Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (10 page)

Phil ips had one consuming passion. When he had entered col ege, his father had taken a new pastorship in Terre Haute. There, Phil ips’s sister had introduced him to a girl from the church choir, a col ege student named Cecile Perry, known as Cecy. She had blond hair, a curvy figure, a buoyant disposition, a quick mind, and a family cat named Chopper. She was studying to be a teacher. At a prom in Terre Haute, Al en kissed Cecy. He was a goner, and so was she.

On a Saturday night in November 1941, when he left for the air corps, Phil ips spent five last minutes with Cecy at the Indianapolis train station. When the fighting was over, he promised, he’d make her his bride. He kept her photo on his footlocker and wrote her love letters several times a week. When she turned twenty-one, he sent her his pay and asked her to find an engagement ring. Al en’s ring was soon on Cecy’s finger.

In June 1942, just after her graduation, Cecy traveled to Phoenix to see Al en get his wings. Crazy in love, the two talked about running off to get hitched right then, but reconsidered, deciding to marry at his next training venue and live together there until he was deployed. That venue was Ephrata, and when Phil ips saw it, he kicked himself. “I’ve wished 100 times that we had gotten married when we were at Phoenix,” he wrote to her, “but I wouldn’t ask you now to come out here + live in a dump like Ephrata.” Again, they postponed their wedding. In the fal , Al en’s training would be finished. Then, they hoped, they’d have one more chance to see each other before he went to war.

In Ephrata, Louie and Phil ips fel in together. Phil ips floated along contentedly in Louie’s chatty bonhomie; Louie liked Phil ips’s quiet steadiness, and thought him the kindest person he’d ever met. They never had a single argument and were almost never apart. Phil ips cal ed Louie “Zamp”; Louie cal ed Phil ips “Phil.”

Phil’s crew. Left to right: Phil ips, temporary copilot Gross, Zamperini, Mitchel , Douglas, Pil sbury, and Glassman. Moznette, Lambert, and Brooks are not pictured. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

The rest of Phil’s bomber crew assembled. Serving as engineer and top turret gunner would be twenty-two-year-old Stanley Pil sbury, who’d been running his family’s Maine farm before joining up. The other engineer was Virginia native Clarence Douglas, who would operate one of the two side-directed waist guns, behind the wings. The navigator and nose gunner would be Robert Mitchel , a professor’s son from Il inois. Tiny Frank Glassman, with his tightly curled hair, was a dead ringer for Harpo Marx. He would be their radioman and, later, their bel y gunner. Because Frank hailed from Chicago, the men cal ed him Gangster. Ray Lambert of Maryland would man the tail gun. The crew’s girl magnet was Harry Brooks, a good-looking, ebul ient radioman and waist gunner from Michigan. The copilot would be George Moznette, Jr. Because copilots were rotated from plane to plane as they qualified to be pilots, Moznette wouldn’t stay with the crew, but he became fast friends with Phil and Louie.

Moznette, Mitchel , Phil, and Louie were officers; the others were enlisted. Al were bachelors, but Harry Brooks, like Phil, had a steady girl back home.

Her name was Jeannette, and before the war, she and Harry had set their wedding date for May 8, 1943.

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The men were issued heavy sheepskin jackets and wool clothing, assembled, and photographed. They would make up crew No. 8 in the nine-crew 372nd Bomb Squadron of the 307th Bomb Group, Seventh Air Force. Al they needed was a plane.

Louie was hoping to be assigned to a B-17 Flying Fortress. It was the kind of plane that men wanted to be seen in: handsome, masculine, nimble, fiercely armed, reliable, long-winded, and practical y indestructible. The plane that no one wanted was a new bomber, Consolidated Aircraft’s B-24

Liberator. On paper, it was general y comparable to the B-17, but for one major advantage. Thanks to auxiliary fuel tanks and slender, ultraefficient Davis wings, it could fly literal y al day, a decisive asset in the sprawling World War I theaters.

