Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian's Astonishing Story of Survival as a Japanese POW in World War II

About this book

The "inspirational" and "extraordinary" memoir of one of the most courageous of the greatest generation Louis Zamperini: Olympian WWII Japanese POW and survivor. A juvenile delinquent a world class NCAA miler a 1936 Olympian a WWII bombardier: Louis Zamperini had a fuller than most when it changed in an instant. On May 27 1943 his B24 crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Louis and two other survivors found a raft amid the flaming wreckage and waited for rescue. Instead they drifted two thousand miles for fortyseven days. Their only food: two shark livers and three raw albatross. Their only water: sporadic rainfall. Their only companions: hope and faithand the everpresent sharks. On the fortyseventh day mere skeletons close to death Zamperini and pilot Russell Phillips spotted landand were captured by the Japanese. Thus began more than two years of torture and humiliation as a prisoner of war. Zamperini was threatened with beheading subject to medical experiments routinely beaten hidden in a secret interrogation facility starved and forced into slave labour and was the constant victim of a brutal prison guard nicknamed the Birda 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 sends official condolences to his family who never gave up hope that he was alive.