Louis Zamperini was born in Olean, New York on January 26, 1917. He was a track star at the University of Southern California and graduated in 1940. He was a member of the 1936 U.S. Olympic track team in Berlin, where he ran the 5,000 meters and finished a strong eighth. At the age of 19, he was the youngest American qualifier ever in that event. In 1941, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force and was deployed to the Pacific as a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator bomber. In 1943, his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean. He and two others survived without food and water for 47 days before washing ashore on a Japanese island behind enemy lines, where he was held as a prisoner of war for two… years. He wrote two memoirs, both titled Devil at My Heels, the first published in 1956 and written with Helen Itris, and the second in 2003 with David Rensin His story was the inspiration for the book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. The book and his story were also adapted into a film entitled Unbroken, which opened on December 25, 2014. On his 81st birthday in 1988, he returned to Japan and ran a leg in the Olympic Torch relay for the Winter Olympics in Nagano. He died following a case of pneumonia on July 2, 2014 at the age of 97.