Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (19 page)

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Daisy Mae lifted off at almost the same time as Green Hornet, and the planes flew side by side. On Green Hornet, other than the four Super Man veterans, the crewmen were strangers and had little to say to one another. Louie passed the time on the flight deck, chatting with Phil and Cuppernel .

Green Hornet, true to form, flew with its tail wel below its nose, and couldn’t keep up with Daisy Mae. After about two hundred miles, Phil radioed to Deasy to go on without him. The crews lost sight of each other.

Sometime around two P.M., Green Hornet reached the search area, about 225 miles north of Palmyra. Clouds pressed around the plane, and no one could see the water. Phil dropped the plane under the clouds, leveling off at eight hundred feet. Louie took out his binoculars, descended to the greenhouse, and began scanning. Phil’s voice soon crackled over the interphone, asking him to come up and pass the binoculars around. Louie did as told, then remained on the flight deck, just behind Phil and Cuppernel .

told, then remained on the flight deck, just behind Phil and Cuppernel .

While they searched the ocean, Cuppernel asked Phil if he could switch seats with him, taking over the first pilot’s duties. This was a common practice, enabling copilots to gain experience to qualify as first pilots. Phil assented. The enormous Cuppernel squeezed around Phil and into the left seat as Phil moved to the right. Cuppernel began steering the plane.

A few minutes later, someone noticed that the engines on one side were burning more fuel than those on the other, making one side progressively lighter. They began transferring fuel across the wings to even out the load.

Suddenly, there was a shudder. Louie looked at the tachometer and saw that the RPMs on engine No. 1—on the far left—were fal ing. He looked out the window. The engine was shaking violently. Then it stopped. The bomber tipped left and began dropping rapidly toward the ocean.

Phil and Cuppernel had only seconds to save the plane. They began working rapidly, but Louie had the sense that they were disoriented by their seat swap. To minimize drag from the dead No. 1 engine, they needed to “feather” it—turn the dead propel er blades paral el to the wind and stop the propel er’s rotation. Normal y, this was Cuppernel ’s job, but now he was in the pilot’s seat. As he worked, Cuppernel shouted to the new engineer to come to the cockpit to feather the engine. It is unknown if he or anyone else specified which engine needed feathering. It was a critical piece of information; because a dead engine’s propel er continues turning in the wind, it can look just like a running engine.

On the control panel, there were four feathering buttons, one for each engine, covered by a plastic shield. Leaning between Cuppernel and Phil, the engineer flipped the shield and banged down on a button. The moment he did it, Green Hornet heaved and lurched left. The engineer had hit the No. 2

button, not the No. 1 button. Both leftward engines were now dead, and No. 1 stil wasn’t feathered.

Phil pushed the two working engines ful on, trying to keep the plane aloft long enough to restart the good left engine. The racing right engines, pul ing against the dragging, liftless side, rol ed the plane halfway onto its left side, sending it into a spiral. The engine wouldn’t start. The plane kept dropping.

Green Hornet was doomed. The best Phil could do was to try to level it out to ditch. He grunted three words into the interphone:

“Prepare to crash.”

Louie ran from the flight deck, yel ing for everyone to get to crash stations. As the plane whirled, he dug out the extra life raft, then clambered toward his crash position by the right waist window. He saw Mac, the new tail gunner, clutching the survival provisions box. Other men were frantical y pul ing on Mae Wests. Louie was distantly aware that Mitchel hadn’t emerged from the nose. It was Mitchel ’s duty to calculate the plane’s position, relay this to the radioman so he could send a distress signal, and strap the sextant and celestial navigation kit to his body. But with the plane gyrating down nose first and the escape passage narrow, perhaps the navigator couldn’t pul himself out.

