Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (16 page)

Louie rotated the dead turret by hand and Mitchel climbed out. The gunners kept firing, and Super Man trembled on. There were stil two Zeros circling it.

——

In the top turret, facing backward, Stanley Pil sbury had fearsome weapons, twin .50-caliber machine guns. Each gun could fire eight hundred rounds per minute, the bul ets traveling about three thousand feet per second. Pil sbury’s guns could kil a man from four miles away, and they could take out a Zero if given the chance. But the Zeros were staying below, where Pil sbury couldn’t hit them. He could feel their rounds thumping into Super Man’s bel y, but al he could see were his plane’s wings. Fixated on the nearest Zero, Pil sbury thought, If he’d just come up, I can knock him down .

He waited. The plane groaned and shook, the gunners fired, the Zeros pounded them from below, and stil Pil sbury waited. Then Louie saw a Zero swoop up on the right. Pil sbury never saw it. The first he knew of it was an earsplitting ka-bang! ka-bang! ka-bang!, a sensation of everything tipping and blowing apart, and excruciating pain.

The Zero had sprayed the entire right side of Super Man with cannon shel s. The first rounds hit near the tail, spinning the plane hard on its side.

Shrapnel tore into the hip and left leg of tail gunner Ray Lambert, who hung on sideways as Super Man rol ed. The plane’s twist saved him; a cannon round struck exactly where his head had been an instant earlier, hitting so close to him that his goggles shattered. Ahead, shrapnel dropped Brooks and Douglas at the waist guns. In the bel y turret, two hunks of shrapnel penetrated the back of Glassman, who was so adrenalized that he felt nothing. Another round hit the passenger, Nelson. Final y, a shel blew out the wal of the top turret, disintegrating on impact and shooting metal into Pil sbury’s leg from foot to knee. Half of the crew, and al of the working gunners, had been hit. Super Man reeled crazily on its side, and for a moment it felt about to spiral out of control. Phil and Cuppernel wrenched it level.

Clinging to his gun as the shrapnel struck his leg and the plane’s spin nearly flung him from his seat, Pil sbury shouted the only word that came to mind.

“Ow!”

——

Louie heard someone scream. When the plane was righted, Phil yel ed to him to find out how bad the damage was. Louie climbed from the nose turret.

The first thing he saw was Harry Brooks, in the bomb bay, lying on the catwalk. The bomb bay doors were wide open, and Brooks was dangling partway off the catwalk, one hand gripping the catwalk and one leg swinging in the air, with nothing but air and ocean below him. His eyes bulged, and his upper body was wet with blood. He lifted one arm toward Louie, a plaintive expression on his face.

Louie grabbed Brooks by the wrists and pul ed him into a seated position. Brooks slumped forward, and Louie could see holes dotting the back of his jacket. There was blood in his hair.

Louie dragged Brooks to the flight deck and pul ed him into a corner. Brooks passed out. Louie found a cushion and slid it under him, then returned to the bomb bay. He remembered having turned the valve to close the doors, and couldn’t understand why they were open. Then he saw: There was a slash in the wal , and purple fluid was splattered everywhere. The hydraulic lines, which control ed the doors, had been severed. With these lines broken, Phil would have no hydraulic control of the landing gear or the flaps, which they would need to slow the plane on landing. And without hydraulics, they had no brakes.

Louie cranked the bomb bay doors shut by hand. He looked to the rear and saw Douglas, Lambert, and Nelson lying together, bloody. Douglas and Lambert were pawing along the floor, trying to reach their guns. Nelson didn’t move. He’d taken a shot to the stomach.

Louie shouted to the cockpit for help. Phil yel ed back that he was losing control of the plane and needed Cuppernel . Louie said that this was a dire emergency. Phil braced himself at the controls, and Cuppernel got up, saw the men in back, and broke into a run. He found morphine, sulfa, oxygen masks, and bandages and dropped down next to each man in turn.

