Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (22 page)

On Oahu, Louie’s friends gathered in a barracks. In the corner of one of the rooms, they hung a smal flag in memory of Zamp. It would hang there as Louie, Phil, and Mac drifted west and the Al ies, the 11th Bomb Group’s 42nd squadron among them, carried the war across the Pacific and into the throat of Japan.

* There was one spot directly west, about halfway to the Marshal Islands, where the ocean floor was just five feet below the surface. It was almost an island, but not quite.

* As soon as he could walk, Pil sbury was assigned to a new crew to replace a dead waist gunner. Superstitious about adding a new man, the crew received him coldly. On a mission, a Zero tried to ram the plane, and one of its rounds exploded inside the fuselage. The engineer found Pil sbury on the floor with a hunk of metal embedded just above his eye, the white of which was clouding with blood. The plane made a hasty landing, and Pil sbury was bandaged up and sent back to his gun. Somehow, Pil sbury survived the war, a fistful of medals and a permanent limp testifying to al he’d endured. “It was awful, awful, awful,” he said through tears sixty years later. “… If you dig into it, it comes back to you. That’s the way war is.”

Fourteen

Thirst

PHIL FELT AS IF HE WERE ON FIRE. THE EQUATORIAL SUN LAY upon the men, scalding their skin. Their upper lips burned and cracked, balooning so dramaticaly that they obstructed their nostrils, while their lower lips bulged against their chins. Their bodies were slashed with open cracks that formed under the corrosive onslaught of sun, salt, wind, and fuel residue. Whitecaps slapped into the fissures, a sensation that Louie compared to having alcohol poured onto a wound. Sunlight glared off the ocean, sending barbs of white light into the men’s pupils and leaving their heads pounding. The men’s feet were cratered with quarter-sized salt sores. The rafts baked along with their occupants, emitting a bitter smel .

The water cans were empty. Desperately thirsty and overheated, the men could do no more than use their hands to bail seawater over themselves. The coolness of the ocean beckoned and couldn’t be answered, for the sharks circled. One shark, six or eight feet long, stalked the rafts without rest, day and night. The men became especial y wary of him, and when he ventured too close, one of them would jab him with an oar.

On the third day without water, a smudge appeared on the horizon. It grew, darkened, bil owed over the rafts, and lidded the sun. Down came the rain.

The men threw back their heads, spil ed their bodies back, spread their arms, and opened their mouths. The rain fel on their chests, lips, faces, tongues.

It soothed their skin, washed the salt and sweat and fuel from their pores, slid down their throats, fed their bodies. It was a sensory explosion.

They knew it wouldn’t last. They had to find a way to save the water. The narrow water tins, opened to the downpour, caught virtual y nothing. Louie, keeping his head tipped up and his mouth open, felt around the raft for something better. He dug into the raft pockets and pul ed out one of the air pumps.

It was sheathed in a canvas case about fourteen inches long, stitched down one side. He tore the seam open, spread the fabric to form a triangular bowl, and watched happily as the rain pooled on the fabric.

He had col ected some two pints of water when a whitecap cracked into the raft, crested over, and slopped into the canvas, spoiling the water. Not only had the most productive part of the storm been wasted, but the canvas had to be rinsed in the rain before Louie could resume capturing water. Even when that was done, there was no way to avoid the next whitecap, because Louie couldn’t see them coming.

Louie tried a new technique. Instead of al owing large pools of water to gather, he began continuously sucking the captured water into his mouth, then spitting it in the cans. Once the cans were ful , he kept harvesting the rain, giving one man a drink every thirty seconds or so. They tore open the second pump case to form another rain catcher. When the sun emerged, they found that the canvas cases also made excel ent hats. They began rotations with them, two men in, one man out.

——

The men were ravenous. It was now clear that Mac’s binge on the chocolate, which had seemed only moderately worrisome at the time, was a catastrophe. Louie resented Mac, and Mac seemed to know it. Though Mac never spoke of it, Louie sensed that he was consumed with guilt over what he had done.

