I felt he wanted me to start a new ministry, which was a tall order because I had nothing, or almost nothing, with which to even begin. I had no studio, no building, no radio affiliates, no technical help, and very little money. Shirley and I got on our knees before the Lord and we said, "Lord, I will do what you want me to do, of course, but I am nothing without you. Please tell me that you will continue to bless me, that you will go with me in this new venture." He assured me that he was going to give me a little help. Well, that was the beginning and I stepped out on faith, as I have done and did do with Focus on the Family 33 years earlier. God was faithful to his promise. Family Talk that began broadcasting on 60, rather small stations, has grown to what we see it today. It's now called James Dobson Family Institute because of its divisions. It's heard daily on 1300 stations.
One of my first decisions in 2010 was to invite two gifted young people to join me in the studio as my co-hosts. The first was Luanne Crane with whom I had worked for many years at Focus on the Family, I knew her well. The second was my son, Ryan, who is an outstanding communicator. They both love the Lord and it was exciting to have them as part of my team. They both have moved on now, but Ryan is back this month on my invitation to help us celebrate our anniversary this month. Now let me tell you about that and then we'll get started. Our production team has gone back 10 years and has identified the 20 most popular broadcasts of that entire decade. Ryan is going to introduce them to you each day as we go along through the month of May.
We'll stop only to offer some breaking news about the coronavirus or whatever, otherwise this is our plan. With that, welcome Ryan, my beloved son. Good to have you here.
Ryan Dobson: Thanks dad. It's great to be here. I really appreciate it. It's been so fun looking at these broadcasts. There are so many to choose from and you have picked out some amazing broadcasts.
Dr. Dobson: I think people are really going to enjoy this, Ryan, and I'm very pleased to have this celebration today. It's not a celebration of us, it's a celebration of God's goodness. Ryan, tell us briefly about your own podcast.
Ryan Dobson: Well, my wife and I, Laura, as you obviously know, have a podcast called Rebel Parenting and we podcast three times a week. It's on iTunes and Spotify, wherever podcasts are found. It is all marriage and parenting all the time. I tell you, with the coronavirus and the lockdown, we have done so many programs on how do you survive being quarantined with your family and the response has been fantastic.
Dr. Dobson: Well, I congratulate you on that, Ryan. It's really fun to watch you develop that from scratch also, and the Lord has really blessed you. Ryan, we want to get started here. Why don't you tell everybody what our first, it's actually our first three programs are going to be starting today. This one, if we shut up, get out of here. Explain what that first program is and how this is going to work.
Ryan Dobson: Oh dad, talk about a classic, this is an amazing story about the late World War II veteran, Louis Zamperini. You may have heard of the movie, Unbroken, which was just a hit in 2014. This is, as you said, a three part interview and you interview his son and daughter in law. His faith journey is astounding. People won't believe it. He was an athlete. He fought in the war, was part of the greatest generation, and then the work he did when he got back home as an evangelist is just extraordinary.
Dr. Dobson: Well, it's a real pleasure to honor him and his life. Why don't we go ahead and get started. Thanks Ryan for doing this for the month of May and I'll be talking to you.
Ryan Dobson: Sounds good. I appreciate you having me.
Dr. Dobson: Well, we've got a lot to talk about, in fact, more than we're going to get done today and maybe more than we can get done in about three weeks. So I hope you're not planning to go home. You and I have been talking about the stories that surround him and surround your family and they're really just kind of breathtaking because of what he went through. I call him a national treasure or a hero. You agree with that? Don't you?
Luke Zamperini: Oh, absolutely. As a matter of fact, I have a senatorial bipartisan resolution and a congressional bipartisan resolution both declaring Louis Zamperini to be a national hero.
Dr. Dobson: You were very close to him, weren't you?
Luke Zamperini: Yes, I was very close to my father. I loved being with him. I loved taking him places. I used to take him on his speaking engagements and listen to him tell his story over and over and over again. And I never got tired of hearing it.
Dr. Dobson: Frequently when you know the backstory of heroes, there's more to it than meets the eye. And if you knew all the facts, you might be a little disappointed. In his case, it's not a disappointment. The way he lived his life and his love for Jesus Christ in the latter years of his life, and many as a matter of fact, even though he was not a Christian in his younger years, it is as impressive as we think it is, wasn't it?
