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 Cuppernell 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. Cuppernell was nowhere to be seen.
Far below, Louie was still 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 recollected 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 still 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 pulling him into the ceiling of the plane. The air was gone from his lungs, and he was now gulping reflexively, swallowing 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 ballooned. He was suddenly light, the vest pulling 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 swallowed. 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 gallons 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 lolled 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 all 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 pulled out his raft’s oars, rowed as hard as he could, and just managed to catch the cord and pull 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 pulled Phil aboard, and Mac climbed up under his own power. Both men, like Louie, were filmy with fuel and oil. With all three of them in one raft, it was cramped; the raft was only about six feet long and inside 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 pulled off his muslin top shirt and T-shirt and pulled Phil’s shirts off as well. 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.
Phil’s mind was woozy. He knew that he’d crashed, that someone had pulled him from the water, that he was in a raft, and that Louie was with him. He felt frightened, though not panicked. As the pilot, he was officially in command, but he grasped his situation well enough to know that he was in no condition to make decisions. He could see that Louie had a nasty cut on his finger, near his USC ring, but was otherwise unhurt and lucid. He asked Louie to take command, and Louie agreed.
“I’m glad it was you, Zamp,” Phil said softly. Then he fell quiet.
From somewhere nearby, there was a small sound, a moan trailing off into a gargle, a mouth trying to form a word, a throat filling with water—then silence. Louie grabbed an oar and circled around as rapidly as he could, searching for the drowning man. Maybe it was Cuppernell, who hadn’t been seen since he was deep underwater. They would never know. Whoever had made the sound had slipped under. He didn’t come up again.
——
With Phil relatively stable, Louie turned his attention to the rafts. Made of two layers of canvas coated in rubber and divided into two air pockets bisected by a bulkhead, each was in good condition. The critical question regarded provisions. The provisions box, which Mac had been holding as the plane went down, was gone, either ripped from his hands during the crash or lost in his escape from the wreckage. In their pockets, the men had only wallets and a few coins. Their watches were still on their wrists, but the hands had stopped when the plane had hit the water. Probably for the first time since Phil had arrived in Oahu, Cecy’s lucky bracelet wasn’t on his wrist, and the silver dollar he’d been keeping for his reunion with her wasn’t in his pocket. Maybe in the hurry to dress for the flight, he had forgotten them, or maybe they’d been lost in the crash.
Pockets in the rafts contained some survival provisions. Whatever was in them was all that they’d have. Louie untied the pocket flaps and looked inside. He found several thick chocolate bars—probably Hershey’s military-issue Ration D bars—divided into segments and packaged in wax-dipped containers to resist gas attack. Designed to be unpalatably bitter so soldiers would eat them only in dire circumstances, they were formulated to be highly caloric and melt-resistant. The package instructions said that each man was to be given two segments a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, to be held on the tongue and allowed to dissolve over thirty minutes.
With the chocolate, Louie found several half-pint tins of water, a brass mirror, a flare gun, sea dye, a set of fishhooks, a spool of fishing line, and two air pumps in canvas cases. There was also a set of pliers with a screwdriver built into the handle. Louie pondered it for a long while, trying to come up with a reason why someone would need a screwdriver or pliers on a raft. Each raft also had a patch kit, to be used if the raft leaked. That was all there was.
The provisions were grossly inadequate. One year later, each B-24 raft would be equipped with a sun tarpaulin for shade, blue on one side, yellow on the other. For camouflage in enemy waters, the tarpaulin could be spread blue side up; for signaling, the yellow side could be waved. Each standard 1944 raft would also be equipped with a bailing bucket, a mast and sail, a sea anchor, sun ointment, a first aid kit, puncture plugs, a flashlight, fishing tackle, a jackknife, scissors, a whistle, a compass, and religious pamphlets. None of these items, not even a knife, was in Green Hornet’s rafts. The rafts also had no “Gibson Girl,” a radio transmitter that could send signals over some two hundred miles. Newer planes had been carrying them for nearly a year, and in two months, all planes would be equipped, but Green Hornet hadn’t been furnished with one. And they had no navigation instruments. It had been Mitchell’s job to strap them to his body, but if he had done so, the instruments had gone to the bottom with him.
Most worrisome was the water situation. A few half-pints wouldn’t last them long. The men were surrounded by water, but they couldn’t drink it. The salt content in seawater is so high that it is considered a poison. When a person drinks seawater, the kidneys must generate urine to flush the salt away, but to do so, they need more water than is contained in the seawater itself, so the body pulls water from its cells. Bereft of water, the cells begin to fail. Paradoxically, a drink of seawater causes potentially fatal dehydration.
