скачать книгу бесплатно
Unbroken
Laura Hillenbrand
On a May afternoon in 1943, a US bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean. After an agonising delay, a young lieutenant finally bobbed to the surface and struggled aboard a life raft. So begins one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. As a boy, he turned to petty crime until he discovered a remarkable talent for running, which took him to the Berlin Olympics. But as war loomed, he joined up and was soon embroiled in the ferocious battle for the Pacific.Now Zamperini faced a journey of thousands of miles of open ocean on a failing raft, dogged by sharks, starvation and the enemy. Driven to limits of endurance, Zamperini’s fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would depend on the strength of his will…
LAURA HILLENBRAND
Unbroken
An Extraordinary True Story of
Courage and Survival
Copyright (#ulink_75897c9f-2129-5640-a652-6d5eb84f9415)
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
Originally published in the United States by Random House in 2010
Copyright © Laura Hillenbrand 2010
The right of Laura Hillenbrand to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
HB ISBN 9780007378012
TPB ISBN 9780007386642
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007378029
Version: 2018-07-06
For the wounded and the lost
What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?
—Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser”
CONTENTS
Title Page (#ud0794d23-6107-5df3-91cf-cb46b4b59ff3)
Copyright (#uc315d9a0-9a4f-5a36-94b8-bbd1d92a5412)
PREFACE (#u380f05e3-e29e-5889-8899-82bb0682f8c8)
PART I (#ueb7e2c9d-22cc-5523-a4e3-9b203a37186d)
One The One-Boy Insurgency (#uf151d2d2-d654-56d1-a56a-279bd95071a6)
Two Run Like Mad (#u0d650c80-8128-5d75-8cb5-f6f93d09d4a7)
Three The Torrance Tornado (#uc080f0ef-d6d3-5901-bf50-a246410a079e)
Four Plundering Germany (#uaea1dd42-5619-5874-a123-879754e4debe)
Five Into War (#uf8c6425d-87c7-5001-bfdd-bc959ffb99cf)
PART II (#u7c898790-aa64-5a1f-8e95-3d5b09ceb59a)
Six The Flying Coffin (#ua2088dd7-c5e1-5e49-a234-a81a759f93d7)
Seven “This Is It, Boys” (#ue130660f-d2a1-5011-93d4-dd311d2fb41f)
Eight “Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was” (#u07a5d414-237d-5b9c-b925-8b48cf360838)
Nine Five Hundred and Ninety-four Holes (#ubdfa2419-e72a-51de-816f-0d91a0b5d748)
Ten The Stinking Six (#ud94d4987-1473-5305-91e4-d13eebf37108)
Eleven “Nobody’s Going to Live Through This” (#u55211073-2426-59e8-ba00-4eebdd9ee7f7)
PART III (#ueceb9429-ba21-5255-bc34-d51e8af17115)
Twelve Downed (#ufca280e9-e159-5df6-833b-b72a6589d4ba)
Thirteen Missing at Sea (#uf7f4163c-3d0c-5e1f-be8a-1a6b55f5c57f)
Fourteen Thirst (#u46b29488-b4f9-502f-9cce-dbcce6e470a2)
Fifteen Sharks and Bullets (#uaa03df8f-1c70-523e-9228-728e94ec541a)
Sixteen Singing in the Clouds (#u86774c86-24ea-53e3-baea-530078b03ded)
Seventeen Typhoon (#u382e0801-2f07-52b8-9714-d35050bd2648)
PART IV (#ue5bedc47-3221-55ab-a3a0-4eb4970ed872)
Eighteen A Dead Body Breathing (#u7025a553-87a4-5db8-abb1-41baf911a509)
Nineteen Two Hundred Silent Men (#ub2a9fe82-aee7-580b-9033-9b69301ab359)
Twenty Farting for Hirohito (#u17d6f325-841b-53ac-b448-45d5250a8bdb)
Twenty-one Belief (#uf499a4ec-e285-5855-8f62-db2783506aae)
Twenty-two Plots Afoot (#u42017780-2ca3-5bbf-95ea-50c0c25ca792)
Twenty-three Monster (#u9b885d8e-5ba1-59eb-a2d1-709e354fe4e5)
Twenty-four Hunted (#ud11fe283-fc9a-56b3-8362-eaa9b59a29a4)
Twenty-five B-29 (#u4e1e9aaf-7727-531a-9a74-edd7e6a918fd)
Twenty-six Madness (#ua247b4ce-0f8f-5060-a7ec-2d3eb48bdf93)
