Louis Zamperini explains the crash that led to his raft journey and imprisonment

Louis Zamperini survived 47 days on a raft and then imprisonment by the Japanese. He explains the crash that led to this in Devil at My Heels:

WE ARRIVED IN the downed plane’s vicinity [on an unsuccessful search and rescue mission] to find cloud cover at one thousand feet. Phil dipped to eight hundred to get a better look and called me to the cockpit while we circled so I could scan the sea for wreckage or a life raft. Suddenly the RPMs on our number one (left outboard) motor dropped radically. It shook violently, sputtered, and died. Phil called the engineer forward to feather the props. Blades normally face nearly flat to the wind so they can cut into the air and pull the plane forward. However, when a motor stops, those surfaces are like a wall and everything slows. Feathering means to turn the blades edge-on to the wind. Think of it this way: you’re in a car doing seventy miles per hour. Put your hand out the window, palm forward, and the wind will blow it back. Turn the edge of your hand to the wind, and it slices right through. Feathering is possible because we had variable-pitch propellers, allowing a different blade angle for takeoff, cruising, or when the motor stopped. After the Nauru raid a new engineer had joined our crew, a green kid just over from the States. He was so eager to help that he rushed into the cockpit and feathered the left inboard (or number-two) motor by mistake— and it died. That old musher could barely fly with four motors and no bombs; suddenly we had two motors out, both on the same side.

…

THE MOST FRIGHTENING experience in life is going down in a plane. Those moments when you fall through the air, waiting for the inevitable impact, are like riding a roller coaster— with one important difference. On a roller coaster you close your eyes, hold on despite the sheer horror, and come through. In a plummeting plane there’s only sheer horror, and the idea of your very imminent death is incomprehensible. Of course, only if you’ve lived through a crash can you tell anyone about the abject terror. You think, This is it. It’s over. I’m going to die. You know with 100 percent of your being that the end is unavoidable. Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It’s not so strange. Where there’s still life, there’s still hope.

His explanation of how he survived is completely different from what a younger author writes in Unbroken:

Everybody in the service gets the same combat training. We go to the front line with the same equipment. When the chips are down, some will panic and run and get court-martialed. Why? Because we’re not all brought up the same. I was raised to face any challenge. If a guy’s raised with short pants and pampering, sure, he goes through the same training, but in combat he can’t face it. He hasn’t been hardened to life. It’s important to be hardened to life. Today kids cut their teeth on video games. I’d rather play real games. This generation may be ready to handle robotic equipment and fly planes with computers, but are they ready to withstand the inevitable counterattack? Are they emotionally stable? Are they callous enough to accept hardship? Can they face defeat without falling apart?

The young writer (Laura Hillenbrand) attributes Zamperini’s success to fortunate genetics, basically. Zamperini himself says it was a lack of childhood coddling.