Luke Zamperini: Well, yes, and as a matter of fact, the less savory portions of his story are the things that built his experience to get him to the point where he did become a Christian.
Dr. Dobson: Yes. Well he was kind of a rascal when he was a little kid, the book, Unbroken, tells us more than the movie did. But he really was a handful, wasn't he?
Luke Zamperini: Yes, he was a terror to his community of Torrance, California. So Louis began smoking when he was five years old. He was so quick on his feet that he used to steal alcohol from bootleggers in the area and he was a very resourceful guy when it came to breaking the law. In those days in Torrance, there was no air conditioning. So on a hot summer day, instead of closing the doors to a business, they would pull these iron gates shut in front of it and let the air through the iron gates.
Luke Zamperini: Well, on Sundays when everybody was in church, Louis would go get his fishing rod and go down the Main Street in Torrance and he'd fish through these iron gates and snag cigarettes and candies and whatever else that had he could. And that way he was able to steal from the stores without actually going inside the store.
Dr. Dobson: Why was he like that? Is that just his temperament? Did he have a tough home life? What made him like that?
Luke Zamperini: Well, he was inherently a defiant person. Even when he was punished, he never cried. He had a loving family. His mother and father being Italian immigrants were good parents. He had a brother and two sisters, yet Louis was just incorrigible. He was smart and could figure out ways to get what he wanted. I think it was the attention that he was getting from when he got caught. It was my uncle, Pete, who finally figured out that if they could channel Louis's energies into sports, he might be able to keep him from going to jail.
And so, he got together with the chief of police in Torrance, California and got the chief of police to convince the school principal to allow Louis to participate in sports even though he didn't have the grades to do so and even though he was constantly in trouble in school.
Dr. Dobson: And he turned out to be a great athlete, he was a runner.
Luke Zamperini: He did. The police chief said, "Well, since we've been chasing him all over town all these years, I suggest running would be a good sport for him." And so he went out for distance running at Torrance High School.
Dr. Dobson: And was fast.
Luke Zamperini: He was. His event was the mile, even though he ran half miles and two miles and cross country, the mile was what he ran. And being a high school student at Torrance High, he set the national collegiate record for the mile at four minutes, 21 seconds and change that was held for 19 years.
Dr. Dobson: That may not sound fast now, but it was faster than anybody in the world at the time.
Luke Zamperini: The world record still hadn't broken the four minute mile and it was, I forget what the mile record was at the time, but when my dad finally got into college, he set the national collegiate record at four minutes, 8.3 seconds.
Dr. Dobson: At USC.
Luke Zamperini: University of Southern California, and that record held for 14 years.
Dr. Dobson: He actually ran the 5,000 yard distance in the Olympics of 1936 when Jesse Owens was the sensation.
Luke Zamperini: That's right. The positions that were open for the mile run or the 1500 meter run in the Olympic team was already taken up and so my uncle enrolled my father for the 5,000 meter run and he'd never run it before. The second time he ran the 5,000 meters, he actually tied the world record holder Don Lash and got himself onto the US Olympic Team in 1936.
Dr. Dobson: 1936 was the year that Adolf Hitler made a political thing out of the Olympics and of course Jesse Owens was black and Hitler hated any races other than the Aryan race, which he saw as representing Germany. We remember those Olympics because of the prelude to World War II. Shirley and I have been to Berlin and we went to that stadium and I've stood in the place where Adolf Hitler sat and of course, the press and all the other falderal that went along with that Olympics, took place there in that year.
Luke Zamperini: In 1936, he made the team running the 5,000 meters. Interestingly enough, his roommates in the Olympic Village in Germany was Jesse Owens and Mack Robinson, the brother of Jackie Robinson. They were tasked at keeping the young Zamperini out of trouble, which they did to some extent, but after he ran his final heat of the 5,000 meters, a heat where he actually set a record for the very last lap in that 5,000 meters at 56 seconds, that was so fast that it drew the attention of Adolf Hitler, who then summoned him to the podium which you were talking about because he wanted to meet the boy with the fast finish.
So, they met and they shook hands briefly. And it was interesting because Hitler refused to shake Jesse Owens' hand, but he shook Jesse's roommate's hand instead.
Dr. Dobson: Well, there's no great honor in that.
Luke Zamperini: No, none at all.
Dr. Dobson: But your dad stole a flag, a swastika flag with the black and red colors.