Flat-faced, rectangular, and brooding, the B-24 had looks only a myopic mother could love. Crewmen gave it a host of nicknames, among them “the Flying Brick,” “the Flying Boxcar,” and “the Constipated Lumberer,” a play on Consolidated Liberator. The cockpit was oppressively cramped, forcing pilot and copilot to live cheek by jowl for missions as long as sixteen hours. Craning over the mountainous control panel, the pilot had a panoramic view of his plane’s snout and not much else. Navigating the nine-inch-wide bomb bay catwalk could be difficult, especial y in turbulence; one slip and you’d tumble into the bay, which was fitted with fragile aluminum doors that would tear away with the weight of a fal ing man.

Taxiing was an adventure. The B-24’s wheels had no steering, so the pilot had to cajole the bomber along by feeding power to one side’s engines, then the other, and working back and forth on the left and right brakes, one of which was usual y much more sensitive than the other. This made the taxiways a pageant of lurching planes, al of which, sooner or later, ended up veering into places nowhere near where their pilots intended them to go, and from which they often had to be extricated with shovels.

A pilot once wrote that the first time he got into a B-24 cockpit, “it was like sitting on the front porch and flying the house.” The sentiment was common.

The Liberator was one of the heaviest planes in the world; the D model then in production weighed 71,200 pounds loaded. Flying it was like wrestling a bear, leaving pilots weary and sore. Because pilots usual y manned the yoke with their left hands while their right hands worked the other controls, B-24

pilots were instantly recognizable when shirtless, because the muscles on their left arms dwarfed those on their right arms. The plane was so clumsy that it was difficult to fly in the tight formations that were critical to fending off attack. A squiggle of turbulence, or a crewman walking inside the fuselage, would tip the plane off its axis.

The B-24 was plagued with mechanical difficulties. If one of the four engines quit, staying airborne was chal enging; the failure of two engines was often an emergency. Shortly after the plane was introduced, there were several incidents in which B-24 tails dropped off in midair. And though the war was young, the plane was winning a reputation for being delicate, especial y in the skinny wings, which could snap off if struck in combat. Some of the men at Ephrata thought of the B-24 as a death trap.

After a long wait, the 372nd squadron’s planes flew into Ephrata. Phil’s crew walked out and squinted at the horizon. Even from a distance, there was no mistaking the silhouettes. As the men grumbled, Louie heard one voice pipe up.

“It’s the Flying Coffin.”

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They were assigned to a B-24D that looked like al the others. For the next three months—in Ephrata in August and September and Sioux City in October

—they practical y lived in it. They flew in formation, fired at targets pul ed by tow planes, simulated combat runs, and dive-bombed. One day they buzzed so low over Iowa that the propel ers kicked up a storm of sand, skinning the paint off the plane’s bel y and scouring the legs of Pil sbury, who was sitting by the open hatch in the tail, trying to photograph their dummy bombs as they fel into target nets. Throughout it al , Louie perched in the glass-windowed

“greenhouse” in the plane’s nose, bombing targets. The COs soon learned of the squadron’s prowess; angry farmers came cal ing after the 372nd’s hundred-pound bombs flattened an outhouse and one unfortunate cow.

Phil’s crew had their first scare at Ephrata. On a training flight, they had radio trouble and got lost, flew around in a blind confusion for hours, and ended up landing at nearly midnight in Spokane, half a state away from their slated destination. They’d been missing for three and a half hours, and the entire West Coast air corps had been hunting for them. When Phil stepped off the plane, he got one chewing out from a colonel. When he flew back to Ephrata, he got another, in stereo, from a colonel and major. “I grew a little older that night, sweet, believe me,” he wrote to Cecy.

The panic had been justified, for accidents were common and deadly. Before Louie had begun his bombardier training, he had received a letter from a friend who was an air corps cadet.

I guess you read about the cadet and instructor who was kil ed here last week. The poor devils never had a chance. They stal ed their ship while turning from base leg onto landing approach. The ship made a one-turn spin and then real y hit the ground … When they hit it tore their bodies to peaces. The safety belt cut the instructor half in-two. Al over the wrecked part of the airplane it look like somebody took and threw about three pans of tomatoes and crakers al over it (blood and flesh) They were mangled to bits, couldn’t even identify them looking at them.

