Up to God
Louis Zamperini was one of the war’s most interesting characters. After some troubled teenage years he became a well-known distance runner and made the 1936 Olympic team. During the games he so impressed Adolf Hitler that he was summoned for an audience. In 1941 he volunteered for the Army Air Corps and earned his wings as a navigator on B-24 bombers. His squadron deployed to the Pacific and flew long-range missions out of different island bases.
On May 27, 1943, he was with his crew on a search-and-rescue mission looking for a lost B-25. Flying low due to cloud cover, his B-24 suddenly lost power to one engine. When an inexperienced engineer shut down the other good engine on that wing, the aircraft went out of control. Zamperini described the feeling:
The most frightening experience in life is going down in a plane. Those moments when you fall through the air, waiting for the inevitable impact, are like riding a roller coaster with one important difference. In a plummeting plane there’s only sheer horror, and the idea of your very imminent death is incomprehensible. You think, this is it. It’s over. I’m going to die. You know with 100 per cent of your being that the end is unavoidable. Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It’s not so strange. Where there’s still life, there’s still hope. What happens is up to God.203
After sinking with the aircraft, tangled in severed control cables and seemingly trapped, Zamperini lost consciousness. He woke suddenly to find himself free of the aircraft and swimming more than seventy feet back to the surface. He and two others survived the crash to begin a separate ordeal adrift in a life raft. He was convinced that God was looking out for him throughout this experience.
There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.
—Deuteronomy 32:39