Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (12 page)

Louie never saw a Chong diner finish his meal.

For the officer half of the crew, paradise was Honolulu’s North Shore officers’ club, where there were tennis courts, pretty girls with ten-thirty curfews, and boilermakers. When the crew got the best gunnery scores in the squadron, Louie rewarded the enlisted men by pinning his insignia to their uniforms and sneaking them into the club. Just after Louie got up to dance with a girl, Colonel Matheny sat down in his place and began talking to the terrified Clarence Douglas, who was pretending to be a second lieutenant. When Louie final y got free and ran to Douglas’s rescue, the unsuspecting colonel stood up and told him what a damn fine man Douglas was.

Waiting to fly. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

One day on the club’s dance floor, Louie spotted the lieutenant who had ordered them to fly on three engines. He scrounged up a bag of flour, recruited a girl, and began dancing in circles near the lieutenant, dropping a pinch of flour down the officer’s col ar each time he swung past. After an hour of this, the whole club was watching. Final y, Louie snagged a glass of water, danced up behind his victim, dumped the water down his shirt, and took off. The lieutenant spun around, his back running with dough. Unable to find the culprit, he stormed out, and Louie was the toast of the club. “We had one more girl for us,” he said.

November became December, and the crew stil hadn’t seen any Japanese. There was hard fighting down on Guadalcanal, and the men felt excluded, frustrated, and intensely curious about combat. Every time a B-17 was brought up from the fighting, Louie and his friends went to the airfield to gawk at it.

At first, al the planes looked the same. Then an airman showed them a lone bul et hole. “My gol y!” Louie said later. “Our hair stood on end.”

——

Three days before Christmas, the crew’s hour final y came. They and twenty-five other crews were told to pack three days’ worth of clothes and report to their planes. Walking out to Super Man, Louie found the bomb bay fitted with two auxiliary fuel tanks and six five-hundred-pound bombs. Judging by the auxiliary tanks, Louie wrote in his diary, their destination was likely “a long hop somewhere.” Instead of the Norden bombsight, Louie was given the handheld sight, which probably meant that they’d be dive-bombing. The crew was handed a packet of orders and told not to open them until airborne.

Five minutes after Super Man lifted off, the crewmen tore open the orders and learned that they were to make a heading for Midway. When they landed there eight hours later, they were greeted with a case of Budweiser and very big news: The Japanese had built a base on Wake Atol . In the biggest raid yet staged in the Pacific war, the AAF was going to burn the base down.

The next afternoon, the crew was cal ed to the briefing room, which was actual y the base theater, strung with limp Christmas tinsel and streamers. They were going to hit Wake that night, with dive-bombing. The mission would take sixteen hours, nonstop, the longest combat flight the war had yet seen. This would push the B-24s as far as they could go. Even with auxiliary fuel tanks, they would be cutting it extremely close.

Before the flight, Louie walked to the airfield. The ground crewmen were preparing the planes, stripping out every ounce of excess weight and rol ing black paint on the bel ies and wings to make them harder to see against a night sky. Coming to Super Man, Louie climbed into the bomb bay, where the bombs sat ready. In honor of his col ege buddy Payton Jordan, who had just married his high school sweetheart, Louie scrawled Marge and Payton Jordan on a bomb.

At 4:00 P.M. on December 23, 1942, twenty-six B-24s, laden with some 73,000 gal ons of fuel and 75,000 pounds of bombs, rose up from Midway.

Super Man slipped toward the rear of the procession. Al afternoon and into the evening, the planes flew toward Wake. The sun set, and the bombers pressed on under the timid glow of moon and stars.

At eleven P.M., when his plane was about 150 miles from Wake, Phil switched off the outside lights. Clouds closed in. The bombers were supposed to approach the atol in formation, but with clouds around and the lights off, the pilots couldn’t find their flightmates. They couldn’t risk breaking radio silence, so each plane went on alone. The pilots craned into the dark, swerving away from the faint shadows of others, trying to avoid col isions. Wake was very close now, but they couldn’t see it. Sitting in the top turret of Super Man, Stanley Pil sbury wondered if he’d make it back alive. In the greenhouse below, Louie felt a buzzing inside himself, the same sensation that he had felt before races. Ahead, Wake slept.

