Seabiscuit Author Laura Hillenbrand Talks About her Latest Unbroken
By S. Mark Rhodes
Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand has come up with another remarkable tale in her latest book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (Random House) the rousing authentic story of Louie Zamperini who managed to live through a series of calamites that prove the old cliché that truth is stranger than fiction. In crisp descriptions, Hillenbrand narrates the story of Louie Zamperini a troubled young man who evolved into an Olympic runner and later a military hero. While on a routine patrol over the Pacific, Louie’s bomber crashed into the ocean setting off a chain of events for three years that test the limits of human endurance, fortune and fate. Ms. Hillenbrand was cordial enough to correspond about her work with In Flight’s S. Mark Rhodes.
IF USA: Louie had a certain amount of athletic notoriety before the war, yet this story doesn’t seem widely known (despite his writing his own book); how do you think it got overlooked for the most part?
Laura Hillenbrand: “When I first learned of this story, I was amazed that I hadn’t heard it before, because it’s so extraordinary. In the seven years that I was researching it, I told scores of people what I was working on, but only encountered one or two who had ever heard of Louie (one of them, interestingly, was Steven Spielberg, who responded to my description of the story by saying, “Are you talking about Lou Zamperini?”). Louie has been the subject of articles in newspapers and magazines over the years, and CBS did a marvelous feature on him about thirteen years ago, but somehow he didn’t become the household name that, say, Audie Murphy became. I don’t have an explanation for it.”
IF USA: Were you surprised that Louie had a tough time during his initial experience as an Air Corps trainee?
Louis and the battered Superman. (Courtesy of Random House)LH: “I wasn’t surprised that Louie had a difficult time when he first trained with the air corps. In 1941, air travel was still a luxury of the rich, and few people had ever been in a plane. Louie was unusual in that he had gone up in a plane once as a child – it scared him to death – and several more times in college, when the organizers of elite track meets paid for him to fly cross-country so he could compete in their mile races. But flying in a big, commercial plane was nothing like pilot training, which took place in small planes undergoing frightening, stomach-turning maneuvers. Like a lot of pilot trainees, Louie was dogged by airsickness, and he was extremely jittery. Pilot training was enormously challenging and competitive, and most men washed out, Louie among them.”
IF USA: Louie seemed to adjust better to his Air Corps training after returning a few months later getting good scores in his training and having a better all around 
Louis gets the hang of basic training. (Courtesy of Random House)experience; is there any accounting for this?
LH: “In Louie’s second go-round in air corps training, he was training not to be a pilot, but a bombardier. He was in big, steady bombers, flying straight and level, so airsickness was no longer a problem, and he was much more comfortable with the duties of a bombardier than with those of a pilot. His mind was particularly well suited to the work of a bombardier – taking in a huge amount of information on air speed, altitude, wind, etc. and integrating all this information to bomb effectively. Timing is everything in bombing, and Louie believed his athleticism made him particularly well suited to the job. When I was researching this book, I found a man who had an original Norden bombsight, the once top-secret computer that was used by bombardiers in WWII. He brought it to my house, set it up in my dining room, and taught me how to operate it. He had a rolling screen of an aerial view of Phoenix, so we spent some time “bombing” it. That day, I came to understand how formidable the job of bombardier was. I think the air corps was very wise to make Louie a bombardier, and the remarkable bombing success of his crew is testament to that.”
IF USA: Do you think the dynamic of a bombing crew suited Louie better than, say, being a fighter pilot or on the crew of a sub?
LH: “I think Louie would have done well no matter where the military put him. Because he was independent, self-reliant and self-confident, I think he would have flourished at a one-man job, such as that of fighter pilot. And because he was a natural leader, he would have done well as a bomber pilot in charge of a crew. But by all accounts, he fit beautifully into the crew of his bomber, Super Man. In very intense training, as well as on the ground, the men became good friends, and learned to trust each other and work together fluidly. They were the most effective bombing crew in the squadron, and I think the dynamics between the crewmen was the reason for this.”
IF USA: Was there anything you found surprising about life in the Air Corps on a bomber?
LH: “Even though I went into my research knowing that being an airman was a very dangerous job, I was startled when I examined the statistics and discovered how deadly it actually was. Combat was, of course, the biggest killer: more than 52,000 Army Air Forces men died in combat in World War II. A tour of duty for Pacific airmen in the latter years of the war was 40 missions, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize that airmen had only a 50 percent chance of surviving those 40 missions.”
“As fearsome as the combat attrition was, what really felled me were the numbers of men killed outside of combat. In the 1940s, aviation was still very much in its youth, and flying was far, far more dangerous. Many of the war planes were brand new, untested technology, prone to sudden breakdown, often in midair. In January, 1943 alone, Louie recorded in his diary ten serious mechanical problems in the planes in which he flew, including locked landing gear, multiple engine failures, and a brake failure that nearly sent their plane hurtling off a runway and into the ocean. And navigation was extremely primitive; in the Pacific, countless airmen were lost when they failed to locate their destination islands, ran out of fuel and crashed at sea. Finally, there was human error, a consequence in part of very rushed training of very young men in immensely complex machines. As a result of all of this, 15,000 Army Air Forces personnel died in training, stateside, without ever seeing a combat theater; at one point, an average of 19 AAF personnel were dying stateside every day. And during the war, 36,000 air corps personnel died in non-combat incidents, the vast majority of which were accidental crashes.”
“Put this together with combat losses, and you have staggering numbers of men killed. Louie Zamperini saw this firsthand. When he arrived on Oahu, he roomed with fifteen other young officers. By war’s end, only four of those sixteen men were still alive, and two of the survivors – Louie and his pilot, Phil – had been mistakenly declared dead after their plane had vanished in the Pacific. Only one man in the sixteen completed his tour of duty.”
IF USA: The public is seemingly so jaded with the extraordinary idea of flight; do you think this book might remind people of the heroic act of aviation and the heroic role of military aviators?
LH: “Flying has always captivated me; I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that a commercial airliner is essentially a flying building, truly a staggering feat of engineering. But over the decades, flight has become so routine and safe that we’ve lost touch with how extraordinary it is, and how dangerous it once was. “
“One of the things I wanted to bring to the readers of Unbroken was a sense of the “wing and a prayer” nature of flying in the war, how challenging, terrifying and deadly it was, and how brave were the people who attempted it. We owe so much more to that generation than we can ever begin to repay, and the least we can do is try to grasp the risks they took, and the sacrifices they made, so we could live in peace.”
