Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (18 page)

Where the struck B-24s had been, there were deep holes ringed by decapitated coconut trees. One crater, Louie noted in his diary, was thirty-five feet deep and sixty feet across. Bits of bomber were sprinkled everywhere. Landing gear and seats that had seen the sunset from one side of Funafuti greeted the sunrise from the other. Al that was left of one bomber was a tail, two wingtips, and two propel ers, connected by a black smudge. There was a 1,200-horsepower Pratt and Whitney engine sitting by itself on the runway; the plane that it belonged to was nowhere to be found. Louie came upon a reporter staring into a crater, in tears. Louie walked to him, bracing to see a dead body. Instead, he saw a typewriter, flattened.

The wounded and dead were everywhere. Two mechanics who’d been caught in the open were bruised al over from the concussive force of the explosions. They were so traumatized that they couldn’t talk, and were using their hands to communicate. Men stood in a solemn circle around a couple of seats and twisted metal, al that was left of the ordnance truck. The three men who had sought shelter under it were beyond recognition. A radioman was found dead, a bomb shard in his head. Louie came upon the body of a native, dressed in a loincloth, lying on his back. Half of his head was missing.

A radio operator would say that there had been about fourteen Japanese bombers, but thinking that there had been two sets of three, someone dubbed them “the Stinking Six.” Everyone expected them to return. Phil and Louie joined a group of men digging foxholes with shovels and helmets. When they had a moment, they walked to the beach and sat together for an hour, trying to col ect their thoughts.

——

Sometime that day, Louie went to the infirmary to help out. Pil sbury was back in his cot. His leg was burning terribly, and he lay with it dangling in the air, dripping blood into a puddle on the floor. Cuppernel sat with him, thanking him for shooting down that Zero.

The doctor was concerned that Pil sbury’s foot wouldn’t stop bleeding. Surgery was necessary, but there was no anesthetic, so Pil sbury was just going to have to do without. With Pil sbury gripping the bed with both hands and Louie lying over his legs, the doctor used pliers to tear tissue from Pil sbury’s foot, then pul ed a long strip of hanging skin over his bone stump and sewed it up.

Super Man sat by the airstrip, listing left on its peg-legged landing gear, the shredded tire hanging partway off. The air raid had missed the plane, but it didn’t look like it. Its 594 holes were spread over every part of it: swarms of bul et holes, slashes from shrapnel, four cannon-fire gashes at least as large as a man’s head, the gaping punch hole beside Pil sbury’s turret, and the hole in the rudder, as big as a doorway. The plane looked as if it had flown through barbed wire, its paint scoured off the leading edge of the engines and sides. Journalists and airmen circled it, amazed that it had stayed airborne for five hours with so much damage. Phil was hailed as a miracle worker, and everyone had cause to reassess the supposedly fainthearted B-24. A photographer climbed inside the plane and snapped a picture. Taken in daylight in the dark of the plane’s interior, the image showed shafts of light streaming through the holes, a shower of stars against a black sky.

Louie, looking as battered as his plane, walked to Super Man. He leaned his head into one of the cannon holes and saw the severed right rudder cables, stil spliced together as he had left them. He ran his fingers along the tears in Super Man’s skin. The plane had saved him and al but one of his crew. He would think of it as a dear friend.

Louie at Super Man on the day after Nauru. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Louie boarded another plane and began his journey back to Hawaii with Phil, Cuppernel , Mitchel , and the bandaged Glassman. Pil sbury, Lambert, and Douglas were too badly wounded to rejoin the crew. In a few days, they’d be sent to Samoa, where a doctor would take one look at Pil sbury’s leg and announce that it had been “hamburgered.” Lambert would be hospitalized for five months.* When a general presented him with a Purple Heart, Lambert apparently couldn’t sit up, so the general pinned the medal to his sheet. Douglas’s war was done. Brooks was lying in a grave in Funafuti’s Marine Corps cemetery.

The crew was broken up forever. They would never see Super Man again.

——

An oppressive weight settled on Louie as he flew away from Funafuti. He and the remains of the crew stopped at Canton, then flew on to Palmyra Atol , where Louie took a hot shower and watched They Died with Their Boots On at the base theater. It was the movie he’d been working on as an extra when the war had begun, a lifetime ago.

Back on Hawaii, he sank into a cold torpor. He was irritable and withdrawn. Phil, too, was off-kilter, drinking a few too many, seeming not himself. With a gutted crew and no plane, the men weren’t cal ed for assignments, so they kil ed time in Honolulu. When a drunken hothead tried to pick a fight, Phil stared back indifferently, but Louie obliged. The two stomped outside to have it out, and the hothead backed out. Later, drinking beer with friends, Louie couldn’t bring himself to be sociable. He holed up in his room, listening to music. His only other solace was running, slogging through the sand around the Kahuku runway, thinking of the 1944 Olympics, trying to forget Harry Brooks’s plaintive face.

On May 24, Louie, Phil, and the other Super Man veterans were transferred to the 42nd squadron of the 11th Bomb Group. The 42nd would be stationed on the eastern edge of Oahu, on the gorgeous beach at Kualoa. Six new men were brought in to replace the lost Super Man crewmen. Flying with unfamiliar men worried Louie and Phil. “Don’t like the idea a bit,” Louie once wrote in his diary. “Every time they mix up a crew, they have a crack up.”

Among the Super Man veterans, the only thing that seemed noteworthy about the new men was that their tail gunner, a sergeant from Cleveland named Francis McNamara, had such an affinity for sweets that he ate practical y nothing but dessert. The men cal ed him “Mac.”