——

At exactly midnight, Colonel Matheny, piloting the lead plane, Dumbo the Avenger, broke radio silence.

“This is it, boys.”

Matheny dropped Dumbo’s nose and sent the bomber plunging out of the clouds. There beneath him was Wake, three slender islands joining hands around a lagoon. As his copilot cal ed out speed and altitude figures, Matheny pushed his plane toward a string of buildings on Peacock Point, the atol ’s southern tip. On either side of Matheny’s plane, B-24s fol owed him down. When he reached his bombing altitude, Matheny hauled the plane’s nose up and yel ed to the bombardier.

“When are you going to turn loose those incendiaries?”

“Gone, sir!”

At that instant, the buildings on Peacock Point exploded. It was forty-five seconds past midnight.

Matheny tipped his bomber and looked down. Peacock Point, struck by Dumbo’s bombs and those of its flanking planes, was engulfed in fire. Matheny knew he’d been lucky; the Japanese had been caught sleeping, and no one had yet manned the antiaircraft guns. As Matheny turned back toward Midway, wave after wave of B-24s dove at Wake. The Japanese ran for their guns.

Up in Super Man, wel behind and above Matheny’s plane, Louie saw broad, quick throbs of light in the clouds. He hit the bomb bay door control valve, and the doors rumbled open. He set his bomb rack on the “select” position, flipped on his bomb switches, and fixed the settings. Phil’s orders were to dive to 4,000 feet before dropping the bombs, but when he reached that altitude, he was stil lost in clouds. Louie’s target was the airstrip, but he couldn’t see it. Phil pushed the plane stil lower, moving at terrific speed. Suddenly, at 2,500 feet, Super Man speared through the clouds and Wake stretched out, sudden and bril iant, beneath it.

Pil sbury would never shake the memory of what he saw. “It looked like a star storm,” he remembered. The islands, sealed in blackness a moment before, were a blaze of garish light. Several large infernos, spewing black smoke, were consuming the atol ’s oil tanks. Everywhere, bombs were striking targets, sending up mushrooms of fire. Searchlights swung about, their beams reflecting off the clouds and back onto the ground, il uminating scores of Japanese, wearing only fundoshi undergarments, sprinting around in confusion. What neither Pil sbury nor any of the other airmen knew was that among the men under their bombers that night were the ninety-eight Americans who had been captured and enslaved.

Waist and tail gunners in the bombers fired downward, and one by one, the searchlights blew to pieces. To Pil sbury, “every gun in the world” seemed to be firing skyward. Antiaircraft guns lobbed shel s over the planes, where they erupted, sending shrapnel showering down. Tracers from the firing above and below streaked the air in yel ow, red, and green. As Pil sbury watched the clamor of colors, he thought of Christmas. Then he remembered: They had crossed the international date line and passed midnight. It was Christmas.

Phil wrestled Super Man out of its dive. As the plane leveled off, Louie spotted the tail ight of a Zero rol ing down the north-south runway. He began synchronizing on the light, hoping to hit the Zero before it took off. Below, very close, something exploded, and Super Man rocked. A shel burst by the left wing, another by the tail. Louie could see tracers cutting neat lines in the sky to the right. He loosed a bomb over the south end of the runway, counted two seconds, then dropped his five other bombs over a set of bunkers and parked planes beside the runway.

Relieved of three thousand pounds of bombs, Super Man bobbed upward. Louie yel ed “Bombs away!” and Phil rol ed the plane roughly to the left, through streams of antiaircraft fire. Louie looked down. His group of five bombs landed in splashes of fire on the bunkers and planes. He’d been a beat too late to hit the Zero. His bomb fel just behind it, lighting up the runway. Phil turned Super Man back for Midway. Wake was a sea of fire and running men.