Louie knelt beside Brooks, who was stil unconscious. Feeling through the gunner’s hair, he found two holes in the back of his skul . There were four large wounds in his back. Louie strapped an oxygen mask to Brooks’s face and bandaged his head. As he worked, he thought about the state of the plane. The waist, nose, and tail gunners were out, the plane was shot to hel , Phil was alone in the cockpit, barely keeping the plane up, and the Zeros were stil out there. One more pass, he thought, will put us down.

Louie was bending over Brooks when he felt a tickle on his shoulder, something dripping. He looked up and saw Pil sbury in the top turret. Blood was streaming from his leg. Louie rushed to him.

Pil sbury was stil in his seat, facing sideways, gripping the gun and sweeping his eyes around the sky. He looked absolutely livid. His leg dangled below him, his pant leg hanging in shreds and his boot blasted. Next to him was a jagged hole, the shape of Texas and almost as large as a beach bal , clawed out of the side of the plane. The turret was shot with holes, and the floor was jingling with flakes of metal and turret motor.

Top turret gunner Stanley Pil sbury, shown at the waist gun. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Louie began doctoring Pil sbury’s wounds. Pil sbury, swinging his head back and forth, ignored him. He knew that the Zero would come back to finish the kil , and he had to find it. The urgency of the moment drove the pain into a distant place.

Suddenly, there was a whoosh of dark, close, upward motion, a gray shining body, a red circle. Pil sbury shouted something unintel igible, and Louie let go of his foot just as Pil sbury banged the high-speed rotator on his turret. The turret grunted to life, whirling Pil sbury around ninety degrees.

The Zero reached the top of its arc, leveled off, and sped directly toward Super Man. Pil sbury was terrified. In an instant, the end would come with the most minute of gestures—the flick of the Zero pilot’s finger on his cannon trigger—and Super Man would carry ten men into the Pacific. Pil sbury could see the pilot who would end his life, the tropical sun il uminating his face, a white scarf coiled about his neck. Pil sbury thought: I have to kill this man.

Pil sbury sucked in a sharp breath and fired. He watched the tracers skim away from his gun’s muzzle and punch through the cockpit of the Zero. The windshield blew apart and the pilot pitched forward.

The fatal blow never came to Super Man. The Zero pilot, surely seeing the top turret smashed and the waist windows vacant, had probably assumed that the gunners were al dead. He had waited too long.

The Zero folded onto itself like a wounded bird. Pil sbury felt sure that the pilot was dead before his plane struck the ocean.

The last Zero came up from below, then faltered and fel . Clarence Douglas, standing at the waist gun with his thigh, chest, and shoulder torn open, brought it down.

In the ocean behind them, the men on the submarine watched the planes tussle over the water. One by one, the Zeros dropped, and the bombers flew on. The submarine crew would later report that not one Zero made it back to Nauru. It is believed that thanks to this raid and others, the Japanese never retrieved a single shipment of phosphate from the island.

——

The pain that had been far away during the gunfight surged over Pil sbury. Louie pushed the release on the turret chair, and the gunner slid into his arms.

Louie eased him to the floor next to Brooks. Grasping Pil sbury’s boot, he began easing it off as gently as he could. Pil sbury hol ered for al he was worth.

The boot slid off. Pil sbury’s left big toe was gone; it was stil in the boot. The toe next to it hung by a string of skin, and portions of his other toes were missing. So much shrapnel was embedded in his lower leg that it bristled like a pincushion. Louie thought that there would be no way to save the foot. He bandaged Pil sbury, gave him a shot of morphine, fed him a sulfa pil , then hurried away to see if they could save the plane.

Super Man was dying. Phil couldn’t turn it from side to side with the normal controls, and the plane was pul ing upward so hard, trying to flip, that Phil couldn’t hold it with his arms. He put both feet on the yoke and pushed as hard as he could. The nose kept rearing up so high that the plane was on the verge of stal ing. It was porpoising, up and down.

