Also by Laura Hillenbrand
SEABISCUIT
Copyright © 2010 by Laura Hillenbrand
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hillenbrand, Laura.
Unbroken : a World War II story of survival, resilience, and redemption / Laura Hillenbrand.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60375-7
1. Zamperini, Louis, 1917– 2. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, Japanese. 3. Prisoners of war—United States—Biography. 4. Prisoners of war—Japan—Biography. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, American. 6. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Pacific Area. 7. United States. Army Air Forces. Heavy Bombardment Group, 307th. 8. Long-distance runners—United States—Biography. I. Title.
D805.J3Z364 2010
940.54′7252092—dc22
[B] 2010017517
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
For the wounded and the lost
What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics,
Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?
—Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser”
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Preface
PART I
Chapter 1. The One-Boy Insurgency
Chapter 2. Run Like Mad
Chapter 3. The Torrance Tornado
Chapter 4. Plundering Germany
Chapter 5. Into War
PART II
Chapter 6. The Flying Coffin
Chapter 7. “This Is It, Boys”
Chapter 8. “Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was”
Chapter 9. Five Hundred and Ninety-four Holes
Chapter 10. The Stinking Six
Chapter 11. “Nobody’s Going to Live Through This”
PART III
Chapter 12. Downed
Chapter 13. Missing at Sea
Chapter 14. Thirst
Chapter 15. Sharks and Bullets
Chapter 16. Singing in the Clouds
Chapter 17. Typhoon
PART IV
Chapter 18. A Dead Body Breathing
Chapter 19. Two Hundred Silent Men
Chapter 20. Farting for Hirohito
Chapter 21. Belief
Chapter 22. Plots Afoot
Chapter 23. Monster
Chapter 24. Hunted
Chapter 25. B-29
Chapter 26. Madness
Chapter 27. Falling Down
Chapter 28. Enslaved
Chapter 29. Two Hundred and Twenty Punches
Chapter 30. The Boiling City
Chapter 31. The Naked Stampede
Chapter 32. Cascades of Pink Peaches
Chapter 33. Mother’s Day
PART V
Chapter 34. The Shimmering Girl
Chapter 35. Coming Undone
Chapter 36. The Body on the Mountain
Chapter 37. Twisted Ropes
Chapter 38. A Beckoning Whistle
Chapter 39. Daybreak
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
PREFACE
ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.
The men had been adrift for twenty-seven days. Borne by an equatorial current, they had floated at least one thousand miles, deep into Japanese-controlled waters. The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave off a sour, burning odor. The men’s bodies were pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into their nostrils and chins. They spent their days with their eyes fixed on the sky, singing “White Christmas,” muttering about food. No one was even looking for them anymore. They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean.
A month earlier, twenty-six-year-old Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian’s body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside of his family had given him up for dead.
On that morning of the twenty-seventh day, the men heard a distant, deep strumming. Every airman knew that sound: pistons. Their eyes caught a glint in the sky—a plane, high overhead. Zamperini fired two flares and shook powdered dye into the water, enveloping the rafts in a circle of vivid orange. The plane kept going, slowly disappearing. The men sagged. Then the sound returned, and the plane came back into view. The crew had seen them.
With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted, their voices thin from thirst. The plane dropped low and swept alongside the rafts. Zamperini saw the profiles of the crewmen, dark against bright blueness.
There was a terrific roaring sound. The water, and the rafts themselves, seemed to boil. It was machine gun fire. This was not an American rescue plane. It was a Japanese bomber.
The men pitched themselves into the water and hung together under the rafts, cringing as bullets punched through the rubber and sliced effervescent lines in the water around their faces. The firing blazed on, then sputtered out as the bomber overshot them. The men dragged themselves back onto the one raft that was still mostly inflated. The bomber banked sideways, circling toward them again. As it leveled off, Zamperini could see the muzzles of the machine guns, aimed directly at them.
Zamperini looked toward his crewmates. They were too weak to go back in the water. As they lay down on the floor of the raft, hands over their heads, Zamperini splashed overboard alone.
Somewhere beneath him, the sharks were done waiting. They bent their bodies in the water and swam toward the man under the raft.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini. Photo of original image by John Brodkin.
One
The One-Boy Insurgency
IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS OF AUGUST 26, 1929, IN THE back bedroom of a small house in Torrance, California, a twelve-year-old boy sat up in bed, listening. There was a sound coming from outside, growing ever louder. It was a huge, heavy rush, suggesting immensity, a great parting of air. It was coming from directly above the house. The boy swung his legs off his bed, raced down the stairs, slapped open the back door, and loped onto the grass. The yard was otherworldly, smothered in unnatural darkness, shivering with sound. The boy stood on the lawn beside his older brother, head thrown back, spellbound.
The sky had disappeared. An object that he could see only in silhouette, reaching across a massive arc of space, was suspended low in the air over the house. It was longer than two and a half football fields and as tall as a city. It was putting out the stars.
What he saw was the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin. At nearly 800 feet long and 110 feet high, it was the largest flying machine ever crafted. More luxurious than the finest airplane, gliding effortlessly over huge distances, built on a scale that left spectators gasping, it was, in the summer of ’29, the wonder of the world.
The airship was three days from completing a sensational feat of aeronautics, circumnavigation of the globe. The journey had begun on August 7, when the Zeppelin had slipped its tethers in Lakehurst, New Jersey, lifted up with a long, slow sigh, and headed for Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue that summer, demolition was soon to begin on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, clearing the way for a skyscraper of unprecedented proportions, the Empire State Building. At Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, players were debuting numbered uniforms: Lou Gehrig wore No. 4; Babe Ruth, about to hit his five hundredth home run, wore No. 3. On Wall Street, stock prices were racing toward an all-time high.
After a slow glide around the Statue of Liberty, the Zeppelin banked north, then turned out over the Atlantic. In time, land came below again: France, Switzerland, Germany. The ship passed over Nuremberg, where fringe politician Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had been trounced in the 1928 elections, had just delivered a speech touting selective infanticide. Then it flew east of Frankfurt, where a Jewish woman named Edith Frank was caring for her newborn, a girl named Anne. Sailing northeast, the Zeppelin crossed over Russia. Siberian villagers, so isolated that they’d never even seen a train, fell to their knees at the sight of it.
On August 19, as some four million Japanese waved handkerchiefs and shouted “Banzai!” the Zeppelin circled Tokyo and sank onto a landing field. Four days later, as the German and Japanese anthems played, the ship rose into the grasp of a typhoon that whisked it over the Pacific at breathtaking speed, toward America. Passengers gazing from the windows saw only the ship’s shadow, following it along the clouds “like a huge shark swimming alongside.” When the clouds parted, the passengers glimpsed giant creatures, turning in the sea, that looked like monsters.
On August 25, the Zeppelin reached San Francisco. After being cheered down the California coast, it slid through sunset, into darkness and silence, and across midnight. As slow as the drifting wind, it passed over Torrance, where its only audience was a scattering of drowsy souls, among them the boy in his pajamas behind the house on Gramercy Avenue.
Standing under the airship, his feet bare in the grass, he was transfixed. It was, he would say, “fearfully beautiful.” He could feel the rumble of the craft’s engines tilling the air but couldn’t make out the silver skin, the sweeping ribs, the finned tail. He could see only the blackness of the space it inhabited. It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself.
——
The boy’s name was Louis Silvie Zamperini. The son of Italian immigrants, he had come into the world in Olean, New York, on January 26, 1917, eleven and a half pounds of baby under black hair as coarse as barbed wire. His father, Anthony, had been living on his own since age fourteen, first as a coal miner and boxer, then as a construction worker. His mother, Louise, was a petite, playful beauty, sixteen at marriage and eighteen when Louie was born. In their apartment, where only Italian was spoken, Louise and Anthony called their boy Toots.
From the moment he could walk, Louie couldn’t bear to be corralled. His siblings would recall him careening about, hurdling flora, fauna, and furniture. The instant Louise thumped him into a chair and told him to be still, he vanished. If she didn’t have her squirming boy clutched in her hands, she usually had no idea where he was.
In 1919, when two-year-old Louie was down with pneumonia, he climbed out his bedroom window, descended one story, and went on a naked tear down the street with a policeman chasing him and a crowd watching in amazement. Soon after, on a pediatrician’s advice, Louise and Anthony decided to move their children to the warmer climes of California. Sometime after their train pulled out of Grand Central Station, Louie bolted, ran the length of the train, and leapt from the caboose. Standing with his frantic mother as the train rolled backward in search of the lost boy, Louie’s older brother, Pete, spotted Louie strolling up the track in perfect serenity. Swept up in his mother’s arms, Louie smiled. “I knew you’d come back,” he said in Italian.
In California, Anthony landed a job as a railway electrician and bought a half-acre field on the edge of Torrance, population 1,800. He and Louise hammered up a one-room shack with no running water, an outhouse behind, and a roof that leaked so badly that they had to keep buckets on the beds. With only hook latches for locks, Louise took to sitting by the front door on an apple box with a rolling pin in her hand, ready to brain any prowlers who might threaten her children.
There, and at the Gramercy Avenue house where they settled a year later, Louise kept prowlers out, but couldn’t keep Louie in hand. Contesting a footrace across a busy highway, he just missed getting broadsided by a jalopy. At five, he started smoking, picking up discarded cigarette butts while walking to kindergarten. He began drinking one night when he was eight; he hid under the dinner table, snatched glasses of wine, drank them all dry, staggered outside, and fell into a rosebush.
On one day, Louise discovered that Louie had impaled his leg on a bamboo beam; on another, she had to ask a neighbor to sew Louie’s severed toe back on. When Louie came home drenched in oil after scaling an oil rig, diving into a sump well, and nearly drowning, it took a gallon of turpentine and a lot of scrubbing before Anthony recognized his son again.
Thrilled by the crashing of boundaries, Louie was untamable. As he grew into his uncommonly clever mind, mere feats of daring were no longer satisfying. In Torrance, a one-boy insurgency was born.
——
If it was edible, Louie stole it. He skulked down alleys, a roll of lock-picking wire in his pocket. Housewives who stepped from their kitchens would return to find that their suppers had disappeared. Residents looking out their back windows might catch a glimpse of a long-legged boy dashing down the alley, a whole cake balanced on his hands. When a local family left Louie off their dinner-party guest list, he broke into their house, bribed their Great Dane with a bone, and cleaned out their icebox. At another party, he absconded with an entire keg of beer. When he discovered that the cooling tables at Meinzer’s Bakery stood within an arm’s length of the back door, he began picking the lock, snatching pies, eating until he was full, and reserving the rest as ammunition for ambushes. When rival thieves took up the racket, he suspended the stealing until the culprits were caught and the bakery owners dropped their guard. Then he ordered his friends to rob Meinzer’s again.
It is a testament to the content of Louie’s childhood that his stories about it usually ended with “… and then I ran like mad.” He was often chased by people he had robbed, and at least two people threatened to shoot him. To minimize the evidence found on him when the police habitually came his way, he set up loot-stashing sites around town, including a three-seater cave that he dug in a nearby forest. Under the Torrance High bleachers, Pete once found a stolen wine jug that Louie had hidden there. It was teeming with inebriated ants.
In the lobby of the Torrance theater, Louie stopped up the pay telephone’s coin slots with toilet paper. He returned regularly to feed wire behind the coins stacked up inside, hook the paper, and fill his palms with change. A metal dealer never guessed that the grinning Italian kid who often came by to sell him armfuls of copper scrap had stolen the same scrap from his lot the night before. Discovering, while scuffling with an enemy at a circus, that adults would give quarters to fighting kids to pacify them, Louie declared a truce with the enemy and they cruised around staging brawls before strangers.
To get even with a railcar conductor who wouldn’t stop for him, Louie greased the rails. When a teacher made him stand in a corner for spitballing, he deflated her car tires with toothpicks. After setting a legitimate Boy Scout state record in friction-fire ignition, he broke his record by soaking his tinder in gasoline and mixing it with match heads, causing a small explosion. He stole a neighbor’s coffee percolator tube, set up a sniper’s nest in a tree, crammed pepper-tree berries into his mouth, spat them through the tube, and sent the neighborhood girls running.
