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'Unbroken' movie of survival includes Greencastle connection
"Unbroken" -- Hollywood producer Angelina Jolie's holiday gift to movie audiences that opened Christmas Day -- tells an incredible true story of human will and survival.
The film focuses, and rightfully so, on the legendary Louis Zamperini, an Olympic long-distance runner whose life and spectacular track career are interrupted by World War II, where as an Army Air Corps bombardier, he is captured and tortured by the Japanese.
If you've been watching TV at all this holiday season, you're probably aware of the story by now with all the airtime the movie trailer has gotten in recent weeks.
But besides the Oscar buzz and immense interest in a heart-wrenching story adapted from "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption," the No. 1 bestseller by author Laura Hillenbrand (of "Seabiscuit" fame), there's even a Greencastle connection to this big-picture saga.
Turns out Zamperini's pilot and sidekick in this tale was a Greencastle native, Lt. Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips.
Phillips, then 27, was the pilot of the B-24D Liberator in which he, Zamperini and eight other crewmen set out from Oahu, Hawaii, on an ill-fated May 27, 1943 search-and-rescue mission over the Pacific, looking for a downed American aircraft.
Mechanical failure caused Phillips -- known as "Phil" to his Army Air Corps buddies but Allen in civilian life -- to ditch the plane at sea. Only he, Zamperini and tail gunner SSgt. Francis McNamara make it out alive, scrambling into a life raft that drifts on a perilous Pacific journey for 47 days (with McNamara dying on the 33rd day).
After some 2,400 miles contending with hunger and thirst, ever-present sharks, ocean storms, other weather extremes and even enemy aircraft, they drift toward a tropical island. However, instead of being saved, they meet a fate worse than death, being taken prisoner by the Japanese forces occupying the island and getting tortured by them for more than two years.
Much of the book and the movie (its screenplay written by the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan) focus on Zamperini's incredible will to survive that relentless torture. Most of the abuse comes at the hand of a sadistic prison camp guard known as "The Bird," who, for example, orders every man in the camp to line up and punch Zamperini in the face when he refuses to say the Japanese will win the war.
Eventually Phillips and Zamperini were split up and sent to different prison camps.
The film, however, does detail how Zamperini (played by English actor Jack O'Connell in the movie) comes to rely on the strength and faith of Phillips, who for some reason filmmakers decided to uncharacteristically portray with blond hair.
Zamperini called Phillips "a damn good pilot" in a Jan. 2, 1943 story in the LaPorte Herald-Argus, joking that Phillips "is so short he has to sit on a cushion to see where he's going."
In the movie, Phillips is portrayed by 31-year-old Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, perhaps best known as Bill Weasley in the "Harry Potter" films and the romantic fantasy "About Time" (2012) with Rachel McAdams.
Movie publicity information refers to Phillips as a Greencastle native and Purdue University graduate with a degree in forestry and conservation.
Born in Greencastle on Aug. 1, 1916, he was the son of Rev. Russell L. Phillips and Kelsey Allen. The family later moved to LaPorte, where Phillips graduated from LaPorte High School in 1934.
He died Dec. 18, 1998 and is buried at Pine Lake Cemetery in LaPorte.
In between, however, he left quite a World War II legacy behind. According to records, he was one of the fabled bomb squadron pilots (with Zamperini as his bombardier) who dropped more than 75,000 pounds of bombs on the Japanese stronghold at Wake Island on Christmas Eve 1943. After another raid, he was miraculously able to return safely to his base despite more than 500 bullet holes reportedly riddling the plane's fuselage.
The website findagrave.com indicates that after he was repatriated, Phillips married his hometown sweetheart, Cecile "Cecy" Perry (a Terre Haute native who taught school in Princeton, Ind., during the war) and they had two children.
Phillips and his wife both taught school in LaPorte, yet reportedly he rarely said little if anything about his incredible wartime ordeal.
Greencastle resident Diane Flint first brought the Lt. Phillips-Greencastle connection to the community's attention after reading Hillenbrand's bestseller. In a letter to the editor last summer, Flint sought further information about Lt. Phillips and his family, promising to look into his local background.
"I did, and I didn't find out anything," she told the Banner Graphic earlier this week.
Being a member of the Flint and Phillips branch of her family, she questioned those relatives about Lt. Phillips and his local connection but to no avail.
"Nobody knows that name," she said of the current Phillips clan around the Greencastle area.
With the presence of "Unbroken," however, that could all change very soon.