Adrift near the equator with little water and no shelter, Phil, Louie, and Mac would soon be in dire trouble. The rafts hadn’t been equipped with water desalinizing or distilling materials, nor did they have containers in which to catch rain. Five months earlier, General Hap Arnold had ordered that all life rafts be equipped with the Delano Sunstill, a device that could generate small amounts of drinking water indefinitely. Delivery had been delayed.
——
From the moment that he had come out of the water, Mac hadn’t said a word. He had somehow escaped the crash without injury. He had done everything that Louie had asked of him, but his face had never lost its glazed, startled expression.
Louie was bent over the raft when Mac suddenly began wailing, “We’re going to die!” Louie reassured him that the squadron would come for them, that they were likely to be found that night, at the latest the next day. Mac continued to shout. Louie, exasperated, threatened to report Mac when they returned. It had no effect. At his wits’ end, Louie whacked Mac across the cheek with the back of his hand. Mac thumped back and fell silent.
Louie came up with ground rules. Each man would eat one square of chocolate in the morning, one in the evening. Louie allotted one water tin per man, with each man allowed two or three sips a day. Eating and drinking at this rate, they could stretch their supplies for a few days.
With inventory taken and rules established, there was nothing to do but wait. Louie was in pain. He knew his back had been badly scraped as he had escaped the wreckage, and he assumed this was the source of his pain. He had no idea that he was hurt much more seriously than that. When the plane had hit the water and he’d been thrown into the gun mount, all of his ribs had broken.
Louie made a deliberate effort to avoid thinking about the men who had died, and had to push away the memory of the gurgling voice in the water. Considering the crash, he was amazed that three men had survived. All three had been on the plane’s right side; the fact that the plane had struck on its left had probably saved them. What mystified Louie was his escape from the wreckage. If he had passed out from the pressure, and the plane had continued to sink and the pressure to build, why had he woken again? And how had he been loosed from the wires while unconscious?
The men watched the sky. Louie kept his hand on Phil’s head, stanching the bleeding. The last trace of Green Hornet, the shimmer of gas, hydraulic fluid, and oil that had wreathed the rafts since the crash, faded away. In its place, rising from below, came dark blue shapes, gliding in lithe arcs. A neat, sharp form, flat and shining, cut the surface and began tracing circles around the rafts. Another one joined it. The sharks had found them. Fluttering close to their sides were pilot fish, striped black and white.
The sharks, which Louie thought were of the mako and reef species, were so close that the men would only have to extend their hands to touch them. The smallest were about six feet long; some were double that size. They bent around the rafts, testing the fabric, dragging their fins along them, but not trying to get at the men on top. They seemed to be waiting for the men to come to them.
The sun sank, and it became sharply cold. The men used their hands to bail a few inches of water into each raft. Once their bodies warmed the water, they felt less chilled. Though exhausted, they fought the urge to sleep, afraid that a ship or submarine would pass and they’d miss it. Phil’s lower body, under the water, was warm enough, but his upper body was so cold that he shook.
It was absolutely dark and absolutely silent, save for the chattering of Phil’s teeth. The ocean was a flat calm. A rough, rasping tremor ran through the men. The sharks were rubbing their backs along the raft bottoms.
Louie’s arm was still draped over the side of his raft, his hand resting on Phil’s forehead. Under Louie’s hand, Phil drifted to sleep, attended by the sensation of sharks scraping down the length of his back. In the next raft, Louie, too, fell asleep.
Mac was alone in his wakefulness, his mind spinning with fear. Grasping at an addled resolution, he began to stir.
Thirteen
Missing at Sea
DAISY MAE TOUCHED DOWN ON PALMYRA LATE THAT AFTERNOON. The crew had searched for Corpening’s plane all day but had seen no trace of it. Deasy had dinner, then went to the base theater. He was watching the film when someone told him to report to the base commander immediately. When he got there, he was told that Green Hornet had never come in. “Holy smoke!” he said. He knew that there were two possibilities. One was that Phillips’s crew had turned back to Hawaii; the other was that they were, as Deasy phrased it, “in the drink.” Someone went to check with Hawaii. Knowing that if Green Hornet was indeed down, they’d still have to wait until morning to search, Deasy went to bed.
At around midnight, a sailor woke Deasy’s radioman, Herman Scearce, and told him that Phil’s plane was missing. The navy wanted to check Scearce’s radio log to see when the last contact with the plane was. Scearce asked the sailor to wake Deasy, and he, Deasy, and navy officials reviewed the log at the base office. It yielded little information.
At four-thirty A.M., Green Hornet was declared missing. Two planes were now down—Corpening’s and Phillips’s—taking twenty-one men with them.