His magnum opus became legend. Late one night, Louie climbed the steeple of a Baptist church, rigged the bell with piano wire, strung the wire into a nearby tree, and roused the police, the fire department, and all of Torrance with apparently spontaneous pealing. The more credulous townsfolk called it a sign from God.
Only one thing scared him. When Louie was in late boyhood, a pilot landed a plane near Torrance and took Louie up for a flight. One might have expected such an intrepid child to be ecstatic, but the speed and altitude frightened him. From that day on, he wanted nothing to do with airplanes.
In a childhood of artful dodging, Louie made more than just mischief. He shaped who he would be in manhood. Confident that he was clever, resourceful, and bold enough to escape any predicament, he was almost incapable of discouragement. When history carried him into war, this resilient optimism would define him.
——
Louie was twenty months younger than his brother, who was everything he was not. Pete Zamperini was handsome, popular, impeccably groomed, polite to elders and avuncular to juniors, silky smooth with girls, and blessed with such sound judgment that even when he was a child, his parents consulted him on difficult decisions. He ushered his mother into her seat at dinner, turned in at seven, and tucked his alarm clock under his pillow so as not to wake Louie, with whom he shared a bed. He rose at two-thirty to run a three-hour paper route, and deposited all his earnings in the bank, which would swallow every penny when the Depression hit. He had a lovely singing voice and a gallant habit of carrying pins in his pant cuffs, in case his dance partner’s dress strap failed. He once saved a girl from drowning. Pete radiated a gentle but impressive authority that led everyone he met, even adults, to be swayed by his opinion. Even Louie, who made a religion out of heeding no one, did as Pete said.
Louie idolized Pete, who watched over him and their younger sisters, Sylvia and Virginia, with paternal protectiveness. But Louie was eclipsed, and he never heard the end of it. Sylvia would recall her mother tearfully telling Louie how she wished he could be more like Pete. What made it more galling was that Pete’s reputation was part myth. Though Pete earned grades little better than Louie’s failing ones, his principal assumed that he was a straight-A student. On the night of Torrance’s church bell miracle, a well-directed flashlight would have revealed Pete’s legs dangling from the tree alongside Louie’s. And Louie wasn’t always the only Zamperini boy who could be seen sprinting down the alley with food that had lately belonged to the neighbors. But it never occurred to anyone to suspect Pete of anything. “Pete never got caught,” said Sylvia. “Louie always got caught.”
Nothing about Louie fit with other kids. He was a puny boy, and in his first years in Torrance, his lungs were still compromised enough from the pneumonia that in picnic footraces, every girl in town could dust him. His features, which would later settle into pleasant collaboration, were growing at different rates, giving him a curious face that seemed designed by committee. His ears leaned sidelong off his head like holstered pistols, and above them waved a calamity of black hair that mortified him. He attacked it with his aunt Margie’s hot iron, hobbled it in a silk stocking every night, and slathered it with so much olive oil that flies trailed him to school. It did no good.
And then there was his ethnicity. In Torrance in the early 1920s, Italians were held in such disdain that when the Zamperinis arrived, the neighbors petitioned the city council to keep them out. Louie, who knew only a smattering of English until he was in grade school, couldn’t hide his pedigree. He survived kindergarten by keeping mum, but in first grade, when he blurted out “Brutte bastarde!” at another kid, his teachers caught on. They compounded his misery by holding him back a grade.
He was a marked boy. Bullies, drawn by his oddity and hoping to goad him into uttering Italian curses, pelted him with rocks, taunted him, punched him, and kicked him. He tried buying their mercy with his lunch, but they pummeled him anyway, leaving him bloody. He could have ended the beatings by running away or succumbing to tears, but he refused to do either. “You could beat him to death,” said Sylvia, “and he wouldn’t say ‘ouch’ or cry.” He just put his hands in front of his face and took it.
——
As Louie neared his teens, he took a hard turn. Aloof and bristling, he lurked around the edges of Torrance, his only friendships forged loosely with rough boys who followed his lead. He became so germophobic that he wouldn’t tolerate anyone coming near his food. Though he could be a sweet boy, he was often short-tempered and obstreperous. He feigned toughness, but was secretly tormented. Kids passing into parties would see him lingering outside, unable to work up the courage to walk in.
Frustrated at his inability to defend himself, he made a study of it. His father taught him how to work a punching bag and made him a barbell from two lead-filled coffee cans welded to a pipe. The next time a bully came at Louie, he ducked left and swung his right fist straight into the boy’s mouth. The bully shrieked, his tooth broken, and fled. The feeling of lightness that Louie experienced on his walk home was one he would never forget.
Over time, Louie’s temper grew wilder, his fuse shorter, his skills sharper. He socked a girl. He pushed a teacher. He pelted a policeman with rotten tomatoes. Kids who crossed him wound up with fat lips, and bullies learned to give him a wide berth. He once came upon Pete in their front yard, in a standoff with another boy. Both boys had their fists in front of their chins, each waiting for the other to swing. “Louie can’t stand it,” remembered Pete. “He’s standing there, ‘Hit him, Pete! Hit him, Pete!’ I’m waiting there, and all of a sudden Louie turns around and smacks this guy right in the gut. And then he runs!”
Anthony Zamperini was at his wits’ end. The police always seemed to be on the front porch, trying to talk sense into Louie. There were neighbors to be apologized to and damages to be compensated for with money that Anthony couldn’t spare. Adoring his son but exasperated by his behavior, Anthony delivered frequent, forceful spankings. Once, after he’d caught Louie wiggling through a window in the middle of the night, he delivered a kick to the rear so forceful that it lifted Louie off the floor. Louie absorbed the punishment in tearless silence, then committed the same crimes again, just to show he could.
Louie’s mother, Louise, took a different tack. Louie was a copy of herself, right down to the vivid blue eyes. When pushed, she shoved; sold a bad cut of meat, she’d march down to the butcher, frying pan in hand. Loving mischief, she spread icing over a cardboard box and presented it as a birthday cake to a neighbor, who promptly got the knife stuck. When Pete told her he’d drink his castor oil if she gave him a box of candy, she agreed, watched him drink it, then handed him an empty candy box. “You only asked for the box, honey,” she said with a smile. “That’s all I got.” And she understood Louie’s restiveness. One Halloween, she dressed as a boy and raced around town trick-or-treating with Louie and Pete. A gang of kids, thinking she was one of the local toughs, tackled her and tried to steal her pants. Little Louise Zamperini, mother of four, was deep in the melee when the cops picked her up for brawling.
Knowing that punishing Louie would only provoke his defiance, Louise took a surreptitious route toward reforming him. In search of an informant, she worked over Louie’s schoolmates with homemade pie and turned up a soft boy named Hugh, whose sweet tooth was Louie’s undoing. Louise suddenly knew everything Louie was up to, and her children wondered if she had developed psychic powers. Sure that Sylvia was snitching, Louie refused to sit at the supper table with her, eating his meals in spiteful solitude off the open oven door. He once became so enraged with her that he chased her around the block. Outrunning Louie for the only time in her life, Sylvia cut down the alley and dove into her father’s work shed. Louie flushed her out by feeding his three-foot-long pet snake into the crawl space. She then locked herself in the family car and didn’t come out for an entire afternoon. “It was a matter of life and death,” she said some seventy-five years later.
For all her efforts, Louise couldn’t change Louie. He ran away and wandered around San Diego for days, sleeping under a highway overpass. He tried to ride a steer in a pasture, got tossed onto the ragged edge of a fallen tree, and limped home with his gashed knee bound in a handkerchief. Twenty-seven stitches didn’t tame him. He hit one kid so hard that he broke his nose. He upended another boy and stuffed paper towels in his mouth. Parents forbade their kids from going near him. A farmer, furious over Louie’s robberies, loaded his shotgun with rock salt and blasted him in the tail. Louie beat one kid so badly, leaving him unconscious in a ditch, that he was afraid he’d killed him. When Louise saw the blood on Louie’s fists, she burst into tears.
——
As Louie prepared to start Torrance High, he was looking less like an impish kid and more like a dangerous young man. High school would be the end of his education. There was no money for college; Anthony’s paycheck ran out before the week’s end, forcing Louise to improvise meals out of eggplant, milk, stale bread, wild mushrooms, and rabbits that Louie and Pete shot in the fields. With flunking grades and no skills, Louie had no chance for a scholarship. It was unlikely that he could land a job. The Depression had come, and the unemployment rate was nearing 25 percent. Louie had no real ambitions. If asked what he wanted to be, his answer would have been “cowboy.”
In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through “lethal neglect” or outright murder. At one Illinois mental hospital, new patients were dosed with milk from cows infected with tuberculosis, in the belief that only the undesirable would perish. As many as four in ten of these patients died. A more popular tool of eugenics was forced sterilization, employed on a raft of lost souls who, through misbehavior or misfortune, fell into the hands of state governments. By 1930, when Louie was entering his teens, California was enraptured with eugenics, and would ultimately sterilize some twenty thousand people.
When Louie was in his early teens, an event in Torrance brought reality home. A kid from Louie’s neighborhood was deemed feebleminded, institutionalized, and barely saved from sterilization through a frantic legal effort by his parents, funded by their Torrance neighbors. Tutored by Louie’s siblings, the boy earned straight A’s. Louie was never more than an inch from juvenile hall or jail, and as a serial troublemaker, a failing student, and a suspect Italian, he was just the sort of rogue that eugenicists wanted to cull. Suddenly understanding what he was risking, he felt deeply shaken.
The person that Louie had become was not, he knew, his authentic self. He made hesitant efforts to connect to others. He scrubbed the kitchen floor to surprise his mother, but she assumed that Pete had done it. While his father was out of town, Louie overhauled the engine on the family’s Marmon Roosevelt Straight-8 sedan. He baked biscuits and gave them away; when his mother, tired of the mess, booted him from her kitchen, he resumed baking in a neighbor’s house. He doled out nearly everything he stole. He was “bighearted,” said Pete. “Louie would give away anything, whether it was his or not.”
Each attempt he made to right himself ended wrong. He holed up alone, reading Zane Grey novels and wishing himself into them, a man and his horse on the frontier, broken off from the world. He haunted the theater for western movies, losing track of the plots while he stared at the scenery. On some nights, he’d drag his bedding into the yard to sleep alone. On others, he’d lie awake in bed, beneath pinups of movie cowboy Tom Mix and his wonder horse, Tony, feeling snared on something from which he couldn’t kick free.
In the back bedroom he could hear trains passing. Lying beside his sleeping brother, he’d listen to the broad, low sound: faint, then rising, faint again, then a high, beckoning whistle, then gone. The sound of it brought goose bumps. Lost in longing, Louie imagined himself on a train, rolling into country he couldn’t see, growing smaller and more distant until he disappeared.
Two
Run Like Mad
THE REHABILITATION OF LOUIE ZAMPERINI BEGAN IN 1931, with a key. Fourteen-year-old Louie was in a locksmith shop when he heard someone say that if you put any key in any lock, it has a one-in-fifty chance of fitting. Inspired, Louie began collecting keys and trying locks. He had no luck until he tried his house key on the back door of the Torrance High gym. When basketball season began, there was an inexplicable discrepancy between the number of ten-cent tickets sold and the considerably larger number of kids in the bleachers. In late 1931, someone caught on, and Louie was hauled to the principal’s office for the umpteenth time. In California, winter-born students entered new grades in January, so Louie was about to start ninth grade. The principal punished him by making him ineligible for athletic and social activities. Louie, who never joined anything, was indifferent.
When Pete learned what had happened, he headed straight to the principal’s office. Though his mother didn’t yet speak much English, he towed her along to give his presentation weight. He told the principal that Louie craved attention but had never won it in the form of praise, so he sought it in the form of punishment. If Louie were recognized for doing something right, Pete argued, he’d turn his life around. He asked the principal to allow Louie to join a sport. When the principal balked, Pete asked him if he could live with allowing Louie to fail. It was a cheeky thing for a sixteen-year-old to say to his principal, but Pete was the one kid in Torrance who could get away with such a remark, and make it persuasive. Louie was made eligible for athletics for 1932.