Luke Zamperini: Yes. After his heat, he went and sampled some of the automats that they had in the Olympic Village and you could put a couple of Pfennig in the machine and out would come a liter of beer. So he had a couple liters of beer and went wandering through the city and he found himself in front of the Reich Chancellery building and there're all these Nazi swastikas on flagpoles hanging off the front of the building. And he decided that he really wanted to have one of those as a souvenir. So there were guards walking to and fro in front of the building and he figured his timing would be correct just as those guards passed each other, that he would take a dash for the building and get up the side of it and grab a flag and be gone before they knew what happened.
Of course, he got up the side of the building and the flag was a little higher than he thought it would be. So it took him a little longer to get a hold of it. But when he did-
Dr. Dobson: They took a shot at him.
Luke Zamperini: Yeah. He dropped to the ground with his flag in his hands and started running and the guards saw him and they were yelling, "Halt [inaudible], halt [inaudible]." And finally, he believed he heard the crack of a rifle. They shot in the air to make him stop and he stopped. They collared him and then they saw his American Olympic insignia on his uniform and they started to question him as to why he had taken the flag and he just charmed them and said it was because he wanted a souvenir of the wonderful time he had in this most beautiful of countries.
And so, they held him in place there for a while. They went back into the building and got permission to give him the flag and we still have that flag. It's in the Zamperini Airfield in Torrance, California on display with some of his other war memorabilia
Dr. Dobson: Now the winds of war, World War II, were blowing at that time. And we know now what occurred shortly after that. But your dad went into the... There wasn't an Air Force, but the Army Air Force.
Luke Zamperini: Yes, there was the Army Air Force that later became the Air Force and my dad volunteered to go into the Army Air Force before Pearl Harbor. A lot of men were seeing the winds of war coming and in support of their country, they started volunteering before there even was a draft. And so he went into the Army Air Force and he washed out as a pilot, but he was very mechanically minded and did very well with the Norden bombsights. They turned him into a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator, and then he served in the Pacific Theater being based on Oahu. He went on several bombing raids, one of which was Wake Island. Another one was the Nauru raid, which is of course dramatized at the beginning of the film, Unbroken.
And then it was a subsequent mission he went on that was actually a rescue mission looking for a downed B-25 about 200 miles from Palmyra Island around the Central Pacific. It was [crosstalk 00:16:22]-
Dr. Dobson: Now, the war with Japan was well underway [crosstalk 00:16:24]-
Luke Zamperini: Oh, well underway.
Dr. Dobson: ... and Pearl Harbor had occurred.
Luke Zamperini: It had occurred, and this was, Pearl Harbor happened December 7th, 1941 and this was May 1943 when he went on this reconnaissance mission. They were flying at just under a thousand feet below the cloud cover, looking to see if they could find any wreckage or any survivors of this B-25 that had ditched there. When the airplane that they were using, this B-24 was a borrowed plane and it had engine problems. At under 1,000 feet, this plane just cartwheeled straight into the ocean landing on its left side and just blew to pieces. Now my father, to brace for the crash, he got back by the waist gunner area and he had a rubber life raft uninflated.
He was holding it in his arms and when the plane hit the water, it shoved him under the waist gunner machine gun tripod. And so he was stuck under this tripod with his raft in his stomach. And then the tail of the airplane sheared off and all the cables went from the flight deck back to the rudder and the tail, they coiled around that tripod. Now he was entombed in this tripod with all these wires holding him in here and he was unable to free himself and the plane began to sink and he was really good at holding his breath for a long time. He timed himself with being able to hold his breath underwater for three minutes and 45 seconds. And so he held his breath and the plane-
Dr. Dobson: The great athlete was still in good shape.
Luke Zamperini: Yes. Still in great shape. As a matter of fact, he ran a four minute 12 second mile just the day before this plane crash. So now he's sinking, unable to free himself. And the last thing he remembered saying to himself was, "God help me." And then he blanked out. He said it felt like a sledgehammer hit him in the head and he was out cold. Then he comes too and he thinks that this must be the afterlife, but he had a sensation of floating. He was completely freed from this entombment that he had and knew that he was floating upward in the aircraft, although it was so deep now that it was dark and he couldn't see. And what happened was his USC ring had caught on to the waist gunner window and it caught on there and there was so much force from the plane sinking and his own buoyancy trying to take him up that it cut through his skin all the way to the bone on his ring finger.