The navy assumed command of the rescue effort. Once the sun was up, Daisy Mae would be sent out, along with at least two navy flying boats and at least one other AAF plane. Because Daisy Mae and Green Hornet had flown side by side early in the journey, the searchers knew that Green Hornet had not crashed during the first two hundred miles of the trip. It had apparently gone down somewhere between the point at which Daisy Mae had left it and Palmyra, a stretch of eight hundred miles. The trick was figuring out the direction in which any survivors would be drifting. The ocean around Palmyra was a whorl of currents, lying at the meeting point of the westward-carrying north equatorial current and the eastward-carrying equatorial countercurrent. A few miles of difference in latitude could mean a 180-degree difference in current direction, and no one knew where the plane had hit. The search area would have to be enormous.
Each crew was given search coordinates. From Palmyra, Daisy Mae would fly north. From Oahu, several planes would fly south. Not long after sunup, the planes took off. Everyone knew that the odds of finding the crew were very long, but, said Scearce, “we kept hoping, hoping, hoping …”
——
Louie woke with the sun. Mac was beside him, lying back. Phil lay in his raft, his mind still fumbling. Louie sat up and ran his eyes over the sky and ocean in search of rescuers. Only the sharks stirred.
Louie decided to divvy up breakfast, a single square of chocolate. He untied the raft pocket and looked in. All of the chocolate was gone. He looked around the rafts. No chocolate, no wrappers. His gaze paused on Mac. The sergeant looked back at him with wide, guilty eyes.
The realization that Mac had eaten all of the chocolate rolled hard over Louie. In the brief time that Louie had known Mac, the tail gunner had struck him as a decent, friendly guy, although a bit of a reveler, confident to the point of flippancy. The crash had undone him. Louie knew that they couldn’t survive for long without food, but he quelled the thought. A rescue search was surely under way. They’d be on Palmyra later today, maybe tomorrow, and the loss of the chocolate wouldn’t matter. Curbing his irritation, Louie told Mac that he was disappointed in him. Understanding that Mac had acted in panic, he reassured him that they’d soon be rescued. Mac said nothing.
The chill of the night gave way to a sweltering day. Louie watched the sky. Phil, weak from blood loss, slept. Mac, a shade short of being a redhead, burned in the sun. He remained in a dreamy, distant place. All three men were hungry, but they could do nothing about it. The fishhooks and line were useless. There was no bait.
As the men lay in silence, a purring sound began drifting gently between their thoughts. Then all three realized that they were hearing a plane. Searching the sky, they saw a B-25, high up and well to the east. Flying much too high to be a search plane, it was probably on its way to Palmyra.
Louie lunged for the raft pocket, retrieved the flare gun, and loaded a flare cartridge. He couldn’t stand in the soft-bottomed raft, so he tipped up onto his knees and raised the gun. He squeezed the trigger, the gun bucked in his hand, and the flare, roaring red, streaked up. As it shot overhead, Louie dug out a dye pack and shook it hurriedly into the water, and a pool of vivid greenish yellow bloomed over the ocean.
With the flare arcing over them, Louie, Phil, and Mac watched the bomber, willing the men aboard to see them. Slowly, the flare sputtered out. The bomber kept going, and then it was gone. The circle of color around the rafts faded away.
The sighting left the castaways with one important piece of information. They had known that they were drifting, but without points of reference, they hadn’t known in which direction, or how fast. Since planes on the north-south passage from Hawaii followed a flight lane that ran close to Green Hornet’s crash site, the appearance of a B-25 far to the east almost certainly meant that the rafts were drifting west, away from the view of friendly planes. Their chances of rescue were already dimming.
That evening, the search planes turned back for their bases. No one had seen anything. They would be back in the air at first light.
Over the rafts, the daylight died. The men took sips of water, bailed seawater around themselves, and lay down. The sharks came to the rafts again to rub their backs on the undersides.
——
Phil slept for most of the next day. Louie sipped water and thought about food. Mac continued to hunker down, speaking little. For another day, rescue did not come.
It was sometime early the next morning, May 30, when Louie, Mac, and Phil heard a broad, deep rumble of B-24 engines, the sound of home. Then there it was, low and right overhead, a blunt-faced whale of a plane, heading southeast, plowing through the clouds, disappearing and reappearing. It was a search plane. It was so near the rafts that Louie thought he recognized the insignia of their squadron, the 42nd, on the plane’s tail.
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 smaller 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, especially among clouds. For all 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 still alive, they might reach the Marshall 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 yellow 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, especially 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 well 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-yellow 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 all the pain she would feel when she learned that her fiancé was missing.
On Oahu, the men of the 42nd squadron were losing hope. “Cuppernell, Phillips, Zamperini (the Olympic miler), and Mitchell, 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 all 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 fellow’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.