Pete had big plans for Louie. A senior in 1931–32, he would graduate with ten varsity letters, including three in basketball and three in baseball. But it was track, in which he earned four varsity letters, tied the school half-mile record, and set its mile record of 5:06, that was his true forte. Looking at Louie, whose getaway speed was his saving grace, Pete thought he saw the same incipient talent.
As it turned out, it wasn’t Pete who got Louie onto a track for the first time. It was Louie’s weakness for girls. In February, the ninth-grade girls began assembling a team for an interclass track meet, and in a class with only four boys, Louie was the only male who looked like he could run. The girls worked their charms, and Louie found himself standing on the track, barefoot, for a 660-yard race. When everyone ran, he followed, churning along with jimmying elbows and dropping far behind. As he labored home last, he heard tittering. Gasping and humiliated, he ran straight off the track and hid under the bleachers. The coach muttered something about how that kid belonged anywhere but in a footrace. “He’s my brother,” Pete replied.
From that day on, Pete was all over Louie, forcing him to train, then dragging him to the track to run in a second meet. Urged on by kids in the stands, Louie put in just enough effort to beat one boy and finish third. He hated running, but the applause was intoxicating, and the prospect of more was just enough incentive to keep him marginally compliant. Pete herded him out to train every day and rode his bicycle behind him, whacking him with a stick. Louie dragged his feet, bellyached, and quit at the first sign of fatigue. Pete made him get up and keep going. Louie started winning. At the season’s end, he became the first Torrance kid to make the All City Finals. He finished fifth.
Pete had been right about Louie’s talent. But to Louie, training felt like one more constraint. At night he listened to the whistles of passing trains, and one day in the summer of ’32, he couldn’t bear it any longer.
——
It began over a chore that Louie’s father asked him to do. Louie resisted, a spat ensued, and Louie threw some clothes into a bag and stormed toward the front door. His parents ordered him to stay; Louie was beyond persuasion. As he walked out, his mother rushed to the kitchen and emerged with a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. Louie stuffed it in his bag and left. He was partway down the front walk when he heard his name called. When he turned, there was his father, grim-faced, holding two dollars in his outstretched hand. It was a lot of money for a man whose paycheck didn’t bridge the week. Louie took it and walked away.
He rounded up a friend, and together they hitchhiked to Los Angeles, broke into a car, and slept on the seats. The next day they jumped a train, climbed onto the roof, and rode north.
The trip was a nightmare. The boys got locked in a boxcar so hot that they were soon frantic to escape. Louie found a discarded strip of metal, climbed on his friend’s shoulders, pried a vent open, squirmed out, and helped his friend out, badly cutting himself in the process. Then they were discovered by the railroad detective, who forced them to jump from the moving train at gunpoint. After several days of walking, getting chased out of orchards and grocery stores where they tried to steal food, they wound up sitting on the ground in a railyard, filthy, bruised, sunburned, and wet, sharing a stolen can of beans. A train rattled past. Louie looked up. “I saw … beautiful white tablecloths and crystal on the tables, and food, people laughing and enjoying themselves and eating,” he said later. “And [I was] sitting here shivering, eating a miserable can of beans.” He remembered the money in his father’s hand, the fear in his mother’s eyes as she offered him a sandwich. He stood up and headed home.
When Louie walked into his house, Louise threw her arms around him, inspected him for injuries, led him to the kitchen, and gave him a cookie. Anthony came home, saw Louie, and sank into a chair, his face soft with relief. After dinner, Louie went upstairs, dropped into bed, and whispered his surrender to Pete.
——
In the summer of 1932, Louie did almost nothing but run. On the invitation of a friend, he went to stay at a cabin on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, in southern California’s high desert. Each morning, he rose with the sun, picked up his rifle, and jogged into the sagebrush. He ran up and down hills, over the desert, through gullies. He chased bands of horses, darting into the swirling herds and trying in vain to snatch a fistful of mane and swing aboard. He swam in a sulfur spring, watched over by Cahuilla women scrubbing clothes on the rocks, and stretched out to dry himself in the sun. On his run back to the cabin each afternoon, he shot a rabbit for supper. Each evening, he climbed atop the cabin and lay back, reading Zane Grey novels. When the sun sank and the words faded, he gazed over the landscape, moved by its beauty, watching it slip from gray to purple before darkness blended land and sky. In the morning he rose to run again. He didn’t run from something or to something, not for anyone or in spite of anyone; he ran because it was what his body wished to do. The restiveness, the self-consciousness, and the need to oppose disappeared. All he felt was peace.
He came home with a mania for running. All of the effort that he’d once put into thieving he threw into track. On Pete’s instruction, he ran his entire paper route for the Torrance Herald, to and from school, and to the beach and back. He rarely stayed on the sidewalk, veering onto neighbors’ lawns to hurdle bushes. He gave up drinking and smoking. To expand his lung capacity, he ran to the public pool at Redondo Beach, dove to the bottom, grabbed the drain plug, and just floated there, hanging on a little longer each time. Eventually, he could stay underwater for three minutes and forty-five seconds. People kept jumping in to save him.
Louie also found a role model. In the 1930s, track was hugely popular, and its elite performers were household names. Among them was a Kansas University miler named Glenn Cunningham. As a small child, Cunningham had been in a schoolhouse explosion that killed his brother and left Glenn with severe burns on his legs and torso. It was a month and a half before he could sit up, and more time still before he could stand. Unable to straighten his legs, he learned to push himself about by leaning on a chair, his legs floundering. He graduated to the tail of the family mule, and eventually, hanging off the tail of an obliging horse named Paint, he began to run, a gait that initially caused him excruciating pain. Within a few years, he was racing, setting mile records and obliterating his opponents by the length of a homestretch. By 1932, the modest, mild-tempered Cunningham, whose legs and back were covered in a twisting mesh of scars, was becoming a national sensation, soon to be acclaimed as the greatest miler in American history. Louie had his hero.
In the fall of 1932, Pete began his studies at Compton, a tuition-free junior college, where he became a star runner. Nearly every afternoon, he commuted home to coach Louie, running alongside him, subduing the jimmying elbows and teaching him strategy. Louie had a rare biomechanical advantage, hips that rolled as he ran; when one leg reached forward, the corresponding hip swung forward with it, giving Louie an exceptionally efficient, seven-foot stride. After watching him from the Torrance High fence, cheerleader Toots Bowersox needed only one word to describe him: “Smoooooth.” Pete thought that the sprints in which Louie had been running were too short. He’d be a miler, just like Glenn Cunningham.
In January 1933, Louie began tenth grade. As he lost his aloof, thorny manner, he was welcomed by the fashionable crowd. They invited him to weenie bakes in front of Kellow’s Hamburg Stand, where Louie would join ukulele sing-alongs and touch football games played with a knotted towel, contests that inevitably ended with a cheerleader being wedged into a trash can. Capitalizing on his sudden popularity, Louie ran for class president and won, borrowing the speech that Pete had used to win his class presidency at Compton. Best of all, girls suddenly found him dreamy. While walking alone on his sixteenth birthday, Louie was ambushed by a giggling gaggle of cheerleaders. One girl sat on Louie while the rest gave him sixteen whacks on the rear, plus one to grow on.
When the school track season began in February, Louie set out to see what training had done for him. His transformation was stunning. Competing in black silk shorts that his mother had sewn from the fabric of a skirt, he won an 880-yard race, breaking the school record, co-held by Pete, by more than two seconds. A week later, he ran a field of milers off their feet, stopping the watches in 5:03, three seconds faster than Pete’s record. At another meet, he clocked a mile in 4:58. Three weeks later, he set a state record of 4:50.6. By early April, he was down to 4:46; by late April, 4:42. “Boy! oh boy! oh boy!” read a local paper. “Can that guy fly? Yes, this means that Zamperini guy!”
Almost every week, Louie ran the mile, streaking through the season unbeaten and untested. When he ran out of high school kids to whip, he took on Pete and thirteen other college runners in a two-mile race at Compton. Though he was only sixteen and had never even trained at the distance, he won by fifty yards. Next he tried the two-mile in UCLA’s Southern California Cross Country meet. Running so effortlessly that he couldn’t feel his feet touching the ground, he took the lead and kept pulling away. At the halfway point, he was an eighth of a mile ahead, and observers began speculating on when the boy in the black shorts was going to collapse. Louie didn’t collapse. After he flew past the finish, rewriting the course record, he looked back up the long straightaway. Not one of the other runners was even in view. Louie had won by more than a quarter of a mile.
He felt as if he would faint, but it wasn’t from the exertion. It was from the realization of what he was.
Louie wins the 1933 UCLA Cross Country two-mile race by more than a quarter of a mile. Pete is running up from behind to greet him. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
Three
The Torrance Tornado
IT HAPPENED EVERY SATURDAY. LOUIE WOULD GO TO THE track, limber up, lie on his stomach on the infield grass, visualizing his coming race, then walk to the line, await the pop of the gun, and spring away. Pete would dash back and forth in the infield, clicking his stopwatch, yelling encouragement and instructions. When Pete gave the signal, Louie would stretch out his long legs and his opponents would scatter and drop away, in the words of a reporter, “sadly disheartened and disillusioned.” Louie would glide over the line, Pete would be there to tackle him, and the kids in the bleachers would cheer and stomp. Then there would be autograph-seeking girls coming in waves, a ride home, kisses from Mother, and snapshots on the front lawn, trophy in hand. Louie won so many wristwatches, the traditional laurel of track, that he began handing them out all over town. Periodically, a new golden boy would be touted as the one who would take him down, only to be run off his feet. One victim, wrote a reporter, had been hailed as “the boy who doesn’t know how fast he can run. He found out Saturday.”
Louie’s supreme high school moment came in the 1934 Southern California Track and Field Championship. Running in what was celebrated as the best field of high school milers in history, Louie routed them all and smoked the mile in 4:21.3, shattering the national high school record, set during World War I, by more than two seconds.* His main rival so exhausted himself chasing Louie that he had to be carried from the track. As Louie trotted into Pete’s arms, he felt a tug of regret. He felt too fresh. Had he run his second lap faster, he said, he might have clocked 4:18. A reporter predicted that Louie’s record would stand for twenty years. It stood for nineteen.
Louie and Pete. Bettmann/Corbis
Once his hometown’s resident archvillain, Louie was now a superstar, and Torrance forgave him everything. When he trained, people lined the track fence, calling out, “Come on, Iron Man!” The sports pages of the Los Angeles Times and Examiner were striped with stories on the prodigy, whom the Times called the “Torrance Tempest” and practically everyone else called the “Torrance Tornado.” By one report, stories on Louie were such an important source of revenue to the Torrance Herald that the newspaper insured his legs for $50,000. Torrancers carpooled to his races and crammed the grandstands. Embarrassed by the fuss, Louie asked his parents not to watch him race. Louise came anyway, sneaking to the track to peer through the fence, but the races made her so nervous that she had to hide her eyes.
Not long ago, Louie’s aspirations had ended at whose kitchen he might burgle. Now he latched onto a wildly audacious goal: the 1936 Olympics, in Berlin. The Games had no mile race, so milers ran the 1,500 meters, about 120 yards short of a mile. It was a seasoned man’s game; most top milers of the era peaked in their mid-twenties or later. As of 1934, the Olympic 1,500-meter favorite was Glenn Cunningham, who’d set the world record in the mile, 4:06.8, just weeks after Louie set the national high school record. Cunningham had been racing since the fourth grade, and at the 1936 Games, he would be just short of twenty-seven. He wouldn’t run his fastest mile until he was twenty-eight. As of 1936, Louie would have only five years’ experience, and would be only nineteen.
But Louie was already the fastest high school miler in American history, and he was improving so rapidly that he had lopped forty-two seconds off his time in two years. His record mile, run when he was seventeen, was three and a half seconds faster than Cunningham’s fastest high school mile, run when he was twenty.* Even conservative track pundits were beginning to think that Louie might be the one to shatter precedent, and after Louie won every race in his senior season, their confidence was strengthened. Louie believed he could do it, and so did Pete. Louie wanted to run in Berlin more than he had ever wanted anything.