The men who could walk rushed through the plane, assessing its condition. The peril of their situation was abundantly clear. The right rudder was completely shot, a large portion of it missing and its cables severed. The cables for the elevators, which control ed the plane’s pitch, were badly damaged. So were the cables for the trim, which gave the pilot fine control of the plane’s attitude—its orientation in the air—and thus greatly reduced the effort needed to handle the plane. Fuel was trickling onto the floor under the top turret. No one knew the condition of the landing gear, but with the entire plane perforated, it was likely that the tires had been struck. The bomb bay was sloshing with hydraulic fluid.

Phil did what he could. Slowing the engines on one side created a power differential that forced the plane to turn. Pushing the plane to higher speed eased the porpoising and reduced the risk of stal ing. If Phil kept his feet on the yoke and pushed hard, he could stop the plane from flipping. Someone shut off the fuel feed near Pil sbury, and the leaking stopped. Louie took a bomb-arming wire and spliced the severed rudder and elevator cables together. It didn’t result in immediate improvement, but if the left rudder cables failed, it might help.

Funafuti was five hours away. If Super Man could carry them that far, they would have to land without hydraulic control of the landing gear, flaps, or brakes. They could lower the gear and extend the flaps with hand pumps, but there was no manual alternative to hydraulic brakes. Without bombs or much fuel aboard, the plane weighed some forty thousand pounds. A B-24 without brakes, especial y one coming in “hot”—over the standard of 90 to 110 miles per hour landing speed—could eat up 10,000 feet before it stopped. Funafuti’s runway was 6,660 feet long. At its end were rocks and sea.

Hours passed. Super Man shook and struggled. Louie and Cuppernel moved among the injured men. Pil sbury lay on the floor, watching his leg bleed.

Mitchel hunched over his navigation table, and Phil wrestled with the plane. Douglas limped about, looking deeply traumatized, his shoulder and arm, said Pil sbury, “al torn to pieces.” Brooks lay next to Pil sbury, blood pooling in his throat, making him gurgle as he breathed. Pil sbury couldn’t bear the sound. Once or twice, when Louie knelt before him, Brooks opened his eyes and whispered something. Louie put his ear near Brooks’s lips, but couldn’t understand him. Brooks drifted off again. Everyone knew he was almost surely dying. No one spoke of it.

It was likely, they al knew, that they’d crash on landing, if not before. Whatever thoughts each man had, he kept them to himself.

——

Daylight was fading when the palms of Funafuti brushed over the horizon. Phil began dropping the plane toward the runway. They were going much too fast. Someone went to the hand crank on the catwalk and opened the bomb bay doors, and the plane, dragging on the air, began to slow. Douglas went to the pump for the landing gear, just under the top turret. He needed two hands to work it—one to push the valve and one to work the pump—but he was in too much pain to hold up either of his arms for more than a few seconds. Pil sbury couldn’t stand, but by stretching as far as he could, he reached the selector valve. Together, they got the gear down while Louie peered out the side window, looking for a yel ow tab that would signify that the gear was locked. The tab appeared. Mitchel and Louie pumped the flaps down.

Louie scrounged up parachute cord and went to each injured man, looping cord around him as a belt, then wrapping the rope around stationary parts of the plane. Nelson, with his bel y wound, couldn’t have a rope wrapped around his torso, so Louie fed the line around his arm and under his armpit. Fearing that they’d end up on fire, he didn’t knot the cords. Instead, he wound the ends around the hands of the injured men, so they could free themselves easily.

The question of how to stop the bomber remained. Louie had an idea. What if they were to tie two parachutes to the rear of the plane, pitch them out of the waist windows at touchdown, and pul the rip cords? No one had ever tried to stop a bomber in this manner. It was a long shot, but it was al they had.

Louie and Douglas placed one parachute in each waist window and tied them to a gun mount. Douglas went to his seat, leaving Louie standing between the waist windows, a rip cord in each hand.

Super Man sank toward Funafuti. Below, the journalists and the other bomber crews stood, watching the crippled plane come in. Super Man dropped lower and lower. Just before it touched down, Pil sbury looked at the airspeed gauge. It read 110 miles per hour. For a plane without brakes, it was too fast.