As hunger bleated inside them, the men experienced a classic symptom of starvation, the inability to direct their thoughts away from food. They stared into the ocean, undulating with edible creatures; but without bait, they couldn’t catch even a minnow. Occasional y, a bird passed, always out of reach. The men studied their shoes and wondered if they could eat the leather. They decided that they couldn’t.

Days passed. Each evening, the roasting heat gave way to cold. Sleep was elusive. Phil, alone in his raft and lacking the heat of another man to warm the water around him, suffered particularly badly. He shook through each night, too cold to sleep. In the daytime, exhaustion, heat, and the lol ing of the raft made al of them drowsy. They slept through much of each day and spent the rest lying back, saving their precious, evaporating energy.

It occurred to Phil that from the point of view of the birds, their stil forms, obscured by canvas hoods, must have looked like lifeless debris. He was right.

One day, nine or ten days into their odyssey, Louie felt something alight on his hood, and saw its shadow fal before him. It was an albatross. With Louie’s head hidden, the bird hadn’t recognized that he was landing on a man.

Slowly, slowly, Louie raised his hand toward the bird, his motion so gradual that it was little more noticeable than the turning of a minute hand on a clock.

The bird rested calmly. In time, Louie’s hand was beside the bird, his fingers open. Al at once, Louie snapped his hand shut, clamping down on the bird’s legs. The bird pecked frantical y, slashing his knuckles. Louie grabbed its head and broke its neck.

Louie used the pliers to tear the bird open. A gust of fetid odor rose from the body, and al three men recoiled. Louie handed a bit of meat to Phil and Mac and took one for himself. The stench hung before them, spurring waves of nausea. Gagging, they couldn’t get the meat into their mouths. Eventual y, they gave up.

Though they couldn’t eat the bird, they final y had bait. Louie took out the fishing gear, tied a smal hook to a line, baited it, and fed it into the water. In a moment, a shark cruised by, bit down on the hook, and severed the line, taking the bait, the hook, and a foot or two of line with him. Louie tried with another hook, and again, a shark took it. A third try produced the same result. Final y, the sharks let a hook hang unmolested. Louie felt a tug and pul ed up the line. On its end hung a slender pilot fish, about ten inches long. As Louie pul ed it apart, everyone felt apprehensive. None of them had eaten raw fish before. They each put a bit of meat into their mouths. It was flavorless. They ate it down to the bones.

It was the first food to cross their lips in more than a week. Between three men, a smal fish didn’t go far, but the protein gave them a push of energy.

Louie had demonstrated that if they were persistent and resourceful, they could catch food, and both he and Phil felt inspired. Only Mac remained unchanged.

Phil felt uneasy about the albatross. Like many schoolboys of his era, he had read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In the poem, a sailor kil s a friendly albatross that, it is said, had made the winds blow. In consequence, the sailor and his crew are stranded in infernal, windless waters, tormented by thirst and monstrous creatures. The crewmen al die, and the sailor is left in a hel ish limbo, the albatross hung about his neck, his eyes closed against the accusing stares of his dead crewmen.

Louie wasn’t superstitious, but he’d grown fond of albatrosses on that Christmas he’d spent watching them crash-land on Midway. He felt sorry for the bird. Phil reminded Louie that kil ing an albatross was said to bring bad luck. After a plane crash, Louie replied, what more bad luck could they have?

——

Several more days passed. Louie caught nothing, and his hook supply dwindled. No more birds landed on the raft. Periodical y, rain replenished the water tins, but only partway.

The men floated in a sensory vacuum. When the weather was calm, the ocean was silent. There was nothing to touch but water, skin, hair, and canvas.

Other than the charred smel of the raft, there were no odors. There was nothing to look at but sky and sea. At some point, Louie stuck his finger in his ear and felt wax there. He smel ed his finger, and by virtue of being new, the scent of the wax was curiously refreshing. He developed a habit of twisting his finger in his ear and sniffing it. Phil began doing it too.

When Louie slept, he dreamed of being on land, trying to sleep, but there was never a place to rest safely—only rocks, sucking mud, beds of cactus. He would be on perilous cliffs or unstable boulders, and the ground would heave and shift under his weight. Phil was having the same dreams.