In December 1935, Louie graduated from high school; a few weeks later, he rang in 1936 with his thoughts full of Berlin. The Olympic trials track finals would be held in New York in July, and the Olympic committee would base its selection of competitors on a series of qualifying races. Louie had seven months to run himself onto the team. In the meantime, he also had to figure out what to do about the numerous college scholarships being offered to him. Pete had won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he had become one of the nation’s top ten college milers. He urged Louie to accept USC’s offer but delay entry until the fall, so he could train full-time. So Louie moved into Pete’s frat house and, with Pete coaching him, trained obsessively. All day, every day, he lived and breathed the 1,500 meters and Berlin.
In the spring, he began to realize that he wasn’t going to make it. Though he was getting faster by the day, he couldn’t force his body to improve quickly enough to catch his older rivals by summer. He was simply too young. He was heartbroken.
——
In May, Louie was leafing through a newspaper when he saw a story on the Compton Open, a prestigious track meet to be held at the Los Angeles Coliseum on May 22. The headliner in the 5,000 meters—three miles and 188 yards—was Norman Bright, a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher. Bright had set the American two-mile record in 1935 and was America’s second-fastest 5,000-meter man, behind the legendary Don Lash, Indiana University’s twenty-three-year-old record-smashing machine. America would send three 5,000-meter men to Berlin, and Lash and Bright were considered locks. Pete urged Louie to enter the Compton Open and try his legs at a longer distance. “If you stay with Norman Bright,” he told Louie, “you make the Olympic team.”
The idea was a stretch. The mile was four laps of the track; the 5,000 was more than twelve, what Louie would describe as a “fifteen-minute torture chamber,” well over three times his optimal distance. He had only twice raced beyond a mile, and the 5,000, like the mile, was dominated by much older men. He had only two weeks to train for Compton and, with the Olympic trials in July, two months to become America’s youngest elite 5,000-meter man. But he had nothing to lose. He trained so hard that he rubbed the skin right off one of his toes, leaving his sock bloody.
The race, contested before ten thousand fans, was a barn burner. Louie and Bright took off together, leaving the field far behind. Each time one took the lead, the other would gun past him again and the crowd would roar. They turned into the homestretch for the last time dead together, Bright inside, Louie outside. Ahead, a runner named John Casey was on the verge of being lapped. Officials waved at Casey, who tried to yield, but Bright and Louie came to him before he could get out of the way. Bright squeezed through on the inside, but Louie had to shift right to go around Casey. Confused, Casey veered farther right, carrying Louie out. Louie sped up to go around him, but Casey sped up also, carrying Louie most of the way toward the grandstand. Finally, Louie took a half step to cut inside, lost his balance, and dropped one hand to the ground. Bright now had an advantage that looked, to Pete’s eye, to be several yards. Louie took off after him, gaining rapidly. With the crowd on its feet and screaming, Louie caught Bright at the tape. He was a beat too late: Bright won by a glimmer. He and Louie had clipped out the fastest 5,000 run in America in 1936. Louie’s Olympic dream was on again.
On June 13, Louie made quick work of another Olympic 5,000 qualifier, but the toe injured in training opened up again. He was too lame to train for his final qualifying race, and it cost him. Bright beat Louie by four yards, but Louie wasn’t disgraced, clocking the third-fastest 5,000 run in America since 1931. He was invited to the final of the Olympic trials.
——
On the night of July 3, 1936, the residents of Torrance gathered to see Louie off to New York. They presented him with a wallet bulging with traveling money, a train ticket, new clothes, a shaving kit, and a suitcase emblazoned with the words TORRANCE TORNADO. Fearing that the suitcase made him look brash, Louie carried it out of view and covered the nickname with adhesive tape, then boarded his train. According to his diary, he spent the journey introducing himself to every pretty girl he saw, including a total of five between Chicago and Ohio.
When the train doors slid open in New York, Louie felt as if he were walking into an inferno. It was the hottest summer on record in America, and New York was one of the hardest-hit cities. In 1936, air-conditioning was a rarity, found only in a few theaters and department stores, so escape was nearly impossible. That week, which included the hottest three-day period in the nation’s history, the heat would kill three thousand Americans. In Manhattan, where it would reach 106 degrees, forty people would die.
Louie and Norman Bright split the cost of a room at the Lincoln Hotel. Like all of the athletes, in spite of the heat, they had to train. Sweating profusely day and night, training in the sun, unable to sleep in stifling hotel rooms and YMCAs, lacking any appetite, virtually every athlete lost a huge amount of weight. By one estimate, no athlete dropped less than ten pounds. One was so desperate for relief that he moved into an air-conditioned theater, buying tickets to movies and sleeping through every showing. Louie was as miserable as everyone else. Chronically dehydrated, he drank as much as he could; after an 880-meter run in 106-degree heat, he downed eight orangeades and a quart of beer. Each night, taking advantage of the cooler air, he walked six miles. His weight fell precipitously.
The prerace newspaper coverage riled him. Don Lash was considered unbeatable, having just taken the NCAA 5,000-meter title for the third time, set a world record at two miles and an American record at 10,000 meters, and repeatedly thumped Bright, once by 150 yards. Bright was pegged for second, a series of other athletes for third through fifth. Louie wasn’t mentioned. Like everyone else, Louie was daunted by Lash, but the first three runners would go to Berlin, and he believed he could be among them. “If I have any strength left from the heat,” he wrote to Pete, “I’ll beat Bright and give Lash the scare of his life.”
On the night before the race, Louie lay sleepless in his sweltering hotel room. He was thinking about all the people who would be disappointed if he failed.
The next morning, Louie and Bright left the hotel together. The trials were to be held at a new stadium on Randall’s Island, in the confluence of the East and Harlem rivers. It was a hair short of 90 in the city, but when they got off the ferry, they found the stadium much hotter, probably far over 100 degrees. All over the track, athletes were keeling over and being carted off to hospitals. Louie sat waiting for his race, baking under a scalding sun that, he said, “made a wreck of me.”
At last, they were told to line up. The gun cracked, the men rushed forward, and the race was on. Lash bounded to the lead, with Bright in close pursuit. Louie dropped back, and the field settled in for the grind.
On the other side of the continent, a throng of Torrancers crouched around the radio in the Zamperinis’ house. They were in agonies. The start time for Louie’s race had passed, but the NBC radio announcer was lingering on the swimming trials. Pete was so frustrated that he considered putting his foot through the radio. At last, the announcer listed the positions of the 5,000-meter runners, but didn’t mention Louie. Unable to bear the tension, Louise fled to the kitchen, out of earshot.
The runners pushed through laps seven, eight, nine. Lash and Bright led the field. Louie hovered in the middle of the pack, waiting to make his move. The heat was suffocating. One runner dropped, and the others had no choice but to hurdle him. Then another went down, and they jumped him, too. Louie could feel his feet cooking; the spikes on his shoes were conducting heat up from the track. Norman Bright’s feet were burning particularly badly. In terrible pain, he took a staggering step off the track, twisted his ankle, then lurched back on. The stumble seemed to finish him. He lost touch with Lash. When Louie and the rest of the pack came up to him, he had no resistance to offer. Still he ran on.
As the runners entered the final lap, Lash gave himself a breather, dropping just behind his Indiana teammate, Tom Deckard. Well behind him, Louie was ready to move. Angling into the backstretch, he accelerated. Lash’s back drew closer, and then it was just a yard or two ahead. Looking at the bobbing head of the mighty Don Lash, Louie felt intimidated. For several strides, he hesitated. Then he saw the last curve ahead, and the sight slapped him awake. He opened up as fast as he could go.
Banking around the turn, Louie drew alongside Lash just as Lash shifted right to pass Deckard. Louie was carried three-wide, losing precious ground. Leaving Deckard behind, Louie and Lash ran side by side into the homestretch. With one hundred yards to go, Louie held a slight lead. Lash, fighting furiously, stuck with him. Neither man had any more speed to give. Louie could see that he was maybe a hand’s width ahead, and he wouldn’t let it go.
With heads thrown back, legs pumping out of sync, Louie and Lash drove for the tape. With just a few yards remaining, Lash began inching up, drawing even. The two runners, legs rubbery with exhaustion, flung themselves past the judges in a finish so close, Louie later said, “you couldn’t put a hair between us.”
The announcer’s voice echoed across the living room in Torrance. Zamperini, he said, had won.
Standing in the kitchen, Louise heard the crowd in the next room suddenly shout. Outside, car horns honked, the front door swung open, and neighbors gushed into the house. As a crush of hysterical Torrancers celebrated around her, Louise wept happy tears. Anthony popped the cork on a bottle of wine and began filling glasses and singing out toasts, smiling, said one reveler, like a “jackass eating cactus.” A moment later, Louie’s voice came over the airwaves, calling a greeting to Torrance.
Louie and Lash at the finish line at the 1936 Olympic trials. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
But the announcer was mistaken. The judges ruled that it was Lash, not Zamperini, who had won. Deckard had hung on for third. The announcer soon corrected himself, but it hardly dimmed the celebration in Torrance. The hometown boy had made the Olympic team.
A few minutes after the race, Louie stood under a cold shower. He could feel the sting of the burns on his feet, following the patterns of his cleats. After drying off, he weighed himself. He had sweated off three pounds. He looked in a mirror and saw a ghostly image looking back at him.
Across the room, Norman Bright was slumped on a bench with one ankle propped over the other knee, staring at his foot. It, like the other one, was burned so badly that the skin had detached from the sole. He had finished fifth, two places short of the Olympic team.*
By the day’s end, Louie had received some 125 telegrams. TORRANCE HAS GONE NUTS, read one. VILLAGE HAS GONE SCREWEY, read another. There was even one from the Torrance Police Department, which must have been relieved that someone else was chasing Louie.
That night, Louie pored over the evening papers, which showed photos of the finish of his race. In some, he seemed to be tied with Lash; in others, he seemed to be in front. On the track, he’d felt sure that he had won. The first three would go to the Olympics, but Louie felt cheated nonetheless.
As Louie studied the papers, the judges were reviewing photographs and a film of the 5,000. Later, Louie sent home a telegram with the news: JUDGES CALLED IT A TIE. LEAVE NOON WEDNESDAY FOR BERLIN. WILL RUN HARDER IN BERLIN.
When Sylvia returned from work the next day, the house was packed with well-wishers and newsmen. Louie’s twelve-year-old sister, Virginia, clutched one of Louie’s trophies and told reporters of her plans to be the next great Zamperini runner. Anthony headed off to the Kiwanis club, where he and Louie’s Boy Scout master would drink toasts to Louie until four in the morning. Pete walked around town to back slaps and congratulations. “Am I ever happy,” he wrote to Louie. “I have to go around with my shirt open so that I have enough room for my chest.”
Louie Zamperini was on his way to Germany to compete in the Olympics in an event that he had only contested four times. He was the youngest distance runner to ever make the team.
*
Louie’s time was called a “world interscholastic” record, but this was a misnomer. There were no official world high school records. Later sources would list the time as 4:21.2, but all sources from 1934 list it as 4:21.3. Because different organizations had different standards for record verification, there is some confusion about whose record Louie broke, but according to newspapers at the time, the previous recordholder was Ed Shields, who ran 4:23.6 in 1916. In 1925, Chesley Unruh was timed in 4:20.5, but this wasn’t officially verified. Cunningham was also credited with the record, but his time, 4:24.7 run in 1930, was far slower than those of Unruh and Shields. Louie’s mark stood until Bob Seaman broke it in 1953.
*
Apparently because of his burns, Cunningham didn’t start high school until he was eighteen.
*
Bright wouldn’t have another shot at the Olympics, but he would run for the rest of his life, setting masters records in his old age. Eventually he went blind, but he kept right on running, holding the end of a rope while a guide held the other. “The only problem was that most guides couldn’t run as fast as my brother, even when he was in his late seventies,” wrote his sister Georgie Bright Kunkel. “In his eighties his grandnephews would walk with him around his care center as he timed the walk on his stopwatch.”
