Drive past Torrance Municipal Airport and you will regularly see another name attached to it:

Zamperini Field.

That name is not a corporate sponsorship or an aviation term. It honors Louis Zamperini, one of the most extraordinary people ever associated with Torrance.

Zamperini attended Torrance High School, became a celebrated distance runner and competed for the United States in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces. After his bomber crashed in the Pacific, Zamperini survived weeks on a life raft before being captured and held as a Japanese prisoner of war. His story later became internationally known through Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken and its film adaptation. The City of Torrance identifies Zamperini as one of the city’s notable World War II servicemen and Torrance High graduates.

But the airport bearing his name has a remarkable history of its own.

The site did not begin as a conventional municipal airport.

In 1941, the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads purchased about 480 acres of the former Weston Ranch and developed what became known as the Lomita Flight Strip, intended partly as an emergency landing field.

After the United States entered World War II, the military took control.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expanded the site in 1942, adding military facilities. Pilots flying aircraft including the P-38 Lightning and P-51 Mustang trained there before deployment to the Pacific.

The airport’s postwar story contains another little-known chapter.

After World War II, the former flight strip was temporarily used to house 125 Japanese Americans returning from wartime incarceration camps, according to the Western Museum of Flight.

The Army left the property in 1946, and the federal government transferred the field to the City of Torrance.

Then, on December 7, 1946, Torrance named the airport Zamperini Field in honor of its hometown athlete and World War II veteran.

Today, Torrance Municipal Airport–Zamperini Field is primarily a general-aviation airport. It supports flight instruction, aircraft maintenance, charter operations and hundreds of locally based aircraft. It is also home to Robinson Helicopter Company, one of Torrance’s best-known aviation manufacturers.

So the next time you see “Zamperini Field” on a Torrance Airport sign, there are actually two histories behind those words.

One belongs to an airfield born during World War II.

The other belongs to a Torrance High runner whose journey took him from the Olympics to war, captivity, survival—and eventually into the history of the city that raised him.

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