As time passed, Phil began thinking about an article, written by the World War I ace pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, that he had read in Life magazine that winter. The previous October, a B-17 carrying Rickenbacker and a crew over the Pacific had become lost and run out of fuel. The pilot had ditched the plane, and it had floated long enough for the men to get into rafts. The men had drifted for weeks, surviving on stores in the rafts, rainwater, fish, and bird meat. One man had died, and the rest had hal ucinated, babbling at invisible companions, singing bizarre songs, arguing about where to pul over the imaginary car in which they were riding. One lieutenant had been visited by a specter who had tried to lure him to the bottom of the ocean. Final y, the rafts had split up, and one had reached an island. Natives had radioed to Funafuti, and the other men had been rescued.

It seemed that Rickenbacker’s crew had stretched the capacity for human survival as far as it would go. Rickenbacker had written that he had drifted for twenty-one days (he had actual y drifted for twenty-four), and Phil, Louie, and Mac believed that this was a survival record. In fact, the record for inflated raft survival appears to have been set in 1942, when three navy plane crash victims survived for thirty-four days on the Pacific before reaching an island, where they were sheltered by natives.*

At first, Phil gave no thought to counting days, but when time stretched on, he began paying attention to how long they’d been out there. He had no trouble counting days without confusion; because they were on the raft for only part of the day they crashed, Phil and Louie counted the fol owing day as day 1. With each new day, Phil told himself that surely they’d be picked up before reaching Rickenbacker’s mark. When he considered what they’d do if they passed that mark, he had no answer.

Rickenbacker’s story, familiar to Louie also, was important for another reason. Exposure, dehydration, stress, and hunger had quickly driven many of Rickenbacker’s party insane, a common fate for raft-bound men. Louie was more concerned about sanity than he was about sustenance. He kept thinking of a col ege physiology class he had taken, in which the instructor had taught them to think of the mind as a muscle that would atrophy if left idle.

Louie was determined that no matter what happened to their bodies, their minds would stay under their control.

Within a few days of the crash, Louie began peppering the other two with questions on every conceivable subject. Phil took up the chal enge, and soon he and Louie turned the raft into a nonstop quiz show. They shared their histories, from first memories onward, recounted in minute detail. Louie told of his days at USC; Phil spoke of Indiana. They recal ed the best dates they’d ever had. They told and retold stories of practical jokes that they’d played on each other. Every answer was fol owed by a question. Phil sang church hymns; Louie taught the other two the lyrics to “White Christmas.” They sang it over the ocean, a holiday song in June, heard only by circling sharks.

Every conversation meandered back to food. Louie had often boasted to Phil about his mother’s cooking, and at some point, Phil asked Louie to describe how she made a meal. Louie began describing a dish, and al three men found it satisfying, so Louie kept going, tel ing them about each dish in the greatest possible detail. Soon, Louise’s kitchen floated there with them: Sauces simmered, spices were pinched and scattered, butter melted on tongues.

So began a thrice-daily ritual on the raft, with pumpkin pie and spaghetti being the favorite subjects. The men came to know Louise’s recipes so wel that if Louie skipped a step or forgot an ingredient, Phil, and sometimes Mac, would quickly correct him and make him start over. When the imaginary meal was prepared, the men would devour every crumb, describing each mouthful. They conjured up the scene in such vivid detail that somehow their stomachs were fooled by it, if only briefly.

Once the food was eaten and the past exhausted, they moved to the future. Louie laid plans to buy the Torrance train depot and turn it into a restaurant.

Phil fantasized about getting back to Indiana, maybe to teach school. He couldn’t wait to see the Indy 500 again. The race had been suspended because of the war, but Phil revived it in his mind, spreading a blanket on the infield grass, heaping it with food, and watching the cars blur past. And he thought about Cecy. It hadn’t occurred to him to tuck her picture in his wal et before he left the cottage, but in his mind, she never left him.

For Louie and Phil, the conversations were healing, pul ing them out of their suffering and setting the future before them as a concrete thing. As they imagined themselves back in the world again, they wil ed a happy ending onto their ordeal and made it their expectation. With these talks, they created something to live for.

In al of these bul sessions, not once did they broach the subject of the crash. Louie wanted to talk about it, but something about Phil stopped him.