Recyclables Revisited Templates 4 by Scrapping with Liz
The Good Old Days | Kit by Designed by Soco and Pink Reptile Designs
Bordered Vellum Alphas by Kim Jensen (recolored to black)
font: Traveling Typewriter
Journaling (425 words): These pictures of my Grandpa during WWII are cool enough all by themselves, but they are even more fascinating when we discovered the ties to the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. When my sister was reading “Unbroken,” she recognized the name of one of the planes, Dumbo, The Avenger. She looked through her stash of old scanned photos of my Grandpa from his time as a pilot during World War 2 and found him and his crew in front of the very same plane! In the book there was a different pilot, but seeing this picture of my Grandpa, who was based on Funafuti in the South Pacific at the very same time with that same plane, means he not only likely flew the same plane, but he also very likely knew Louis Zamperini. Louis Zamperini is the protagonist in the book The Unbroken. He was an olympic track athlete at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and actually met Adolph Hitler there. After the Olympics, Louis attended USC and was on the track team there. In 1940 the Olympics are canceled when the war starts, so Louis joined the Air Corps before he could be drafted so he could pick which branch he could serve. He soon dropped out because flying made him nauseous. When the draft was enacted, Louis was drafted and was back in the Army Air Force. He was a lieutenant and a bombardier when he survived a bomber crash into the Pacific Ocean in May of 1943. He and one other survivor found a life raft and survived 47 days at sea only to be captured by the Japanese. He then survived two and a half years in three Japanese POW camps.
Dumbo was the lead plane in a bombing run on the Wake atoll on December 23, 1942. Louis was in another plane, Superman behind Dumbo on the same bombing run. On April 18, 1943, Superman was the lead plane for a bombing raid over Naura at 8,000 feet. The Superman sustained 594 bullet holes and would never fly again. The next morning Funafuti (the island where these pictures were taken) was bombed by the Japanese and Louie is transferred to Oahu along with Phil and a couple others left healthy enough from the Superman crew. On May 27, 1943 Louie and a crew of 9 head out on a search mission for a missing plane flying on the Green Hornet. There were fuel issues and a mistake by the engineer while trying to fix those issues causes them to crash.
