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or you can get all of History Daily plus other fantastic history podcasts at into History.com. It's the afternoon of May 27th,

1943 in the skies above the Pacific Ocean several hundred miles south of Hawaii.

Louis Zamperini stands on the flight deck of an American B-24 bomber.

Louis is a 26-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces, and while the pilot and co-pilot fly a plane,

Louis carefully scans the waves ahead with a pair of binoculars.

Yesterday, an aircraft from Louis's squadron set out from their air base in Hawaii bound for Canton in China, but it never arrived.

So today Louis's bombers, one of the two that's been sent out on a search and rescue mission,

scouring the ocean for any sign of the missing plane or its crew.

Louis lowers his binoculars as a metallic rattle shutters through the plane.

Looking out the window, Louis sees that one of the bomber's four engines is shaking violently on its mounting.

Then the propeller blade stopped turning.

Louis grips the metal walls of the flight deck to steady himself while the co-pilot urgently

stabs and switches on the console.

But then a second engine stops working.

Pilot and co-pilot struggled to control the plane,

but they can't stop it tipping to the left.

The bomber begins spiraling into a dive.

Pilots face turns pale and he shouts at Louis to get to his crash station, they're going down.

Louis fights the g-forces of the tumbly plane, clamors out of the cockpit and into the waste of the bombers.

...