Four
Plundering Germany
THE LUXURY STEAMER MANHATTAN, BEARING THE 1936 U.S. Olympic team to Germany, was barely past the Statue of Liberty before Louie began stealing things. In his defense, he wasn’t the one who started it. Mindful of being a teenaged upstart in the company of such seasoned track deities as Jesse Owens and Glenn Cunningham, Louie curbed his coltish impulses and began growing a mustache. But he soon noticed that practically everyone on board was “souvenir collecting,” pocketing towels, ashtrays, and anything else they could easily lift. “They had nothing on me,” he said later. “I [was] Phi Beta Kappa in taking things.” The mustache was abandoned. As the voyage went on, Louie and the other lightfingers quietly denuded the Manhattan.
Everyone was fighting for training space. Gymnasts set up their apparatuses, but with the ship swaying, they kept getting bucked off. Basketball players did passing drills on deck, but the wind kept jettisoning the balls into the Atlantic. Fencers lurched all over the ship. The water athletes discovered that the salt water in the ship’s tiny pool sloshed back and forth vehemently, two feet deep one moment, seven feet the next, creating waves so large, one water polo man took up bodysurfing. Every large roll heaved most of the water, and everyone in it, onto the deck, so the coaches had to tie the swimmers to the wall. The situation was hardly better for runners. Louie found that the only way to train was to circle the first-class deck, weaving among deck chairs, reclining movie stars, and other athletes. In high seas, the runners were buffeted about, all staggering in one direction, then in the other. Louie had to move so slowly that he couldn’t lose the marathon walker creeping along beside him.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
For a Depression-era teenager accustomed to breakfasting on stale bread and milk, and who had eaten in a restaurant only twice in his life,* the Manhattan was paradise. Upon rising, the athletes sipped cocoa and grazed from plates of pastries. At nine, there was steak and eggs in the dining room. A coffee break, lunch, tea, and dinner followed, nose to tail. Between meals, a ring for the porter would bring anything the heart desired, and late at night, the athletes raided the galley. Inching around the first-class deck, Louie found a little window in which pints of beer kept magically appearing. He made them magically disappear. When seasickness thinned the ranks of the diners, extra desserts were laid out, and Louie, who had sturdy sea legs, let nothing go to waste. His consumption became legendary. Recalling how the ship had to make an unscheduled stop to restock the pantries, runner James LuValle joked, “Of course, most of this was due to Lou Zamperini.” Louie made a habit of sitting next to the mountainous shot putter Jack Torrance, who had an inexplicably tiny appetite. When Torrance couldn’t finish his entrée, Louie dropped onto the plate like a vulture.
On the evening of July 17, Louie returned from dinner so impressed with his eating that he immortalized it on the back of a letter:
1 pint of pineapple juice
2 bowls of beef broth
2 sardine salads
5 rolls
2 tall glasses of milk
4 small sweet pickles
2 plates of chicken
2 helpings of sweet potatoes
4 pieces of butter
3 helpings of ice cream with wafers
3 chunks of angel food cake with white frosting
1½ pounds of cherries
1 apple
1 orange
1 glass of ice water
“Biggest meal I ever ate in my life,” he wrote, “and I can’t believe it myself, but I was there … Where it all went, I don’t know.”
He’d soon find out. Shortly before the athletes came ashore at Hamburg, a doctor noted that quite a few were expanding. One javelin competitor had gained eight pounds in five days. Several wrestlers, boxers, and weightlifters had eaten themselves out of their weight classes, and some were unable to compete. Don Lash had gained ten pounds. Louie outdid them all, regaining all the weight that he’d lost in New York, and then some. When he got off the Manhattan, he weighed twelve pounds more than when he’d gotten on nine days earlier.
——
On July 24, the athletes shuffled from the ship to a train, stopped over in Frankfurt for a welcoming dinner, and reboarded the train toting quite a few of their hosts’ priceless wine glasses. The Germans chased down the train, searched the baggage, repatriated the glasses, and sent the Americans on to Berlin. There, the train was swamped by teenagers holding scissors and chanting, “Wo ist Jesse? Wo ist Jesse?” When Owens stepped out, the throng swarmed him and began snipping off bits of his clothing. Owens leapt back onto the train.
The athletes were driven to the Olympic Village, a masterpiece of design crafted by Wolfgang Fürstner, a Wehrmacht captain. Nestled in an undulating patchwork of beech forests, lakes, and clearings were 140 cottages, a shopping mall, a barbershop, a post office, a dentist’s office, a sauna, a hospital, training facilities, and dining halls. A new technology called television was on exhibit in the village office. There were wooded trails, over which bounded a multitude of imported animals. The Japanese athletes were especially taken with the deer and began feeding them treats in such volume that the Germans discreetly moved the deer out. One British wag wondered aloud where the storks were. The next day, two hundred storks appeared.
Louie was housed in a cottage with several other athletes, including Owens. The great sprinter kept a fatherly eye on him; Louie repaid him by swiping his DO NOT DISTURB sign, leaving poor Owens besieged by autograph seekers. Louie swam in the lakes, ate appalling quantities of food, and socialized. The hit of the village was the Japanese contingent, whose tradition of prodigious gift giving made them the collective Santa Claus of the Games.
On the first of August, Louie and the other Olympians were driven through Berlin for the opening ceremonies. Every vista suggested coiled might. Nazi banners had been papered over everything. As much as a third of the male population was in uniform, as were many children. Military units drilled openly, and though powered aircraft were forbidden under the Versailles Treaty, the strength of the burgeoning Luftwaffe was on conspicuous display over an airfield, where gliders swooped over impressed tourists and Hitler Youth. The buses had machine gun mounts on the roofs and undercarriages that could be converted into tank-style tracks. The city was pristine. Even the wagon horses left no mark, their droppings instantly scooped up by uniformed street sweepers. Berlin’s Gypsies and Jewish students had vanished—the Gypsies had been dumped in camps, the Jews confined to the University of Berlin campus—leaving only smiling “Aryans.” The only visible wisp of discord was the broken glass in the windows of Jewish businesses.
The buses drove to the Olympic stadium. Entering in a parade of nations and standing at attention, the athletes were treated to a thunderous show that culminated in the release of twenty thousand doves. As the birds circled in panicked confusion, cannons began firing, prompting the birds to relieve themselves over the athletes. With each report, the birds let fly. Louie stayed at attention, shaking with laughter.
Louie had progressed enough in four 5,000-meter races to compete with Lash, but he knew that he had no chance of winning an Olympic medal. It wasn’t just that he was out of shape from the long idleness on the ship, and almost pudgy from gorging on board and in the village. Few nations had dominated an Olympic event as Finland had the 5,000, winning gold in 1912, ’24, ’28, and ’32. Lauri Lehtinen, who had won gold in ’32, was back for another go, along with his brilliant teammates Gunnar Höckert and Ilmari Salminen. When Louie watched them train, noted a reporter, his eyes bulged. Louie was too young and too green to beat the Finns, and he knew it. His day would come, he believed, in the 1,500 four years later.
In the last days before his preliminary heat, Louie went to the stadium and watched Owens crush the field in the 100 meters and Cunningham break the world record for the 1,500 but still lose to New Zealander Jack Lovelock. The atmosphere was surreal. Each time Hitler entered, the crowd jumped up with the Nazi salute. With each foreign athlete’s victory, an abbreviated version of his or her national anthem was played. When a German athlete won, the stadium rang with every stanza of “Deutschland über Alles” and the spectators shouted “Sieg heil!” endlessly, arms outstretched. According to the swimmer Iris Cummings, the slavish nationalism was a joke to the Americans, but not to the Germans. The Gestapo paced the stadium, eyeing the fans. A German woman sitting with Cummings refused to salute. She shrank between Iris and her mother, whispering, “Don’t let them see me! Don’t let them see me!”
——
On August 4, three 5,000-meter qualifying heats were run. Louie drew the third, deepest heat, facing Lehtinen. The top five in each heat would make the final. In the first, Lash ran third. In the second, Tom Deckard, the other American, failed to qualify. Louie slogged through heat three, feeling fat and leaden-legged. He barely caught fifth place at the line. He was, he wrote in his diary, “tired as hell.” He had three days to prepare for the final.
While he was waiting, an envelope arrived from Pete. Inside were two playing cards, an ace and a joker. On the joker Pete had written, “Which are you going to be, the joker, which is another word for horse’s ass, or the TOPS: Ace of spades. The best in the bunch. The highest in the deck. Take your choice!” On the ace he had written, “Let’s see you storm through as the best in the deck. If the joker does not appeal to you, throw it away and keep this for good luck. Pete.”
On August 7, Louie lay facedown in the infield of the Olympic stadium, readying himself for the 5,000-meter final. One hundred thousand spectators ringed the track. Louie was terrified. He pressed his face to the grass, inhaling deeply, trying to settle his quivering nerves. When the time came, he rose, walked to the starting line, bowed forward, and waited. His paper number, 751, flapped against his chest.
At the sound of the gun, Louie’s body, electric with nervous energy, wanted to bolt, but Louie made a conscious effort to relax, knowing how far he had to go. As the runners surged forward, he kept his stride short, letting the pacesetters untangle. Lash emerged with the lead, a troika of Finns just behind him. Louie floated left and settled into the second tier of runners.
The laps wound by. Lash kept leading, the Finns on his heels. Louie pushed along in the second group. He began breathing in a sickening odor. He looked around and realized that it was coming from a runner ahead of him, his hair a slick of reeking pomade. Feeling a swell of nausea, Louie slowed and slid out a bit, and the stench dissipated. Lash and the Finns were slipping out of reach, and Louie wanted to go with them, but his body felt sodden. As the clumps of men stretched and thinned into a long, broken thread, Louie sank through the field, to twelfth. Only three stragglers trailed him.
Ahead, the Finns scuffed and sidled into Lash, roughing him up. Lash held his ground. But on the eighth lap, Salminen cocked his elbow and rammed it into Lash’s chest. Lash folded abruptly, in evident pain. The Finns bounded away. They entered the eleventh lap in a tight knot, looking to sweep the medals. Then, for an instant, they strayed too close to each other. Salminen’s leg clipped that of Höckert. As Höckert stumbled, Salminen fell heavily to the track. He rose, dazed, and resumed running. His race, like Lash’s, was lost.
Louie saw none of it. He passed the deflated Lash, but it meant little to him. He was tired. The Finns were small and distant, much too far away to catch. He found himself thinking of Pete, and of something that he had said as they had sat on their bed years earlier: A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.
Nearing the finish line for the penultimate time, Louie fixed his eyes on the gleaming head of the pomaded competitor, who was many runners ahead. He began a dramatic acceleration. Around the turn and down the backstretch, Louie kicked, his legs reaching and pushing, his cleats biting the track, his speed dazzling. One by one, runners came up ahead and faded away behind. “All I had,” Louie would say, “I gave it.”
As Louie flew around the last bend, Höckert had already won, with Lehtinen behind him. Louie wasn’t watching them. He was chasing the glossy head, still distant. He heard a gathering roar and realized that the crowd had caught sight of his rally and was shouting him on. Even Hitler, who had been contorting himself in concert with the athletes, was watching him. Louie ran on, Pete’s words beating in his head, his whole body burning. The shining hair was far away, then nearer. Then it was so close that Louie again smelled the pomade. With the last of his strength, Louie threw himself over the line. He had made up fifty yards in the last lap and beaten his personal best time by more than eight seconds. His final time, 14:46.8, was by far the fastest 5,000 run by any American in 1936, almost twelve seconds faster than Lash’s best for the year. He had just missed seventh place.
As Louie bent, gasping, over his spent legs, he marveled at the kick that he had forced from his body. It had felt very, very fast. Two coaches hurried up, gaping at their stopwatches, on which they had clocked his final lap. Both watches showed precisely the same time.