It was the kind of story that was fil ing the letters of would-be airmen al over the country. Pilot and navigator error, mechanical failure, and bad luck were kil ing trainees at a stunning rate. In the Army Air Forces, or AAF, * there were 52,651 stateside aircraft accidents over the course of the war, kil ing 14,903

personnel. Though some of these personnel were probably on coastal patrol and other duties, it can be presumed that the vast majority were trainees, kil ed without ever seeing a combat theater. In the three months in which Phil’s men trained as a crew, 3,041 AAF planes—more than 33 per day—met with accidents stateside, kil ing nine men per day. In subsequent months, death tal ies exceeding 500 were common. In August 1943, 590 airmen would die stateside, 19 per day.

Louie, Phil, and their crew saw the dying firsthand. In July, Phil’s close friend had been kil ed in a B-24, just after Phil had had dinner with him. On another day, Phil’s crew spent part of a rainy morning sitting in a briefing room with another crew as they awaited flights. Both crews went to their planes,

but at the last minute, Phil’s crew was ordered back. The other crew took off, flew two miles, and crashed, kil ing the pilot and navigator. In October in Sioux City, another bomber from their group plowed onto a field, kil ing two. When he learned that the press was reporting on the crash without giving the crewmen’s names, Phil ran out of a meeting to get word to his family that he hadn’t been on the plane.

The air corps did its best to teach men how to survive a crash. Men were dril ed in preparing their planes for impact and equipping themselves for postcrash survival. Each man was assigned to a crash station, which in Louie’s case was by the waist window behind the right wing. They were also schooled in bailout simulations, jumping from parked planes. Some rol ed off the catwalk and dropped through the open bomb bay doors; others leapt from the waist windows, wondering how, if jumping from an airborne plane, they’d avoid being cut in two by the twin rudders just behind the windows. They were also taught how to ditch, or make a control ed landing on water. Phil studied dutiful y, but he found the idea of landing a giant bomber on water “kind of sil y.” The training films surely deepened his doubts; in every film, the ditching B-24 broke apart.

Training was a crucible, and it transformed Phil’s crew. They would not al live through what lay ahead, but the survivors would speak of their good fortune in serving among such skil ed men. They worked together with seamless efficiency, and judging by their training scores, in the grim business of bombs and bul ets, there was no better crew in the squadron. Among surviving crewmen and men from other crews, the warmest praise would be reserved for Phil. B-24s were built for tal pilots, and though Phil needed a cushion to get his feet to the pedals and his eyes over the control panel, by al accounts he was superb at his job. Phil, Louie told a reporter, was “a damn swel pilot.”

The B-24 assigned to Phil’s crew had its own personality. It had a valve that oozed fuel into the bomb bay, prompting Pil sbury to develop a nervous habit of pacing the fuselage, sniffing the air. It had a curmudgeonly fuel transfer valve that Pil sbury and Douglas had to finesse into place, lest it stick wide open, slow an engine, or trigger a deafening backfire. The fuel gauges were reliable only until the tanks neared empty, at which point they sometimes reported that the plane was magical y gaining fuel. One engine, for reasons known only to the plane, was thirstier than the others, so the gauges had to be watched constantly.

In time, the men’s misgivings about the Liberator fel away. In hundreds of hours of intense training, their plane never failed them. For al its ugliness and quirks, it was a noble thing, rugged and inexhaustible. The ground crewmen felt the same, nursing Phil’s plane with affection and fretting while it flew.

When it returned, they received it with relief, scolding the crew for any scratches. Airmen talked of “flying boxcars,” but Phil and Louie dismissed them.

Louie described it as “our home.”

On the ground, the crew drank together, swam in the local lakes, and cruised around Ephrata and Sioux City. In the latter, Louie discovered that the enlisted ground crewmen, who had preceded them into town, had convinced the local women that their insignia indicated that they were officers. As Louie set off to right this wrong, Phil pul ed night duty at the operations office. Sometime one night, he drifted into a troubled dream. In it, he came home from the war only to find that Cecy had given him up.