1936 OLYMPIAN, WWII B-24 BOMBARDIER, FORTY-SEVEN DAYS IN A RAFT, JAPANESE PRISONER OF WAR

A juvenile delinquent, a world-class NCAA miler, a 1936 Olympian, a WWII bombardier: Louis Zamperini had a life fuller than most when it changed in an instant. On May 27, 1943, his B-24 crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Louis and two other survivors found a raft amid the flaming wreakage and waited for rescue. Instead, they drifted two thousand miles for forty-seven days. Their only food: two shark livers and three raw albatross. Their only water: sporadic rainfall. Their only companions: hope and faith – and the ever-present sharks.
On the forty-seventh day, mere skeletons close to death, Zamperini and pilot Russell Phillips finally spotted land – and were captured by the Japanese. Thus began more than two years of torture and humiliation as prisoners of war.

Zamperini was threatened with beheading, subjected to medical experiments, routinely beaten, hidden in a secret interrogation facility, starved and forced into slave labor, and was the constant victim of a brutal prison guard nicknamed The Bird – a man so vicious that the other guards feared him and called him a psychopath. Meanwhile, the Army Air Corps declared Zamperini dead and President Roosevelt sent official condolences to his family, who never gave up hope that he was alive.

Somehow Zamperini survived and he returned home a hero. The celebration was short-lived. He plunged into drinking and brawling and the depths of despair. Nightly, the Bird's face leered at him in his dreams. It would take years, but with the love of his wife and the power of faith, he was able to stop the nightmares and the drinking.

The above information is extracted from the jacket to his book "Devil at My Heels". Copies of the book are available in the Orange County Library System.