So, then he realized that he was in the waist gunner window and he pulled himself out and then shot to the surface and through the rest of his life, he could never figure out how he got freed in that aircraft. It had to have been a miracle. As a matter of fact, he was convinced that he had a guardian angel that had freed him from that and whenever he would pray, he would put a good word in for that guardian angel who he named Victor for victory.
Dr. Dobson: Well, it's my memory from reading that there were 11 of his airman buddies that were killed in that crash. Is that right?
Luke Zamperini: That's correct. There was 11 men on the crew, all died except for three. My dad, the pilot, Russell Phillips, and the tail gunner, Francis McNamara. They survived the crash. My dad got to the surface. The ocean was on fire. He was throwing up all the water and blood and hydraulic fluid that he was inhaling as he was going up to the surface, he saw the two other survivors clinging to a piece of wreckage and blood just shooting out of the pilot's head. So he was able to catch another raft and pick up the other two survivors. That began a 47 day Odyssey in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Dr. Dobson: Well, you said that without a lot of emphasis, 47 days on a raft with no... did they have no water? They had a little bit of food, didn't they?
Luke Zamperini: They had what was on this raft. Now, first thing he did once he stopped the bleeding on the pilot's head was he took inventory of what was in these two rafts and he used to joke to me that he was certain that those rafts had to have been provisioned by the Japanese Navy because there was nothing in there for these Americans to survive on. There were six chocolate bars and three tins of water and each tin was about 12 ounces. So there really wasn't much there, but it was enough for three men to survive on for a week. The very first night the tail gunner panicked and ate all the provisions. He ate all those chocolate bars and so there was nothing for my father and the pilot, Russell Phillips.
They thought that they would be rescued pretty soon, but it just didn't happen. So day after day after day, they finally figured out that they were drifting westward when they finally saw an airplane that was far to the East of them, and that was in the flight lanes between Hawaii and Palmyra Island. So they realized they had drifted West and they were continuing to drift West and they figured that eventually they would drift into probably the Gilbert or Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific. Of course, the problem was those islands were under the control of the Japanese Navy at that time.
Dr. Dobson: So they were not making any progress in finding land where they could have survived. Now they're into the second week, the third week and fourth. And what happened to the three men?
Luke Zamperini: Well, they had no more food to eat. So fortunately one day an albatross landed on the raft and-
Dr. Dobson: That's a bird.
Luke Zamperini: It's a bird. It's a pretty big bird and so my dad grabbed it by its feet and they broke its neck and they cut it open to eat it and of course, this was the first of three albatrosses that they had caught over their seven week journey. And they tried to eat this one, they just couldn't do it. Raw bird meat was just terrible. The second one that they caught several weeks later, they were able to choke it down. The third one that they caught, he told me it tasted like a hot fudge sundae to them, they were so hungry at that point. So, they had three birds, half a dozen small fish, and they'd also caught two sharks and ate what they could of those during their journey.
Dr. Dobson: We're going to have to pick up the story next time. We've been talking to Luke Zamperini and his wife, Lisa, is sitting here. This is just the beginning. What happened from then to the end of the war is this main aspect of the story that is told in the movie and it will get your attention, and I'll tell you, it'll move you. Thank you for being with us today. Lisa, thank you, in your silence, for being with us-
Lisa Zamperini: [inaudible 00:23:28].
Dr. Dobson: ... and we'll talk to you both next time. Thanks for being here.
Luke Zamperini: It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.
Dr. Dobson: Well, that was Luke and Lisa Zamperini. They were talking with me about the iconic war hero, Louis Zamperini. And Ryan, I can't wait to hear the other two parts of that interview. It's been aired on Family Talk before as we heard earlier, but I could listen to that many times without getting bored.
Ryan Dobson: My goodness. It is such a fascinating look back at the life and legacy of World War II veteran, Louis Zamperini. I mean, a man of great faith and sound character. I'm Ryan Dobson, and you've been listening to Dr. James Dobson's interview with Luke and Lisa Zamperini, Louis's son and daughter in law. They love their dad and his memory. You can hear it in their voices. I know there are things about my faith and conviction against all odds that I learned from my dad, obviously. Perhaps there is a parent or mentor in your life that set you on the right path.
I certainly hope so and pray that you too will pass it on to your next generation. That's all the content we have for you today. Join us again for part two of this interview tomorrow right here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.
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