Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (21 page)

Louie grabbed the flare gun, loaded it, and fired. The flare shot straight at the bomber; for a moment, the men thought that it would hit the plane. But the flare missed, passing alongside the plane, making a fountain of red that looked huge from the raft. Louie reloaded and fired again. The plane turned sharply right. Louie fired two more flares, past the tail.

The plane was Daisy Mae. Its crewmen were straining their eyes at the ocean, passing a pair of binoculars between them. Searching was difficult that day, with loaves of clouds closing and parting, offering the men only brief glimpses of the sea. Everyone felt a particular urgency; the missing men were their squadron mates and friends. “If we ever looked for something on a mission,” remembered Scearce, “that day we were looking.”

The flares spent themselves, and Daisy Mae flew on. No one aboard saw anything. The plane’s pivot had only been a routine turn. Louie, Phil, and Mac watched Daisy Mae’s twin tails grow smal er in the distance, then disappear.

For a moment, Louie felt furious with the airmen who had passed so close to them, yet had not seen them. But his anger soon cooled. From his days searching for missing planes, he knew how hard it was to see a raft, especial y among clouds. For al he knew, he too had overlooked raft-bound men below him.

But what had probably been their best chance of rescue had been lost. With every hour, they were drifting farther west, away from the flight lanes. If they weren’t found, the only way they could survive would be to get to land. To their west, they knew, there wasn’t a single island for some two thousand miles.* If by some miracle they floated that far and were stil alive, they might reach the Marshal Islands. If they veered a little south, they might reach the Gilberts. If they were lucky enough to drift to those islands, rather than passing by and out again into the open Pacific, they’d have another problem. Both sets of islands belonged to the Japanese. Watching Daisy Mae fly away, Louie had a sinking feeling.

——

As the castaways watched their would-be rescuers disappear over the horizon, not far away, George “Smitty” Smith, who had sat up the night before the crash talking to Phil about Cecy, was piloting his B-24 over the ocean, searching for any sign of the lost men. About fifty miles short of Barbers Point, a base on the leeward side of Oahu, his crew spotted something. Spiraling in for a closer look, Smitty saw a muddle of yel ow rectangular boxes, jostling on the surface. Large fish were circling them.

The boxes had not come from Green Hornet. They were too close to Oahu to have traveled that far, especial y as the currents wouldn’t have carried them in that direction. But Corpening’s plane had probably gone down somewhere along the north-south flight lane, the lane over which Smitty was searching. The boxes may wel have been the last remains of Corpening’s plane, and the men aboard it.

The boxes weren’t the only sighting that Smitty had that day. In the same region where Green Hornet had crashed, he spotted a shock-yel ow object bobbing in the water. He swung his bomber down toward it. It appeared to be a provisions box, like the ones carried on B-24s, but he wasn’t sure. Smitty flew loops around the box for fifteen minutes. There was nothing anywhere near it: no debris, no rafts, no men. Smitty probably believed that he was looking at a piece of Phil’s plane, and if he did, he was probably right. He flew back to Oahu, thinking of his friend Cecy and al the pain she would feel when she learned that her fiancé was missing.

On Oahu, the men of the 42nd squadron were losing hope. “Cuppernel , Phil ips, Zamperini (the Olympic miler), and Mitchel , lost, on their way to Palmyra,” a ground crewman wrote in his diary. “I find it hard to get used to such a thing. Just the other day I drove them al to Kahuku and around—kidded around with them but now they’re probably dead! The other pilots act as though nothing has happened and speak of sending the other fel ow’s clothes home as though it were an everyday occurrence. That’s the way it has to be played because that’s the way it is—it’s an everyday occurrence!”

——

The castaways’ bodies were declining. Other than Mac’s feast on the chocolate bars, none of them had eaten since their early morning breakfast before their last flight. They were intensely thirsty and hungry. After the B-24 sighting, they spent another frigid night, then a long fourth day. There were no planes, no ships, no submarines. Each man drank the last drops of his water.

Sometime on the fifth day, Mac snapped. After having said almost nothing for days, he suddenly began screaming that they were going to die. Wild-eyed and raving, he couldn’t stop shouting. Louie slapped him across the face. Mac abruptly went silent and lay down, appearing strangely contented.

