Guess it goes in this forum:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010...ew/?test=faces
A handshake and the words "The boy with the fast finish": That's how Nazi Chancellor Adolf Hitler, presiding over the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, congratulated Louie Zamperini of Torrance, Calif., when the 19-year-old track star from USC stunned the Fuhrer by making up 50 yards in the final lap of the Games' 5,000-meter event.
For most Americans, competing in the Olympics and shaking Adolf Hitler's hand might mark the most historic events of their lives. But for Zamperini -- still mentally sharp and physically spry at 93, and living unassisted at his home in the Hollywood Hills -- those thrilling moments would prove mere precursors to a set of experiences that would test the very limits of humanity, and mark him for life as a survivor in a class by himself.
Though told before, Zamperini's story is receiving fresh attention with the recent publication of the New York Times and Amazon.com bestseller "Unbroken," by Laura Hillenbrand, who also wrote "Seabiscuit." Tracking down previously untapped veterans and unpublished documents, Hillenbrand has marshaled mountains of old and new evidence to present Zamperini's incredible life story with fresh and harrowing detail. But his story is not for the squeamish.
* * *
Even before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, plunging the United States into World War II, Zamperini had enlisted in the Army Air Corps (the forerunner to the modern Air Force). He was trained to serve as a bombardier aboard the B-24 bomber plane, a fate he and his comrades already dreaded. "We were praying for a B-17, not a B-24," Zamperini told Fox News in a recent interview at his home. "And we waited and waited. Pretty soon, the planes started coming in, and they were all B-24s. Our hearts dropped. There had been so many of them that were just crashing in training. They had a gas leak. You could always smell gasoline."
Based at Hawaii's Hickam Field, Zamperini participated in a series of dangerous campaigns. It was Louie who dropped the bombs that devastated Wake Island ("That was the longest raid in the history of the war," he noted proudly, "round trip from Midway to Wake and back"), and also a phosphate plant on Nauru Island.
The plant was critical to the Japanese supply of fertilizer and fuel. So spectacular was the damage from this mission that photographs of it ran in the July 5, 1943 edition of LIFE magazine.
"We were told to flatten it," Zamperini said of the plant. Flying at 8,000 feet, the "Superman" crew became the first in the war to dive-bomb a four-engine bomber. "I bombed the runway and the bombers and the factory, and then I had one alternate bomb. And I dropped it on a shack which I thought was probably the radio shack and it wasn't -- it was the fuel supply. And a cloud of smoke shot in the air as high as we were: 8,000 feet"
Suddenly, though, "Superman" Snip (long article)
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