Twenty-seven Falling Down (#u95f134df-554e-5465-85a4-340f3d1afaba)
Twenty-eight Enslaved (#u8991f2ec-f013-5940-bab3-655e8a4f1241)
Twenty-nine Two Hundred and Twenty Punches (#u5366ab80-5995-5658-8d0d-e8239de417a8)
Thirty The Boiling City (#u212bb004-81a4-5b46-b8b4-909597a22189)
Thirty-one The Naked Stampede (#u8ed7449e-864e-575c-8b21-25da70aa8090)
Thirty-two Cascades of Pink Peaches (#u00d64599-b78e-5480-bc7c-c2a5f5123c3d)
Thirty-three Mother’s Day (#u1974a31a-1f59-52dc-a482-8601efe53e04)
PART V (#u25a225f8-6950-5bb5-987f-f00482a5fca1)
Thirty-four The Shimmering Girl (#u8598d8d1-152f-5c5d-84cb-3d5b040df7d4)
Thirty-five Coming Undone (#uf0f99839-74de-5fb5-a6a2-851ef9f8e5f4)
Thirty-six The Body on the Mountain (#u3dbb7708-c868-5ee2-b778-0fce03e1bbea)
Thirty-seven Twisted Ropes (#u2b91fc3d-9d71-57e5-badc-125f58220dd0)
Thirty-eight A Beckoning Whistle (#u86945048-ab3b-54c6-ace6-892b010651df)
Thirty-nine Daybreak (#u2e32d2a5-b762-5589-baa2-289a0093ace7)
EPILOGUE (#u739652fb-da43-52a5-bb73-9c35b804c5a4)
NOTES (#ue45401ea-832f-537b-94ce-3deea3a3dedd)
INDEX (#u368c599d-253e-5719-a8ae-c1e9193f96ae)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#ud18cda05-b299-5446-bd1d-130d752efcd1)
Also by Laura Hillenbrand (#ua65a7f87-66ed-5220-8e51-07cbdd110fd3)
About the Publisher (#uc4a9926c-f6ad-5e40-857c-600fcec85d06)
PREFACE (#ulink_268b0a5a-0b91-524f-9473-09a8a4bffe3f)
ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER.
It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.
The men had been adrift for twenty-seven days. Borne by an equatorial current, they had floated at least one thousand miles, deep into Japanese-controlled waters. The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave off a sour, burning odor. The men’s bodies were pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into their nostrils and chins. They spent their days with their eyes fixed on the sky, singing “White Christmas,” muttering about food. No one was even looking for them anymore. They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean.
A month earlier, twenty-six-year-old Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian’s body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside of his family had given him up for dead.
On that morning of the twenty-seventh day, the men heard a distant, deep strumming. Every airman knew that sound: pistons. Their eyes caught a glint in the sky—a plane, high overhead. Zamperini fired two flares and shook powdered dye into the water, enveloping the rafts in a circle of vivid orange. The plane kept going, slowly disappearing. The men sagged. Then the sound returned, and the plane came back into view. The crew had seen them.
With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted, their voices thin from thirst. The plane dropped low and swept alongside the rafts. Zamperini saw the profiles of the crewmen, dark against bright blueness.
There was a terrific roaring sound. The water, and the rafts themselves, seemed to boil. It was machine gun fire. This was not an American rescue plane. It was a Japanese bomber.
The men pitched themselves into the water and hung together under the rafts, cringing as bullets punched through the rubber and sliced effervescent lines in the water around their faces. The firing blazed on, then sputtered out as the bomber overshot them. The men dragged themselves back onto the one raft that was still mostly inflated. The bomber banked sideways, circling toward them again. As it leveled off, Zamperini could see the muzzles of the machine guns, aimed directly at them.