Maybe he was comforted by Louie’s assertion of control, protected thereby from the awful possibilities that his imagination hung before him.

Mac had good reason to lose faith. Their water was gone. After the B-24 had passed over, no more planes had come, and the current was carrying them far from the paths trafficked by friendly aircraft. If the search for them hadn’t been cal ed off, the men knew, it soon would be.

That night, before he tried to sleep, Louie prayed. He had prayed only once before in his life, in childhood, when his mother was sick and he had been fil ed with a rushing fear that he would lose her. That night on the raft, in words composed in his head, never passing his lips, he pleaded for help.

——

As the lost men drifted farther and farther out of reach, their last letters reached their families and friends, who did not yet know that they were missing. It was apparently military policy to wait for initial searches to be conducted before informing loved ones.

On the day after the crash, Phil’s final letter to his father arrived in Virginia. Reverend Phil ips—who cal ed his son by his middle name, Al en—had joined the army and was now Chaplain Phil ips at Camp Pickett. The last news of Al en had reached him weeks earlier, in newspaper stories about Super Man’s saga over Nauru. Chaplain Phil ips had carried clippings about the raid to the offices of a local newspaper, which had run a story on Al en’s heroism. As proud as he was, Chaplain Phil ips was also frightened. “I sure hope that is the closest cal he ever has,” he wrote to his daughter.

It was probably this fear that had led Chaplain Phil ips to write to Al en to ask about the fate of the raft-bound men his crew had found, encircled by sharks, that spring. In his last letter to his father, Al en was reassuring: The men were al safe. As for himself, Al en wrote, “I’m stil in the same place I have been … I’l write again soon. So long for now. —Al.”

On the weekend after the crash, Pete, Virginia, and Louise Zamperini made an impromptu visit to the home of Cuppernel ’s parents, who lived in Long Beach. It was a merry meeting, and they al talked of their boys. After the visit, Pete wrote to Louie, asking him to tel Cuppernel that his parents were doing great. Before sealing the envelope, he tucked in a photo of himself, smiling. On the back, he had scribbled an inscription: “Don’t let ’em clip your wings.”

In Saranap, California, Payton Jordan opened the letter that Louie had tossed out the window of Green Hornet as the plane taxied for its last takeoff.

“Dear Payton and Marge,” it read. “I am stil alive and kickin around, why I don’t know.”

That little turkey’d better take care of himself , Jordan thought.

Phil’s last letter to Cecy reached her in Princeton, Indiana, where she was finishing her first year as a high school teacher. In his letter, Phil had written of the moon over Hawaii and how it reminded him of the last time he was with her. “I never wil forget that time I spent there with you. There are a lot of things which I’l never forget while I was with you, sweet—I’m waiting for the day when we can begin doing things together again as we used to do.” He had closed this letter as he had so many others: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

No more messages would come from the lost men. Pete’s letter to Louie made its way to the postmaster in San Francisco, where the 11th Bomb Group’s mail was sorted. Someone wrote Missing at sea on the outside and dropped it back in the mail to Pete.

——

A week had passed since Green Hornet had vanished. Intensive searching had yielded nothing. Every man on Phil’s crew was official y declared missing, and in Washington, the process of informing family members was set in motion. The men from Daisy Mae were told to return the plane from Palmyra to Oahu. The search had been abandoned. The crew was dejected—they wanted to go on looking. As they flew back to Oahu, they talked of the lost men.

At Kualoa, a second lieutenant named Jack Krey walked into the cottage to perform the grim duty of cataloging the men’s things and sending them to their families. Louie’s room was mostly as it had been when Louie had walked out that Thursday morning: clothes, a footlocker, a diary that ended with a few words about a rescue mission, a pinup of actress Esther Wil iams on the wal . The note that Louie had left on the locker was gone, as was the liquor.

Among Louie’s things, Krey found photographs that Louie had taken inside his plane. In some of them, Louie had forgotten to aim the camera away from the Norden bombsight, so Krey had to confiscate those. The rest of Louie’s belongings were packed into his footlocker and readied to be sent to Torrance.