For the moment, they had no plane. Liberators destined for the 11th Bomb Group were being flown in from other combat areas, and the first five, peppered with bul et holes, had just arrived. One of them, Green Hornet, looked haggard, its sides splattered with something black, the paint worn off the engines. Even with an empty bomb bay and al four engines going, it was only just able to stay airborne. It tended to fly with its tail dragging below its nose, something the airmen cal ed “mushing,” a reference to the mushy feel of the controls of a faltering plane. Engineers went over the bomber, but found no explanation. Al of the airmen were wary of Green Hornet. The bomber was relegated to errands, and the ground crewmen began prying parts off it for use on other planes. Louie went up in it for a short hop, came away referring to it as “the craziest plane,” and hoped he’d never have to fly in it again.

On May 26, Louie packed up his belongings and caught a ride to his new Kualoa digs, a private cottage thirty feet from the ocean. Louie, Phil, Mitchel , and Cuppernel would have the place al to themselves. That afternoon, Louie stayed in, transforming the garage into his private room. Phil went to a squadron meeting, where he met a rookie pilot, George “Smitty” Smith, by coincidence a close friend of Cecy’s. After the meeting, Phil lingered late with Smitty, talking about Cecy. At the cottage, Louie turned in. The next day, he, Phil, and Cuppernel were going to go to Honolulu to take another crack at P.

Y. Chong’s steaks.

Across the island at Hickam Field, nine crewmen and one passenger climbed aboard a B-24. The crew, piloted by a Tennessean named Clarence Corpening, had just come from San Francisco and was on its way to Canton, then Australia. As men on the ground watched, the plane lifted off, banked south, and flew out of sight.

* Lambert eventual y returned to duty with another crew and amassed an astounding record, completing at least ninety-five missions.

E leven

“Nobody’s Going to Live Through This”

ON THURSDAY, MAY 27, 1943, LOUIE ROSE AT FIVE A.M. Everyone else in the cottage was asleep. He tiptoed out and hiked up the hil behind the cottage to rouse himself, then walked back, pul ed on his workout clothes, and started for the runway. On his way, he found a sergeant and asked him to pace him in a jeep.

The sergeant agreed, and Louie jogged off with the jeep beside him. He turned a mile in 4:12, a dazzling time given that he was running in sand. He was in the best shape of his life.

He walked back to the cottage, cleaned himself up, and dressed, donning a pair of tropical-weight khaki pants, a T-shirt, and a muslin top shirt that he’d bought in Honolulu. After breakfast and some time spent fixing up his new room, he wrote a letter to Payton Jordan, tucked the letter into his shirt pocket, climbed into a borrowed car with Phil and Cuppernel , and headed for Honolulu.

At the base gate, they were flagged down by the despised lieutenant who had ordered them to fly Super Man on three engines. The lieutenant was on urgent business. Clarence Corpening’s B-24, which had left for Canton the day before, had never landed. The lieutenant, who was under the impression that the plane was a B-25 instead of a much larger B-24, was looking for volunteers to hunt for it. Phil told him that they had no plane. The lieutenant said they could take Green Hornet. When Phil said that the plane wasn’t airworthy, the lieutenant replied that it had passed inspection. Both Louie and Phil knew that though the word “volunteer” was used, this was an order. Phil volunteered. The lieutenant woke pilot Joe Deasy and talked him into volunteering as wel . Deasy and his crew would take the B-24 Daisy Mae.

Phil, Louie, and Cuppernel turned back to round up their crew. Stopping at the cottage, Louie grabbed a pair of binoculars that he had bought at the Olympics. He flipped open his diary and jotted down a few words on what he was about to do. “There was only one ship, ‘The Green Hornet,’ a ‘musher,’ ”

he wrote. “We were very reluctant, but Phil ips final y gave in for rescue mission.”

Just before he left, Louie scribbled a note and left it on his footlocker, in which he kept his liquor-fil ed condiment jars. If we’re not back in a week , it read, help yourself to the booze .

——

The lieutenant met the crews at Green Hornet. He unrol ed a map. He believed that Corpening had gone down two hundred miles north of Palmyra. His reason for believing this is unclear; the official report of the downing states that the plane wasn’t seen or heard from after takeoff, so it could have been anywhere. Whatever his reason, he told Phil to fol ow a heading of 208 and search to a point paral el to Palmyra. He gave Deasy roughly the same instruction but directed him to a slightly different area. Both crews were told to search al day, land at Palmyra, then resume searching the next day, if necessary.

As they prepared for takeoff, everyone on Phil’s crew worried about Green Hornet. Louie tried to reassure himself that without bombs or ammunition aboard, the plane should have enough power to stay airborne. Phil was concerned that he’d never been in this plane and didn’t know its quirks. He knew that it had been cannibalized, and he hoped that critical parts weren’t missing. The crew reviewed crash procedures and made a special inspection to be sure that the survival equipment was aboard. There was a provisions box in the plane, and retrieving this was the tail gunner’s responsibility. There was also an extra raft, stored in a yel ow bag on the flight deck. This raft was Louie’s responsibility, and he checked to be sure it was there. He put on his Mae West, as did some other crewmen. Phil left his off, perhaps because it was difficult to fly with it on.

At the last moment, an enlisted man ran to the plane and asked if he could hitch a ride to Palmyra. There were no objections, and the man found a seat in the back. With the addition of the enlisted man, there were eleven on board.

Green Hornet. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

As Phil and Cuppernel turned the plane up the taxiway, Louie remembered his letter to Payton Jordan. He fished it from his pocket, leaned from the waist window, and tossed it to a ground crewman, who said he’d mail it for him.