In distance running in the 1930s, it was exceptionally rare for a man to run a last lap in one minute. This rule held even in the comparatively short hop of a mile: In the three fastest miles ever run, the winner’s final lap had been clocked at 61.2, 58.9, and 59.1 seconds, respectively. No lap in those three historic performances had been faster than 58.9. In the 5,000, well over three miles, turning a final lap in less than 70 seconds was a monumental feat. In his record-breaking 1932 Olympic 5,000, Lehtinen had spun his final lap in 69.2 seconds.
Louie had run his last lap in 56 seconds.
——
After cleaning himself up, Louie climbed into the stands. Nearby, Adolf Hitler sat in his box, among his entourage. Someone pointed out a cadaverous man near Hitler and told Louie that it was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. Louie had never heard of him. Pulling out his camera, he carried it to Goebbels and asked him if he’d snap a picture of the führer. Goebbels asked him his name and event, then took the camera, moved away, snapped a photo, spoke with Hitler, returned, and told Louie that the führer wanted to see him.
Louie was led into the führer’s section. Hitler bent from his box, smiled, and offered his hand. Louie, standing below, had to reach far up. Their fingers barely touched. Hitler said something in German. An interpreter translated.
“Ah, you’re the boy with the fast finish.”
——
Happy with his performance, Louie was itching to raise hell. He had hoped to pal around with Glenn Cunningham, but his hero proved too mature for him. Instead, he found a suitably irresponsible companion, donned his Olympic dress uniform, and descended on Berlin. The two prowled bars, wooed girls, chirped, “Heil Hitler!” at everyone in uniform, and stole anything Germanish that they could pry loose. In an automat, they discovered German beer. The serving size was a liter, which took Louie a good while to finish. Buzzing, they went walking, then circled back for another liter, which went down easier than the first.
Trolling around Berlin, they stopped across the street from the Reich Chancellery. A car pulled up and out stepped Hitler, who walked inside. Studying the building, Louie spotted a small Nazi flag near the doors. It would make a swell souvenir, and it looked easy to reach. The banner didn’t yet carry much symbolic meaning for him, or many other Americans, in the summer of ’36. Louie just had a hankering to steal in his head and two persuasive liters of German brew in his belly.
Two guards paced the apron before the Chancellery. Watching them walk, Louie noted that on each pass, there was a point at which both had their backs to the flag. As the soldiers turned, Louie ran to the flag and immediately realized that it was much higher than he had thought. He began jumping in the air, trying to catch the edge of it. He became so absorbed in his task that he forgot about the guards, who ran toward him, shouting. Taking one last lunge for the flag, Louie snagged the edge and fell to the pavement, tearing the banner down with him, then scrambled to his feet and ran like mad.
He heard a crack! Behind him, a guard was running at him, his gun pointed at the sky, yelling, “Halten Sie!” That much Louie understood. He stopped. The guard grabbed his shoulder, spun him around, saw his Olympic uniform, and hesitated. He asked Louie his name. The one thing that Louie knew about Nazis was that they were anti-Semitic, so when he gave his name, he delivered it in an exaggeratedly Italian fashion, rolling the r, he would say, “for about two minutes.”
The guards conferred, went inside, and came out with someone who looked more important than they. The new German asked him why he had stolen the flag. Louie, laying it on thick, replied that he wanted a souvenir of the happy time he had had in beautiful Germany. The Germans gave him the flag and let him go.
When the press got wind of Louie’s adventure, reporters took creative liberties. Louie had “stormed Hitler’s palace” to steal the flag in a hail of gunfire that had “whistled around his head.” Plunging “eighteen feet,” he had raced away, pursued by “two columns” of armed guards, who had tackled and beat him. Just as a German rifle butt had been about to crush Louie’s head, the German army’s commander in chief had halted the attack, and Louie had talked the general into sparing his life. In one version, Hitler himself had allowed him to keep the flag. In another, Louie had concealed the flag so cleverly that it was never discovered. He had done it all, went the story, to win the heart of a girl.
——
On August 11, Louie packed his belongings, the flag, and an array of other stolen Teutonica and left his room in the Olympic Village. The Games were winding down, and the track athletes were leaving early to compete in meets in England and Scotland. A few days later, fireworks brought the Games to a booming close. Hitler’s show had gone without a hitch. The world was full of praise.
The American basketball player Frank Lubin lingered in Berlin for a few days. His German hosts had invited him out to dinner, so they cruised the streets in search of a restaurant. A pretty place caught Lubin’s eye, but when he suggested it, his hosts balked: a Star of David hung in the window. To be seen there, they said, “might prove harmful to us.” The group found a gentile restaurant, then visited a public swimming pool. As they walked in, Lubin saw a sign reading JUDEN VERBOTEN. The sign hadn’t been there during the Games. All over Berlin, such signs were reappearing, and the Nazis’ virulently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer, nowhere to be seen during the Games, was back on newsstands. Lubin had won a gold medal in Berlin, but when he left, he felt only relief. Something terrible was coming.
The Olympic Village wasn’t empty for long. The cottages became military barracks. With the Olympics over and his usefulness for propaganda expended, the village’s designer, Captain Fürstner, learned that he was to be cashiered from the Wehrmacht because he was a Jew. He killed himself. Less than twenty miles away, in the town of Oranienburg, the first prisoners were being hauled into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
——
On the evening of September 2, when Louie arrived in Torrance, he was plunked onto a throne on the flatbed of a truck and paraded to the depot, where four thousand people, whipped up by a band, sirens, and factory whistles, cheered. Louie shook hands and grinned for pictures. “I didn’t only start too slow,” he said, “I ran too slow.”
As he settled back into home, Louie thought of what lay ahead. Running the 1936 Olympic 5,000 at nineteen on four races’ experience had been a shot at the moon. Running the 1940 Olympic 1,500 at twenty-three after years of training would be another matter. The same thought was circling in Pete’s mind. Louie could win gold in 1940, and both brothers knew it.
A few weeks before, officials had announced which city would host the 1940 Games. Louie shaped his dreams around Tokyo, Japan.
*
Louie would later recall eating at a restaurant only once, when a family friend bought him a sandwich at a lunch counter, but according to his Olympic diary, after his 5,000-meter trial, a fan treated him to dinner in a Manhattan skyscraper. The meal cost $7, a staggering sum to Louie, who had been paying between 65 cents and $1.35 for his dinners, carefully recording the prices in his diary.
Five
Into War
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, LOUIE found himself on a campus infested with world-class track athletes. He spent mornings in class and afternoons training with his best friend, Payton Jordan. A sensationally fast sprinter, Jordan had seen nothing but Jesse Owens’s back at the 1936 Olympic trials and, like Louie, was aiming for gold in Tokyo. In the evenings, Louie, Jordan, and their teammates wedged into Louie’s ’31 Ford and drove to Torrance for Louise Zamperini’s spaghetti, considering themselves so close to family that Sylvia once found a high jumper asleep on her bed. In his spare time, Louie crashed society weddings, worked as a movie extra, and harassed his housemates with practical jokes, replacing their deviled ham with cat food and milk with milk of magnesia. He pursued coeds by all means necessary, once landing a date with a beauty by hurling himself into the side of her car, then pretending to have been struck.
Between classes, Louie, Jordan, and their friends congregated near the administration building, sitting at the foot of the statue of Tommy Trojan, the symbol of USC. On some days, they were joined by a neatly dressed Japanese émigré who lingered on the edges of the group. His name was Kunichi James Sasaki. Known as Jimmie, he had come to America in his late teens and settled in Palo Alto, where he had endured the social misery of attending elementary school as an adult. Among Louie’s friends, no one would remember what Sasaki studied at USC, but they all recalled his quiet, anodyne presence; saying almost nothing, he smiled without interruption.
Sasaki was an ardent track fan, and he sought Louie’s acquaintance. Louie was especially impressed with Sasaki’s scholarliness; prior to coming to USC, Jimmie said, he had earned degrees at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Bonding over shared interests in sports and music, the two became good friends.
Training for the Olympics, 1940. Bettmann/Corbis
Louie and Jimmie had something else in common. Sometime over the course of the friendship, Louie learned that his friend was making daily trips to Torrance. He asked Jimmie if he lived there, and Jimmie said no. He explained that he was concerned about the poverty of his Japanese homeland and was going to Torrance to give lectures to locals of Japanese ancestry, encouraging them to send money and foil from cigarette packs and gum wrappers to Japan to help the poor. Louie admired his friend for his efforts, but found it odd that he would travel to Torrance every day, given how few Japanese lived there.
Jimmie Sasaki wasn’t what he seemed. He had never attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. His friends thought him about thirty; he was in fact nearly forty. He had a wife and two daughters, though neither Louie nor his friends knew that they existed. Though he spent a lot of time on campus and led everyone to believe that he was a student, he was not. He had graduated from USC some ten years earlier, with a B.A. in political science. Neither Louie nor anyone else knew that Jimmie’s attempts to pass as a student were apparently an elaborate ruse.
——
On USC’s track team, Louie was a juggernaut. Focused on winning in Tokyo in 1940, he smashed record after record at multiple distances and routinely buried his competition by giant margins, once winning a race by one hundred yards. By the spring of 1938, he’d whittled his mile time down to 4:13.7, some seven seconds off the world record, which now stood at 4:06.4. His coach predicted that Louie would take that record down. The only runner who could beat him, the coach said, was Seabiscuit.
One afternoon in 1938, Glenn Cunningham stood in the Los Angeles Coliseum locker room, talking with reporters after winning a race. “There’s the next mile champion,” he said, leveling his eyes across the room. “When he concentrates on this distance, he’ll be unbeatable.” The reporters turned to see who Cunningham was looking at. It was Louie, blushing to the roots of his hair.
In the 1930s, track experts were beginning to toss around the idea of a four-minute mile. Most observers, including Cunningham, had long believed that it couldn’t be done. In 1935, when Cunningham’s record of 4:06.7 reigned, science weighed in. Studying data on human structural limits compiled by Finnish mathematicians, famed track coach Brutus Hamilton penned an article for Amateur Athlete magazine stating that a four-minute mile was impossible. The fastest a human could run a mile, he wrote, was 4:01.6.
Pete disagreed. Since the Olympics, he’d been certain that Louie had a four-minute mile in him. Louie had always shaken this off, but in the spring of ’38, he reconsidered. His coach had forbidden him to run hills on the mistaken but common belief that it would damage his heart, but Louie didn’t buy the warnings. Every night that May, he climbed the coliseum fence, dropped into the stadium, and ran the stairs until his legs went numb. By June, his body was humming, capable of speed and stamina beyond anything he’d ever known. He began to think that Pete was right, and he wasn’t alone. Running pundits, including Olympic champion sprinter Charlie Paddock, published articles stating that Louie could be the first four-minute man. Cunningham, too, had changed his mind. He thought that four minutes might be within Louie’s reach. Zamperini, Cunningham told a reporter, was more likely to crack four minutes than he was.
In June 1938, Louie arrived at the NCAA Championships in Minneapolis, gunning for four minutes. Spilling over with eagerness, he babbled to other athletes about his new training regimen, his race strategy, and how fast he might go. Word spread that Louie was primed for a superlative performance. On the night before the race, a coach from Notre Dame knocked on Louie’s hotel room door, a grave expression on his face. He told Louie that some of his rival coaches were ordering their runners to sharpen their spikes and slash him. Louie dismissed the warning, certain that no one would do such a thing deliberately.
He was wrong. Halfway through the race, just as Louie was about to move for the lead, several runners shouldered around him, boxing him in. Louie tried repeatedly to break loose, but he couldn’t get around the other men. Suddenly, the man beside him swerved in and stomped on his foot, impaling Louie’s toe with his spike. A moment later, the man ahead began kicking backward, cutting both of Louie’s shins. A third man elbowed Louie’s chest so hard that he cracked Louie’s rib. The crowd gasped.
Bleeding and in pain, Louie was trapped. For a lap and a half, he ran in the cluster of men, unable to get free, restraining his stride to avoid running into the man ahead. At last, as he neared the final turn, he saw a tiny gap open before him. He burst through, blew past the race leader, and, with his shoe torn open, shins streaming blood, and chest aching, won easily.
He slowed to a halt, bitter and frustrated. When his coach asked him how fast he thought he had gone, Louie replied that he couldn’t have beaten 4:20.