As the men behind the cockpit fled toward the comparative safety of the waist and rear of the plane, one man, almost certainly the engineer who had hit the wrong feathering button, apparently stayed in front. Because life rafts didn’t deploy automatical y in a crash, it was the engineer’s duty to stand behind the cockpit to pul the overhead raft-release handle. To ensure that the rafts would be near enough to the plane for survivors to swim to them, he would have to wait until just before the crash to pul the handle. This meant that he would have little or no chance to get to a crash position, and thus, little chance of survival.

Phil and Cuppernel fought the plane. Green Hornet rol ed onto its left side, moving faster and faster as the right engines thundered at ful power. There was no time to radio a distress cal . Phil looked for a swel over which to orient the plane for ditching, but it was no use. He couldn’t haul the plane level, and even if he’d been able to, he was going much too fast. They were going to crash, very hard. Phil felt strangely devoid of fear. He watched the water rotating up at him and thought: There’s nothing more I can do.

Louie sat down on the floor by the bulkhead, facing forward. There were five men near him. Everyone looked stunned; no one said anything. Louie looked out the right waist window. Al he saw was the cloudy sky, turning around and around. He felt intensely alive. He recal ed the bulkhead in front of him and thought of how his skul would strike it. Sensing the ocean coming up at the plane, he took a last glance at the twisting sky, then pul ed the life raft in front of him and pushed his head into his chest.

One terrible, tumbling second passed, then another. An instant before the plane struck the water, Louie’s mind throbbed with a single, final thought: Nobody’s going to live through this.

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For Louie, there were only jagged, soundless sensations: his body catapulted forward, the plane breaking open, something wrapping itself around him, the cold slap of water, and then its weight over him. Green Hornet, its nose and left wing hitting first at high speed, stabbed into the ocean and blew apart.

As the plane disintegrated around him, Louie felt himself being pul ed deep underwater. Then, abruptly, the downward motion stopped and Louie was flung upward. The force of the plane’s plunge had spent itself, and the fuselage, momentarily buoyed by the air trapped inside, leapt to the surface. Louie opened his mouth and gasped. The air hissed from the plane, and the water rushed up over Louie again. The plane slipped under and sank toward the ocean floor as if yanked downward.

Louie tried to orient himself. The tail was no longer behind him, the wings no longer ahead. The men who’d been around him were gone. The impact had rammed him into the waist gun mount and wedged him under it, facedown, with the raft below him. The gun mount pressed against his neck, and countless strands of something were coiled around his body, binding him to the gun mount and the raft. He felt them and thought: Spaghetti. It was a snarl of wires, Green Hornet’s nervous system. When the tail had broken off, the wires had snapped and whipped around him. He thrashed against them but couldn’t get free. He felt frantic to breathe, but couldn’t.

In the remains of the cockpit, Phil was fighting to get out. When the plane hit, he was thrown forward, his head striking something. A wave of water punched through the cockpit, and the plane carried him under. From the darkness, he knew that he was far below the surface, sinking deeper by the second. He apparently saw Cuppernel push his big body out of the plane. Phil found what he thought was the cockpit window frame, its glass missing. He put his foot on something hard and pushed himself through the opening and out of the cockpit. He swam toward the surface, the light coming up around him.

He emerged in a puzzle of debris. His head was gushing blood and his ankle and one finger were broken. He found a floating hunk of wreckage, perhaps four feet square, and clung to it. It began to sink. There were two life rafts far away. No one was in them. Cuppernel was nowhere to be seen.

Far below, Louie was stil ensnared in the plane, writhing in the wires. He looked up and saw a body, drifting passively. The plane coursed down, and the world fled away above. Louie felt his ears pop, and vaguely recol ected that at the swimming pool at Redondo Beach, his ears would pop at twenty feet. Darkness enfolded him, and the water pressure bore in with greater and greater intensity. He struggled uselessly. He thought: Hopeless.

He felt a sudden, excruciating bolt of pain in his forehead. There was an oncoming stupor, a fading, as he tore at the wires and clenched his throat against the need to breathe. He had the soft realization that this was the last of everything. He passed out.