——

The crew was jumpy, coursing with adrenaline. There were several Zeros in the air, but in the darkness, no one knew where they were. Somewhere in the galaxy of planes, a Zero fired on a bomber, which fired back. The Zero disappeared. Pil sbury looked to the side and saw yel ow dashes of tracer fire, heading directly toward them. A B-24 gunner had mistaken them for an enemy plane and was firing on them. Phil saw it just as Pil sbury did, and swung the plane away. The firing stopped.

The bomb bay doors were stuck open. The motors strained, but couldn’t budge them. Louie climbed back and looked. When Phil had wrenched the plane out of its dive, the enormous g-forces had nudged the auxiliary fuel tanks out of place, just enough to block the doors. Nothing could be done. With the bomb bay yawning open and dragging against the air, the plane was burning much more fuel than usual. Given that this mission was stretching the plane’s range to the limit, it was sobering news.

The men could do nothing but wait and hope. They passed around pineapple juice and roast beef sandwiches. Louie was drained, both from the combat and the incessant quivering of the plane. He stared out, sleepy, watching the stars through breaks in the clouds.

Seventy-five miles away from Wake, one of the men looked back. He could stil see the island burning.

——

As day broke over the Pacific, Brigadier General Howard K. Ramey stood by the Midway airstrip, looking at the clouds and waiting for his bombers. His face was furrowed. A brow of fog hung two hundred feet over the ocean, spil ing rain. In some places, visibility was down to a few yards. Finding tiny, flat Midway would be difficult, and there was the question of whether the bombers’ fuel would last long enough to bring them home.

One plane appeared, then another and another. One by one, they landed, al critical y low on fuel, one with a dead engine. Super Man wasn’t in sight.

Out in the fog, Phil must have looked at his fuel gauge and known that he was in real trouble. With his bomb bay open and wind howling through the fuselage, he had dragged away most of his fuel and was running on empty. He didn’t know if he’d be able to find Midway, and he didn’t have enough fuel to make a second pass. At last, at around eight A.M., he saw Midway dimly through the mist. A moment later, one of Super Man’s engines sputtered and died.

Phil knew that the other engines would quit almost immediately. He nursed the plane along, spotting the runway and aiming for it. The engines kept turning. Phil dropped Super Man and touched down. Just after the plane turned off the runway, a second engine died. As it reached its bunker, the other two engines quit. Had the route been only slightly longer, Super Man would have hit the ocean.

General Ramey ran to each bomber, cal ing out congratulations. The tired Super Man crewmen dropped out of the plane and into a mob of marines, who’d spent a year waiting to deliver retribution to the Japanese for what they’d done to their brothers at Wake. The marines passed out shots of liquor and feted the airmen.

The mission had been a smashing success. Every plane had returned safely. Only one bomb had missed its target, plopping into the water twenty feet offshore. The Japanese base had been gravely damaged—by one estimate, half of its personnel had been kil ed—and America had demonstrated the reach and power of its B-24s. And though the men didn’t know it, the American captives had al survived.

Phil’s crew spent the day sitting in the rain, watching several albatrosses make comical y inept attempts at landing on the flooded runway. Early the next morning, Super Man carried them back to Kahuku. Louie spent New Year’s Eve at a party with Moznette and his bombardier, James Carringer, Jr., and didn’t drag himself back to the pornographic palace until four-thirty. He pul ed himself together a few hours later, when Admiral Chester Nimitz presented the Wake pilots with Distinguished Flying Crosses and their crewmen with Air Medals.

News of the raid broke, and the men were lauded as heroes. The press played up their Christmas gift to the Al ies. STEEL FILLS JAP SOX, read one headline. In Tokyo, radio broadcasters had a different take. They reported that the Americans, upon encountering Japanese defenses, had “fled in terror.”

In the Honolulu Advertiser, Louie found a cartoon depicting his role in bombing Wake. He clipped it out and tucked it in his wal et.

With the dawn of 1943 and the success at Wake, the men felt cocky. It had al been so easy. One admiral predicted that Japan might be finished within the year, and Phil overheard men talking about going home.