——

On the evening of Friday, June 4, 1943, Phil’s mother, Kelsey, was in Princeton, Indiana. In the absence of her husband and son, she had sold the family house in Terre Haute and moved to Princeton to be closer to her daughter, Martha, and future daughter-in-law, Cecy, with whom she had become dear friends. That evening, when Kelsey was visiting Martha, someone brought her a telegram:

I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT THE COMMANDING GENERAL PACIFIC AREA REPORTS YOUR SON—FIRST LIEUTENANT RUSSELL A PHILLIPS—MISSING SINCE MAY TWENTY-SEVEN. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION OF HIS STATUS ARE RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED

The telegram reached the Zamperinis that same evening. Louise cal ed Sylvia, who had recently married a firefighter, Harvey Flammer, and now lived in a nearby suburb with her husband. Upon hearing that her brother was missing, Sylvia became hysterical, sobbing so loudly that her neighbor ran to her.

When the neighbor asked her what was wrong, Sylvia was crying too hard to speak. Eventual y she pul ed herself together enough to cal Harvey at the fire station. She was frantic and confused and didn’t know what to do. Harvey told her to go to her mother. Sylvia put the phone down and ran straight out the door.

Sylvia sobbed for the entire forty-five-minute drive. Weeks before, just after the Nauru raid, she had picked up her morning paper and seen, on the front page, a photograph of Louie, looking haunted, staring through a gaping hole in the side of Super Man. The image had horrified her. Now, as she absorbed the news that Louie was missing, she couldn’t stop seeing that image. When she pul ed up at her parents’ house, she had to compose herself before she walked in.

Her father was calm but quiet; her mother was consumed in anguish. Sylvia, who, like the rest of the family, assumed that Louie had gone down in the ocean, told her mother not to worry. “With al those islands,” Sylvia said, “he’s teaching someone hula.” Pete arrived from San Diego. “If he has a toothbrush and a pocket knife and he hits land,” he told his mother, “he’l make it.”

Perhaps that day, or perhaps later, Louise found the tiny snapshot that had been taken on the afternoon Louie had left, when he had stood beside her on her front steps, his arm around her waist. On the back of the photograph, Louise wrote, Louis Reported missing—May 27, 1943.

——

The news of Louie’s disappearance headlined California newspapers and led radio broadcasts on June 5. The Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express ran a feature on the “Life of Zamp,” which looked an awful lot like an obituary. Payton Jordan, now a navy officer, was driving to his base when he heard the news on the radio. Jordan gasped. He drove into the base feeling numb, and for a while did nothing at al . Then he started speaking to his fel ow officers. Jordan’s job was to train cadets in survival techniques, and he and the others considered the possibilities that might face Louie. Al of the officers agreed that if Louie had the right training, he might survive.

Pete cal ed Jordan, and they talked about Louie. As Pete spoke of his hope that Louie would be found, Jordan could hear his voice wavering. Jordan thought about cal ing Louie’s parents, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had no idea what to say. That evening, he drove home and told his wife, Marge, who had known Louie wel at USC. They moved through their routines in a quiet fog, then went to bed and lay awake, in silence.

In Torrance, Anthony Zamperini remained stoic. Louise cried and prayed. From the stress, open sores broke out al over her hands. Sylvia thought her hands looked like raw hamburger.

Somewhere in those jagged days, a fierce conviction came over Louise. She was absolutely certain that her son was alive.

——

On Samoa, Stanley Pil sbury and Clarence Douglas were stil in the hospital, trying to recover from the wounds incurred over Nauru. Douglas’s shoulder was far from healed, and to Pil sbury, he seemed emotional y gutted. Pil sbury was in considerable pain. The doctors had been unable to remove al of the shrapnel from his leg, and he could feel every shard, burning. He wasn’t close to being able to walk. In his dreams, planes dove at him, endlessly.

Pil sbury was in his bed when Douglas came in, his face radiating shock.

“The crew went down,” he said.

Pil sbury could barely speak. His first emotion was overwhelming guilt. “If I had only been there,” he said later, “I could have saved it.”

Douglas and Pil sbury said little more to each other. They parted, each man swimming in grief. Douglas would soon be granted transfer back to the States. Pil sbury would linger on his cot in Samoa, hoping that he would one day walk again.*