On May 27, 1943, the eleven crewmembers of the Green Hornet crash-landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, leaving the three surviving men stranded. For the next two years, Louis Zamperini, one of the survivors and the bombardier of the plane, would become a prisoner of war to the Japanese and suffer countless tortures. Though the Geneva Convention theoretically administrated the treatment of prisoners of war, not all POW camps adhered to its rules. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand chronicles Louis’s story and depicts how the differences in culture of two nations affected the lives of the thousands of American soldiers imprisoned in Japan during World War II. Louis was captured by the Japanese after he survived for forty-seven days on the open ocean with minimal supplies. He was immediately faced with the obstacle of communication, often receiving cruel beatings when unable to respond. “The pretext for many of the outbursts was miscommunication. The captives and their guards came form cultures with …show more content…
Japan never ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention and therefore used Allied prisoners as slaves. The work was so “dangerous and exhausting that thousands of POWs died on the job” (234). Many POW camps were disguises for slave camps where men were worked to the verge of death from arduous labor. This translated into a wide range of diseases, such as tuberculosis, malaria, and dysentery. Neurological damage was almost ubiquitous, “more than 85 percent of former Pacific POWs…suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder” (346). These injuries, both physical and emotional, took a huge toll on their post-war lives. Louis, like so many other former POWs, fell into alcoholism and became consumed by his war memories. Loud noises would easily send him into a flashback, leaving him distraught and