to their knees to claw foxholes in the sand with their helmets. As he dug in the dark with the bombs coming, one man noisily cursed the sonofabitch generals who had left the atoll without shelters.
Dozens of natives crowded into a large missionary church that stood in a clearing. Realizing that the white church would stand out brilliantly on the dark atoll, a marine named Fonnie Black Ladd ran in and yelled at the natives to get out. When they wouldn’t move, he drew his sidearm. They scattered.
In the infirmary, Stanley Pillsbury lay in startled confusion. One moment he’d been sleeping, and the next, the atoll was rocking with explosions, a siren was howling, and people were sprinting by, dragging patients onto stretchers and rushing them out. Then the room was empty, and Pillsbury was alone. He had apparently been forgotten. He sat up, frantic. He couldn’t stand.
Louie and Phil ran through the coconut grove, searching for anything that might serve as shelter. The bombs were overtaking them, making a sound that one man likened to the footfalls of a giant: Boom … boom … BOOM … BOOM! At last, Louie and Phil spotted a native hut built on flood stilts. They dove under it, landing in a heap of more than two dozen men. The bombs were now so close that the men could hear them spinning in the air; Deasy remembered the sound as a whirr, Scearce as a piercing whistle.
An instant later, everything was scalding whiteness and splintering noise. The ground heaved, and the air whooshed around, carrying an acrid smell. Trees blew apart. A bomb struck the tent in which Louie and Phil had been sleeping a minute before. Another burst beside a pile of men in a ditch, and something speared into the back of the man on top. He said, “This feels like it, boys,” and passed out. A bomb hit the ordnance truck, sending it into the air in thousands of pieces. The remains of the truck and the men under it skimmed past Jesse Stay’s head. A nose gunner heard a singing sound as the parts of the truck flew by him. It was apparently this truck that landed on one of the tents, where two airmen were still on their cots. Another bomb tumbled into Scearce’s trench, plopping right on top of a tail gunner. It didn’t go off, but sat there hissing. The gunner shouted, “Jesus!” It took them a moment to realize that what they’d thought was a bomb was actually a fire extinguisher. Yards away, Louie and Phil huddled. The hut shook, but still stood.
The bombs moved down the atoll. Each report sounded farther away, and then the explosions stopped. A few men climbed from their shelters to help the wounded and douse fires. Louie and the others stayed where they were, knowing that the bombers would be back. Matches were struck and cigarettes were pinched in trembling fingers. If we’re hit, one man grumbled, there’ll be nothing left of us but gravy. Far away, the bombers turned. The booming began again.
Someone running by the infirmary saw Pillsbury, hurried in, threw him on a stretcher, and dragged him into a tiny cement building where the other wounded had been taken. The building was so crowded that men had been laid on shelves. It was pitch-dark, and doctors were shuffling around, peering at their patients by flashlight. Pillsbury lay panting in the darkness, listening to the bombs coming, feeling claustrophobic, his mind flashing with images of bombs entombing them. With men stacked everywhere and no one speaking, he thought of a morgue. His leg hurt. He began groaning, and the doctor felt his way to him and gave him morphine. The booming was louder, louder, and then it was over them again, tremendous crashing. The ceiling shuddered, and cement dust sifted down.
Outside, it was hell on earth. Men moaned and screamed, one calling for his mother. A pilot thought the voices sounded “like animals crying.” Men’s eardrums burst. A man died of a heart attack. Another man’s arm was severed. Others sobbed, prayed, and lost control of their bowels. “I wasn’t only scared, I was terrified,” one airman would write to his parents. “I thought I was scared in the air, but I wasn’t. [It was] the first time in my life I saw how close death could come.” Phil felt the same; never, even during the fight over Nauru, had he known such terror. Louie crouched beside him. As he had run through the coconut grove, he had moved only on instinct and roaring adrenaline, feeling no emotion. Now, as explosions went off around him, fear seized him.
Staff Sergeant Frank Rosynek huddled in a coral trench, wearing nothing but a helmet, untied shoes, and boxer shorts. The tonnage coming down, he later wrote, “seemed like a railroad carload. The bombs sounded like someone pushing a piano down a long ramp before they hit and exploded. Big palm trees were shattered and splintered all around us; the ground would rise up in the air when a bomb exploded and there was this terrific flash of super bright light that it made. The concussion blew pieces of coral into our hole and we blindly groped for them and tossed them out as quick as we could find them. At intervals between a bomb falling it sounded like church: voices from nearby slit trenches all chanting the Lord’s prayer together—over and over again. Louder when the bombs hit closer. I thought I even heard some guys crying. You were afraid to look up because you felt your face might be seen from above.”