Zamperini looked toward his crewmates. They were too weak to go back in the water. As they lay down on the floor of the raft, hands over their heads, Zamperini splashed overboard alone.
Somewhere beneath him, the sharks were done waiting. They bent their bodies in the water and swam toward the man under the raft.
PART I (#ulink_64eb3395-06c2-5272-959a-79c359679bc3)
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini. Photo of original image by John Brodkin.
One The One-Boy Insurgency (#ulink_49dc90ed-c201-55f2-98f1-e8d9e4d0156d)
IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS OF AUGUST 26, 1929, IN THE back bedroom of a small house in Torrance, California, a twelve-year-old boy sat up in bed, listening. There was a sound coming from outside, growing ever louder. It was a huge, heavy rush, suggesting immensity, a great parting of air. It was coming from directly above the house. The boy swung his legs off his bed, raced down the stairs, slapped open the back door, and loped onto the grass. The yard was otherworldly, smothered in unnatural darkness, shivering with sound. The boy stood on the lawn beside his older brother, head thrown back, spellbound.
The sky had disappeared. An object that he could see only in silhouette, reaching across a massive arc of space, was suspended low in the air over the house. It was longer than two and a half football fields and as tall as a city. It was putting out the stars.
What he saw was the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin. At nearly 800 feet long and 110 feet high, it was the largest flying machine ever crafted. More luxurious than the finest airplane, gliding effortlessly over huge distances, built on a scale that left spectators gasping, it was, in the summer of ‘29, the wonder of the world.
The airship was three days from completing a sensational feat of aeronautics, circumnavigation of the globe. The journey had begun on August 7, when the Zeppelin had slipped its tethers in Lakehurst, New Jersey, lifted up with a long, slow sigh, and headed for Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue that summer, demolition was soon to begin on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, clearing the way for a skyscraper of unprecedented proportions, the Empire State Building. At Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, players were debuting numbered uniforms: Lou Gehrig wore No. 4; Babe Ruth, about to hit his five hundredth home run, wore No. 3. On Wall Street, stock prices were racing toward an all-time high.
After a slow glide around the Statue of Liberty, the Zeppelin banked north, then turned out over the Atlantic. In time, land came below again: France, Switzerland, Germany. The ship passed over Nuremberg, where fringe politician Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had been trounced in the 1928 elections, had just delivered a speech touting selective infanticide. Then it flew east of Frankfurt, where a Jewish woman named Edith Frank was caring for her newborn, a girl named Anne. Sailing northeast, the Zeppelin crossed over Russia. Siberian villagers, so isolated that they’d never even seen a train, fell to their knees at the sight of it.
On August 19, as some four million Japanese waved handkerchiefs and shouted “Banzai!” the Zeppelin circled Tokyo and sank onto a landing field. Four days later, as the German and Japanese anthems played, the ship rose into the grasp of a typhoon that whisked it over the Pacific at breathtaking speed, toward America. Passengers gazing from the windows saw only the ship’s shadow, following it along the clouds “like a huge shark swimming alongside.” When the clouds parted, the passengers glimpsed giant creatures, turning in the sea, that looked like monsters.
On August 25, the Zeppelin reached San Francisco. After being cheered down the California coast, it slid through sunset, into darkness and silence, and across midnight. As slow as the drifting wind, it passed over Torrance, where its only audience was a scattering of drowsy souls, among them the boy in his pajamas behind the house on Gramercy Avenue.
Standing under the airship, his feet bare in the grass, he was transfixed. It was, he would say, “fearfully beautiful.” He could feel the rumble of the craft’s engines tilling the air but couldn’t make out the silver skin, the sweeping ribs, the finned tail. He could see only the blackness of the space it inhabited. It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself.
The boy’s name was Louis Silvie Zamperini. The son of Italian immigrants, he had come into the world in Olean, New York, on January 26, 1917, eleven and a half pounds of baby under black hair as coarse as barbed wire. His father, Anthony, had been living on his own since age fourteen, first as a coal miner and boxer, then as a construction worker. His mother, Louise, was a petite, playful beauty, sixteen at marriage and eighteen when Louie was born. In their apartment, where only Italian was spoken, Louise and Anthony called their boy Toots.