The race time was posted on the board. From the stands came a sudden Woooo! Louie had run the mile in 4:08.3. It was the fastest NCAA mile in history and the fifth-fastest outdoor mile ever run. Louie had missed the world record by 1.9 seconds. His time would stand as the NCAA record for fifteen years.
Weeks later, Japan withdrew as host of the 1940 Olympics, and the Games were transferred to Finland. Adjusting his aspirations from Tokyo to Helsinki, Louie rolled on. He won every race he contested in the 1939 school season. In the early months of 1940, in a series of eastern indoor miles against the best runners in America, he was magnificent, taking two seconds and two close fourths, twice beating Cunningham, and getting progressively faster. In February at the Boston Garden, he ran a 4:08.2, six-tenths of a second short of the fastest indoor mile ever run.* At Madison Square Garden two weeks later, he scorched a 4:07.9, caught just before the tape by the great Chuck Fenske, whose time equaled the indoor world record. With the Olympics months away, Louie was peaking at the ideal moment.
With a cracked rib and puncture wounds to both legs and one foot, Louie celebrates his record-setting NCAA Championship victory. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
——
As Louie blazed through college, far away, history was turning. In Europe, Hitler was laying plans to conquer the continent. In Asia, Japan’s leaders had designs of equal magnitude. Poor in natural resources, its trade crippled by high tariffs and low demand, Japan was struggling to support a growing population. Eyeing their nation’s resource-rich neighbors, Japan’s leaders saw the prospect of economic independence, and something more. Central to the Japanese identity was the belief that it was Japan’s divinely mandated right to rule its fellow Asians, whom it saw as inherently inferior. “There are superior and inferior races in the world,” said the Japanese politician Nakajima Chikuhei in 1940, “and it is the sacred duty of the leading race to lead and enlighten the inferior ones.” The Japanese, he continued, are “the sole superior race of the world.” Moved by necessity and destiny, Japan’s leaders planned to “plant the blood of the Yamato [Japanese] race” on their neighboring nations’ soil. They were going to subjugate all of the Far East.
Japan’s military-dominated government had long been preparing for its quest. Over decades, it had crafted a muscular, technologically sophisticated army and navy, and through a military-run school system that relentlessly and violently drilled children on the nation’s imperial destiny, it had shaped its people for war. Finally, through intense indoctrination, beatings, and desensitization, its army cultivated and celebrated extreme brutality in its soldiers. “Imbuing violence with holy meaning,” wrote the historian Iris Chang, “the Japanese imperial army made violence a cultural imperative every bit as powerful as that which propelled Europeans during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.” Chang cited a 1933 speech by a Japanese general: “Every single bullet must be charged with the Imperial Way, and the end of every bayonet must have National Virtue burnt into it.” In 1931, Japan tested the waters, invading the Chinese province of Manchuria and setting up a fiercely oppressive puppet state. This was only the beginning.
In the late 1930s, both Germany and Japan were ready to move. It was Japan that struck first, in 1937, sending its armies smashing into the rest of China. Two years later, Hitler invaded Poland. America, long isolationist, found itself pulled into both conflicts: In Europe, its allies lay in Hitler’s path; in the Pacific, its longtime ally China was being ravaged by the Japanese, and its territories of Hawaii, Wake, Guam, and Midway, as well as its commonwealth of the Philippines, were threatened. The world was falling into catastrophe.
On a dark day in April 1940, Louie returned to his bungalow to find the USC campus buzzing. Hitler had unleashed his blitzkrieg across Europe, his Soviet allies had followed, and the continent had exploded into total war. Finland, which was set to host the summer Games, was reeling. Helsinki’s Olympic stadium was partially collapsed, toppled by Soviet bombs. Gunnar Höckert, who had beaten Louie and won gold for Finland in the 5,000 in Berlin, was dead, killed defending his homeland.* The Olympics had been canceled.
——
Louie was unmoored. He became ill, first with food poisoning, then with pleurisy. His speed abandoned him, and he lost race after race. When USC’s spring semester ended, he collected his class ring and left campus. He was a few credits short of a degree, but he had all of 1941 to make them up. He took a job as a welder at the Lockheed Air Corporation and mourned his lost Olympics.
As Louie worked through the summer of ’40, America slid toward war. In Europe, Hitler had driven the British and their allies into the sea at Dunkirk. In the Pacific, Japan was tearing through China and moving into Indochina. In an effort to stop Japan, President Franklin Roosevelt imposed ever-increasing embargoes on matériel, such as scrap metal and aviation fuel. In the coming months, he would declare an oil embargo, freeze Japanese assets in America, and finally declare a total trade embargo. Japan pushed on.
Lockheed was on a war footing, punching out aircraft for the Army Air Corps and the Royal Air Force. From the hangar where he worked, Louie could see P-38 fighters cruising overhead. Ever since his trip in the air as a boy, he’d been uneasy about planes, but watching the P-38s, he felt a pull. He was still feeling it in September when Congress enacted a draft bill. Those who enlisted prior to being drafted could choose their service branch. In early 1941, Louie joined the Army Air Corps.*
Sent to the Hancock College of Aeronautics in Santa Maria, California, Louie learned that flying a plane was nothing like watching it from the ground. He was jittery and dogged by airsickness. He washed out of the air corps, signed papers that he didn’t bother to read, and got a job as a movie extra. He was working on the set of They Died with Their Boots On, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, when a letter arrived. He’d been drafted.
Louie in training. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
The induction date fell before the Flynn film would wrap, and Louie stood to earn a bonus if he stayed through the shoot. Just before his army physical, he ate a fistful of candy bars; thanks to the consequent soaring blood sugar, he failed the physical. Ordered to return a few days later to retake the test, he went back to the set and earned his bonus. Then, on September 29, he joined the army.
When he finished basic training, he had an unhappy surprise. Because he hadn’t read his air corps washout papers, he had no idea that he’d agreed to rejoin the corps for future service. In November 1941, he arrived at Ellington Field, in Houston, Texas. The military was going to make him a bombardier.
——
That fall, while Louie was on his way to becoming an airman, an urgent letter landed on the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI. It had come from a brigadier general at the War Department, Military Intelligence Division. The letter said that a credible informant had warned military officials that a California man, believed to be working for an innocuous local Japanese organization, had in fact been an employee of the Japanese navy, on assignment to raise money for Japan’s war effort. Japanese naval superiors had recently transferred the man to Washington, D.C., the informant said, to continue acting under their orders. According to the informant, the man was known as “Mr. Sasaki.” It was Louie’s friend Jimmie.
Though the surviving records of the informant’s report contain no details of Sasaki’s alleged activities, according to notes made later by a captain of the Torrance police, Sasaki had been making visits to a field adjacent to a power station, just off of Torrance Boulevard. There, he had erected a powerful radio transmitter, which he had used to send information to the Japanese government. If the allegation was true, it would explain Sasaki’s mysterious trips to Torrance. Louie’s good friend may have been a spy.
Sasaki had indeed moved to Washington, D.C., in the employ of the Japanese navy. He worked in the Japanese embassy and lived in an apartment building popular among congressmen. He made himself well known among the Washington elite, mixing with legislators at building cocktail parties, playing golf at the Army Navy Country Club, socializing with police officers and State Department officials, and volunteering to serve as chauffeur after parties. Just whose side he was on is unclear; at a cocktail party, he gave a congressman sensitive information on Japanese aircraft manufacturing.
The letter to the FBI set off alarm bells. Hoover, concerned enough to plan on informing the secretary of state, ordered an immediate investigation of Sasaki.
——
Not long after sunrise on a Sunday in December, a pilot guided a small plane over the Pacific. Below him, the dark sea gave way to a strand of white: waves slapping the northern tip of Oahu Island. The plane flew into a brilliant Hawaiian morning.
Oahu was beginning to stir. At Hickam Field, soldiers were washing a car. On Hula Lane, a family was dressing for Mass. At the officers’ club at Wheeler Field, men were leaving a poker game. In a barracks, two men were in the midst of a pillow fight. At Ewa Mooring Mast Field, a technical sergeant was peering through the lens of a camera at his three-year-old son. Hardly anyone had made it to the mess halls yet. Quite a few were still sleeping in their bunks in the warships, gently swaying in the harbor. Aboard the USS Arizona, an officer was about to suit up to play in the United States Fleet championship baseball game. On deck, men were assembling to raise flags as a band played the national anthem, a Sunday morning tradition.
Far above them, the pilot counted eight battleships, the Pacific Fleet’s full complement. There was a faint sheet of fog settled low to the ground.
The pilot’s name was Mitsuo Fuchida. He rolled back the canopy on his plane and sent a flare skidding green across the sky, then ordered his radioman to tap out a battle cry. Behind Fuchida, 180 Japanese planes peeled away and dove for Oahu.* On the deck of the Arizona, the men looked up.
In the barracks, one of the men in the pillow fight suddenly fell to the floor. He was dead, a three-inch hole blown through his neck. His friend ran to a window and saw a building heave upward and crumble down. A dive-bomber had crashed straight into it. There were red circles on its wings.
——
Pete Zamperini was at a friend’s house that morning, playing a few hands of high-low-jack before heading out for a round of golf. Behind him, the sizzle of waffles on a griddle competed with the chirp of a radio. An urgent voice interrupted the broadcast. The players put down their cards.
In Texas, Louie was in a theater, on a weekend pass. The theater was thick with servicemen, taking breaks from the endless drilling that was the life of the peacetime soldier. Midway through the showing, the screen went blank, light flooded the theater, and a man hurried onto the stage. Is there a fire? Louie wondered.
All servicemen must return to their bases immediately, the man said. Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor.
Louie would long remember sitting there with his eyes wide, his mind floundering. America was at war. He grabbed his hat and ran from the building.
B-24 LIBERATOR
*
Because indoor tracks are shorter than outdoor ones, forcing runners to make more turns to cover the same distance, indoor records are generally slower. In 1940, the outdoor mile world record was one second faster than the indoor record.
*
Höckert’s teammate Lauri Lehtinen, the 1932 5,000-meter Olympic champion, gave his gold medal to another Finnish soldier in Höckert’s honor.
*
Many other great runners also enlisted. When Norman Bright tried to sign up, he was rejected because of his alarmingly slow pulse, a consequence of his extreme fitness. He solved the problem by running three miles, straight into another enlistment office. Cunningham tried to join the navy, but recruiters, seeing his grotesquely scarred legs, assumed that he was too crippled to serve. When someone came in and mentioned his name, they realized who he was and signed him in.
*
One hundred and eighty-three planes were launched in this first of two waves, but two were lost on takeoff.
Six
The Flying Coffin
AS JAPANESE PLANES DOVE OVER OAHU, MORE THAN TWO thousand miles to the west, a few marines were sitting in a mess tent on Wake Atoll, having breakfast. Extremely small, lacking its own water supply, Wake would have been a useless atoll but for one enormous attribute: It lay far out in the Pacific, making it a strategically ideal spot for an air base. And so it was home to one runway and about five hundred bored American servicemen, mostly marines. Aside from the occasional refueling stopovers of Pan American World Airways planes, nothing interesting ever happened there. But that December morning, just as the marines were starting on their pancakes, an air-raid siren began wailing. By noon, the sky was streaked with Japanese bombers, buildings were exploding, and a few startled men on less than three square miles of coral found themselves on the front in the Second World War.
All over the Pacific that morning, the story was the same. In less than two hours over Pearl Harbor, Japan badly wounded the American navy and killed more than 2,400 people. Almost simultaneously, it attacked Thailand, Shanghai, Malaya, the Philippines, Guam, Midway, and Wake. In one day of breathtaking violence, a new Japanese onslaught had begun.
In America, invasion was expected at any moment. Less than an hour after the Japanese bombed Hawaii, mines were being laid in San Francisco Bay. In Washington, Civil Defense Minister Fiorello La Guardia looped around the city in a police car, sirens blaring, shouting the word “Calm!” into a loudspeaker. At the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt dashed off a letter to her daughter, Anna, urging her to get her children off the West Coast. A butler overheard the president speculating on what he’d do if Japanese forces advanced as far as Chicago. Meanwhile, just up Massachusetts Avenue, smoke billowed from the grounds of the Japanese embassy, where Jimmie Sasaki worked. Staffers were burning documents in the embassy yard. On the sidewalk, a crowd watched in silence.