Two more soldiers were killed on the third pass. On the fourth pass, the Japanese hit the jackpot. Two bombs bull’s-eyed the gassed-up, loaded B-24s parked by the runway. The first went up in a huge explosion, sending bomber parts showering all over the island. Another burst into flames. The fires set off machine gun bullets, which whizzed in all directions, their tracers drawing ribbons in the air. Then the five-hundred-pound bombs on the planes started going off.
Finally, the atoll fell silent. A few of the men, shaking, stood up. As they walked among the wreckage, another B-24 blew up, the explosion accelerated by its 2,300 gallons of fuel, 3,000 pounds of bombs, and cache of .50-caliber ammunition. A copilot wrote that it sounded “like the whole island was blowing up.” With that, it was over.
——
When dawn broke, men began creeping from their hiding places. The man who had run into the ocean waded ashore, having clung to a rock for three hours as the tide rose. With the morning light, the man who had cursed his generals as he had dug his foxhole discovered that those generals had been digging right next to him. Louie and Phil crawled out from beneath the hut. Phil was unscathed; Louie had only a cut on his arm. They joined a procession of exhausted, stunned men.
Funafuti, the morning after. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
Funafuti was wrecked. A bomb had struck the church roof, sending the building down onto itself, but thanks to Corporal Ladd, there had been no one inside. There was a crater where Louie and Phil’s tent had been. Another tent lay collapsed, a bomb standing on its nose in the middle of it. Someone tied the bomb to a truck, dragged it to the beach, and turned sharply, sending the bomb skidding into the ocean. Rosynek walked up the runway and found six Japanese bombs lying in a neat row. The bombs were armed by spinning as they fell, but whoever had dropped them had come in too low, not leaving the bombs enough drop space to arm themselves. The men dragged them into the ocean too.
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. All that was left of one bomber was a tail, two wingtips, and two propellers, 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 all 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, all 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 collect their thoughts.
——
Sometime that day, Louie went to the infirmary to help out. Pillsbury 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. Cuppernell sat with him, thanking him for shooting down that Zero.
The doctor was concerned that Pillsbury’s foot wouldn’t stop bleeding. Surgery was necessary, but there was no anesthetic, so Pillsbury was just going to have to do without. With Pillsbury gripping the bed with both hands and Louie lying over his legs, the doctor used pliers to tear tissue from Pillsbury’s foot, then pulled 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 bullet holes, slashes from shrapnel, four cannon-fire gashes at least as large as a man’s head, the gaping punch hole beside Pillsbury’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, still 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 all 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, Cuppernell, Mitchell, and the bandaged Glassman. Pillsbury, 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 Pillsbury’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 Atoll, 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 called for assignments, so they killed 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 practically nothing but dessert. The men called 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 bullet 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 all 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 called “mushing,” a reference to the mushy feel of the controls of a faltering plane. Engineers went over the bomber, but found no explanation. All 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, Mitchell, and Cuppernell would have the place all 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 Cuppernell 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 eventually returned to duty with another crew and amassed an astounding record, completing at least ninety-five missions.
Eleven
“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 hill behind the cottage to rouse himself, then walked back, pulled 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 Cuppernell, 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 well. Deasy and his crew would take the B-24 Daisy Mae.
Phil, Louie, and Cuppernell 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 Phillips finally 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-filled 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 unrolled 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 follow a heading of 208 and search to a point parallel to Palmyra. He gave Deasy roughly the same instruction but directed him to a slightly different area. Both crews were told to search all 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 yellow 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 Cuppernell 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.
——
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 Cuppernell.
Green Hornet, true to form, flew with its tail well 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 Cuppernell.
While they searched the ocean, Cuppernell 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 Cuppernell squeezed around Phil and into the left seat as Phil moved to the right. Cuppernell 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 falling. 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 Cuppernell 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 propeller blades parallel to the wind and stop the propeller’s rotation. Normally, this was Cuppernell’s job, but now he was in the pilot’s seat. As he worked, Cuppernell 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 propeller 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 Cuppernell 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 still wasn’t feathered.
Phil pushed the two working engines full on, trying to keep the plane aloft long enough to restart the good left engine. The racing right engines, pulling against the dragging, liftless side, rolled 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, yelling 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 frantically pulling on Mae Wests. Louie was distantly aware that Mitchell hadn’t emerged from the nose. It was Mitchell’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 pull 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 automatically in a crash, it was the engineer’s duty to stand behind the cockpit to pull 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 pull 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 Cuppernell fought the plane. Green Hornet rolled onto its left side, moving faster and faster as the right engines thundered at full power. There was no time to radio a distress call. Phil looked for a swell 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. All he saw was the cloudy sky, turning around and around. He felt intensely alive. He recalled the bulkh
ead in front of him and thought of how his skull would strike it. Sensing the ocean coming up at the plane, he took a last glance at the twisting sky, then pulled 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.
——
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 pulled 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.