True Stories of Wartime Heroism

Military plane crashes tested an Olympic runner in Japan and Army men and a WAC in New Guinea

Cpl. Margaret Hastings and Filipino medics who helped treat her wounds / U.S. Army

True stories of military heroism can be so exciting that imperfections in the writing matter less than they would in a novel. A wartime narrative can transcend literary flaws if it passes three tests: Is it credible? Is it accurate? Does it tell a neglected story worth telling?

Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand passes one of the three tests in Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, her account of Louis Zamperini’s hellish ordeal after his plane crashed into the Pacific in 1943. Journalist Mitchell Zuckoff aces all of them in Lost in Shangri-la: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II, which tells how the Army saved the marooned survivors of a 1945 crash in New Guinea.

Louis Zamperini as a USC runner and a soldier / Credits: USC and U.S. Army

An Olympic runner became a prisoner of war

Hillenbrand found a story infinitely worth telling in Unbroken, a swashbuckling life of Zamperini written with his cooperation and published several years before his death…