He woke in total darkness. He thought: This is death. Then he felt the water stil on him, the heavy dropping weight of the plane around him. Inexplicably, the wires were gone, as was the raft. He was floating inside the fuselage, which was bearing him toward the ocean floor, some seventeen hundred feet down. He could see nothing. His Mae West was uninflated, but its buoyancy was pul ing him into the ceiling of the plane. The air was gone from his lungs, and he was now gulping reflexively, swal owing salt water. He tasted blood, gasoline, and oil. He was drowning.

Louie flung out his arms, trying to find a way out. His right hand struck something, and his USC ring snagged on it. His hand was caught. He reached toward it with his left hand and felt a long, smooth length of metal. The sensation oriented him: He was at the open right waist window. He swam into the window, put his feet on the frame, and pushed off, wrenching his right hand free and cutting his finger. His back struck the top of the window, and the skin under his shirt scraped off. He kicked clear. The plane sank away.

Louie fumbled for the cords on his Mae West, hoping that no one had poached the carbon dioxide canisters. Luck was with him: The chambers bal ooned. He was suddenly light, the vest pul ing him urgently upward in a stream of debris.

He burst into dazzling daylight. He gasped in a breath and immediately vomited up the salt water and fuel he had swal owed. He had survived.

Twelve

Downed

THE OCEAN WAS A JUMBLE OF BOMBER REMAINS. THE LIFE-BLOOD of the plane—oil, hydraulic fluid, and some one thousand galons of fuel—slopped about on the surface. Curling among the bits of plane were threads of blood.

Louie heard a voice. He turned toward it and saw Phil, a few dozen feet away, clinging to what looked like a fuel tank. With him was the tail gunner, Mac.

Neither man had a Mae West on. Blood spouted in rhythmic arcs from Phil’s head and washed in sheets down his face. His eyes lol ed about in dazed bewilderment. Phil looked at the head bobbing across the debris field and registered that it was Louie. None of the other men had surfaced.

Louie saw one of the life rafts bobbing on the water. It was possible that the raft had been thrown loose by the disintegrating plane, but it was much more likely that the engineer, in the last act of his life, had yanked the raft-release handle just before the crash. The raft had inflated itself and was drifting away rapidly.

Louie knew that he had to get Phil’s bleeding stopped, but if he went to him, the raft would be lost and al of them would perish. He swam for the raft. His clothing and shoes weighed him down, and the current and wind carried the raft away faster than he could swim. As it slipped farther and farther from reach, Louie gave up. He looked back at Phil and Mac, sharing the recognition that their chance was lost. Then he saw a long cord trailing off the raft, snaking not two feet from his face. He snatched the cord, reeled the raft to him, and climbed aboard. A second raft was sliding away. Louie pul ed out his raft’s oars, rowed as hard as he could, and just managed to catch the cord and pul the raft to him. He fed the cords through grommets in the rafts and tied them together.

He rowed to Phil and Mac. Realizing that the jagged hunk that he was clinging to might perforate the rafts, Phil pushed it away. Louie pul ed Phil aboard, and Mac climbed up under his own power. Both men, like Louie, were filmy with fuel and oil. With al three of them in one raft, it was cramped; the raft was only about six feet long and a little more than two feet wide.

There were two gashes on the left side of Phil’s forehead, by the hairline. Blood was spurting from the wounds and, mixed with seawater, sloshing in the bottom of the raft. Remembering what he had learned in Boy Scouts and his Honolulu first aid course, Louie ran his fingers down Phil’s throat until he felt a pulse, the carotid artery. He showed Mac the spot and told him to press down. He pul ed off his muslin top shirt and T-shirt and pul ed Phil’s shirts off as wel . He asked Mac to do the same. Setting aside the top shirts, Louie dipped Phil’s T-shirt in the water, folded it into a compress, and pressed it to the wounds. He took the other T-shirts and tied them tightly around Phil’s head, then slid Phil into the second raft.