On the night of December 7–8, there were four air-raid alerts in San Francisco. At Sheppard Field air corps school, in Texas, spooked officers ran through the barracks at four A.M., screaming that Japanese planes were coming and ordering the cadets to sprint outside and throw themselves on the ground. In coming days, trenches were dug along the California coast, and schools in Oakland were closed. From New Jersey to Alaska, reservoirs, bridges, tunnels, factories, and waterfronts were put under guard. In Kearney, Nebraska, citizens were instructed on disabling incendiary bombs with garden hoses. Blackout curtains were hung in windows across America, from solitary farmhouses to the White House. Shocking rumors circulated: Kansas City was about to be attacked. San Francisco was being bombed. The Japanese had captured the Panama Canal.
Japan galloped over the globe. On December 10, it invaded the Philippines and seized Guam. The next day, it invaded Burma; a few days later, British Borneo. Hong Kong fell on Christmas; North Borneo, Rabaul, Manila, and the U.S. base in the Philippines fell in January. The British were driven from Malaya and into surrender in Singapore in seventy days.
There was one snag: Wake, surely expected to be an easy conquest, wouldn’t give in. For three days, the Japanese bombed and strafed the atoll. On December 11, a vast force, including eleven destroyers and light cruisers, launched an invasion attempt. The little group of defenders shoved them back, sinking two destroyers and damaging nine other ships, shooting down two bombers, and forcing the Japanese to abort, their first loss of the war. It wasn’t until December 23 that the Japanese finally seized Wake and captured the men on it. To the Americans’ 52 military deaths, an estimated 1,153 Japanese had been killed.
For several days, the captives were held on the airfield, shivering by night, sweltering by day, singing Christmas carols to cheer themselves. They were initially slated for execution, but after a Japanese officer’s intervention, most were crowded into the holds of ships and sent to Japan and occupied China as some of the first Americans to become POWs under the Japanese. Unbeknownst to America, ninety-eight captives were kept on Wake. The Japanese were going to enslave them.
——
Though Louie had been miserable over having to rejoin the air corps, it wasn’t so bad after all. Training at Texas’s Ellington Field, then Midland Army Flying School, he earned superb test scores. The flying was usually straight and level, so airsickness wasn’t a problem. Best of all, women found the flyboy uniform irresistible. While Louie was out walking one afternoon, a convertible fringed in blondes pulled up, and he was scooped into the car and sped off to a party. When it happened a second time, he sensed a positive trend.
Louie was trained in the use of two bombsights. For dive-bombing, he had a $1 handheld sight consisting of an aluminum plate with a peg and a dangling weight. For flat runs, he had the Norden bombsight, an extremely sophisticated analog computer that, at $8,000, cost more than twice the price of the average American home. On a bombing run with the Norden sight, Louie would visually locate the target, make calculations, and feed information on air speed, altitude, wind, and other factors into the device. The bombsight would then take over flying the plane, follow a precise path to the target, calculate the drop angle, and release the bombs at the optimal moment. Once the bombs were gone, Louie would yell “Bombs away!” and the pilot would take control again. Norden bombsights were so secret that they were stored in guarded vaults and moved under armed escort, and the men were forbidden to photograph or write about them. If his plane was going down, Louie was under orders to fire his Colt .45 into the bombsight to prevent it from falling into enemy hands, then see about saving himself.
In August 1942, Louie, graduated from Midland, was commissioned a second lieutenant. He jumped into a friend’s Cadillac and drove to California to say good-bye to his family before heading into his final round of training, then war. Pete, now a navy chief petty officer stationed in San Diego, came home to see Louie off.
On the afternoon of August 19, the Zamperinis gathered on the front steps for a last photograph. Louie and Pete, dashing in their dress uniforms, stood on the bottom step with their mother between them, tiny beside her sons. Louise was on the verge of tears. The August sun was sharp on her face, and she and Louie squinted hard and looked slightly away from the camera, as if all before them was lost in the glare.
A last family photograph as Louie leaves to go to war. Rear, left to right: Sylvia’s future husband, Harvey Flammer; Virginia, Sylvia, and Anthony Zamperini. Front: Pete, Louise, and Louie. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
Louie and his father rode together to the train station. The platform was crowded with uniformed young men and crying parents, clinging to one another, saying good-bye. When Louie embraced his father, he could feel him shaking.
As his train pulled away, Louie looked out the window. His father stood with his hand in the air, a wavering smile on his face. Louie wondered if he’d ever see him again.
——
The train carried him to a perpetual dust storm known as Ephrata, Washington, where there was an air base in the middle of a dry lakebed. The lakebed was on a mission to bury the base, the men, and all of their planes, and it was succeeding. The air was so clouded with blowing dirt that men waded through drifts a foot and a half deep. Clothes left out of duffel bags were instantly filthy, and all of the meals, which the crews ate outside while sitting on the ground, were infused with sand. The ground crews, which had to replace twenty-four dirt-clogged aircraft engines in twenty-one days, resorted to spraying oil on the taxiways to keep the dust down. Getting the lakebed off the men was problematic; the hot water ran out long before the men did, and because the PX didn’t sell shaving soap, practically everyone had a brambly, dust-catching beard.
Not long after his arrival, Louie was standing at the base, sweating and despairing over the landscape, when a squarish second lieutenant walked up and introduced himself. He was Russell Allen Phillips, and he would be Louie’s pilot.
Born in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1916, Phillips had just turned twenty-six. He had grown up in a profoundly religious home in La Porte, Indiana, where his father had been a Methodist pastor. As a boy, he’d been so quiet that adults must have thought him timid, but he had a secret bold stripe. He snuck around his neighborhood with bags full of flour, launching guerrilla attacks on windshields of passing cars, and one Memorial Day weekend, he wedged himself into a car trunk to sneak into the infield of the Indy 500. He had gone to Purdue University, where he’d earned a degree in forestry and conservation. In ROTC, his captain had called him “the most unfit, lousy-looking soldier” he’d ever seen. Ignoring the captain’s assessment, Phillips had enlisted in the air corps, where he’d proven to be a born airman. At home, they called him Allen; in the air corps, they called him Phillips.
The first thing people tended to notice about Phillips was that they hadn’t noticed him earlier. He was so recessive that he could be in a room for a long time before anyone realized that he was there. He was smallish, short-legged. Some of the men called him Sandblaster because, said one pilot, “his fanny was so close to the ground.” For unknown reasons, he wore one pant leg markedly shorter than the other. He had a tidy, pleasant, boyish face that tended to blend with the scenery. This probably contributed to his invisibility, but what really did it was his silence. Phillips was an amiable man and was, judging by his letters, highly articulate, but he preferred not to speak. You could park him in a crowd of chattering partygoers and he’d emerge at evening’s end having never said a word. People had long conversations with him, only to realize later that he hadn’t spoken.
Russell Allen Phillips. Courtesy of Karen Loomis
If he had a boiling point, he never reached it. He rolled along with every inexplicable order from his superiors, every foolish act of his inferiors, and every abrasive personality that military life could throw at an officer. He dealt with every manner of adversity with calm, adaptive acceptance. In a crisis, Louie would learn, Phillips’s veins ran icewater.
Phillips had one consuming passion. When he had entered college, his father had taken a new pastorship in Terre Haute. There, Phillips’s sister had introduced him to a girl from the church choir, a college student named Cecile Perry, known as Cecy. She had blond hair, a curvy figure, a buoyant disposition, a quick mind, and a family cat named Chopper. She was studying to be a teacher. At a prom in Terre Haute, Allen kissed Cecy. He was a goner, and so was she.
On a Saturday night in November 1941, when he left for the air corps, Phillips spent five last minutes with Cecy at the Indianapolis train station. When the fighting was over, he promised, he’d make her his bride. He kept her photo on his footlocker and wrote her love letters several times a week. When she turned twenty-one, he sent her his pay and asked her to find an engagement ring. Allen’s ring was soon on Cecy’s finger.
In June 1942, just after her graduation, Cecy traveled to Phoenix to see Allen get his wings. Crazy in love, the two talked about running off to get hitched right then, but reconsidered, deciding to marry at his next training venue and live together there until he was deployed. That venue was Ephrata, and when Phillips saw it, he kicked himself. “I’ve wished 100 times that we had gotten married when we were at Phoenix,” he wrote to her, “but I wouldn’t ask you now to come out here + live in a dump like Ephrata.” Again, they postponed their wedding. In the fall, Allen’s training would be finished. Then, they hoped, they’d have one more chance to see each other before he went to war.
In Ephrata, Louie and Phillips fell in together. Phillips floated along contentedly in Louie’s chatty bonhomie; Louie liked Phillips’s quiet steadiness, and thought him the kindest person he’d ever met. They never had a single argument and were almost never apart. Phillips called Louie “Zamp”; Louie called Phillips “Phil.”
Phil’s crew. Left to right: Phillips, temporary copilot Gross, Zamperini, Mitchell, Douglas, Pillsbury, and Glassman. Moznette, Lambert, and Brooks are not pictured. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
The rest of Phil’s bomber crew assembled. Serving as engineer and top turret gunner would be twenty-two-year-old Stanley Pillsbury, who’d been running his family’s Maine farm before joining up. The other engineer was Virginia native Clarence Douglas, who would operate one of the two side-directed waist guns, behind the wings. The navigator and nose gunner would be Robert Mitchell, a professor’s son from Illinois. Tiny Frank Glassman, with his tightly curled hair, was a dead ringer for Harpo Marx. He would be their radioman and, later, their belly gunner. Because Frank hailed from Chicago, the men called him Gangster. Ray Lambert of Maryland would man the tail gun. The crew’s girl magnet was Harry Brooks, a good-looking, ebullient radioman and waist gunner from Michigan. The copilot would be George Moznette, Jr. Because copilots were rotated from plane to plane as they qualified to be pilots, Moznette wouldn’t stay with the crew, but he became fast friends with Phil and Louie.
Moznette, Mitchell, Phil, and Louie were officers; the others were enlisted. All were bachelors, but Harry Brooks, like Phil, had a steady girl back home. Her name was Jeannette, and before the war, she and Harry had set their wedding date for May 8, 1943.
——
The men were issued heavy sheepskin jackets and wool clothing, assembled, and photographed. They would make up crew No. 8 in the nine-crew 372nd Bomb Squadron of the 307th Bomb Group, Seventh Air Force. All they needed was a plane.
Louie was hoping to be assigned to a B-17 Flying Fortress. It was the kind of plane that men wanted to be seen in: handsome, masculine, nimble, fiercely armed, reliable, long-winded, and practically indestructible. The plane that no one wanted was a new bomber, Consolidated Aircraft’s B-24 Liberator. On paper, it was generally comparable to the B-17, but for one major advantage. Thanks to auxiliary fuel tanks and slender, ultraefficient Davis wings, it could fly literally all day, a decisive asset in the sprawling World War II theaters.
Flat-faced, rectangular, and brooding, the B-24 had looks only a myopic mother could love. Crewmen gave it a host of nicknames, among them “the Flying Brick,” “the Flying Boxcar,” and “the Constipated Lumberer,” a play on Consolidated Liberator. The cockpit was oppressively cramped, forcing pilot and copilot to live cheek by jowl for missions as long as sixteen hours. Craning over the mountainous control panel, the pilot had a panoramic view of his plane’s snout and not much else. Navigating the nine-inch-wide bomb bay catwalk could be difficult, especially in turbulence; one slip and you’d tumble into the bay, which was fitted with fragile aluminum doors that would tear away with the weight of a falling man.
Taxiing was an adventure. The B-24’s wheels had no steering, so the pilot had to cajole the bomber along by feeding power to one side’s engines, then the other, and working back and forth on the left and right brakes, one of which was usually much more sensitive than the other. This made the taxiways a pageant of lurching planes, all of which, sooner or later, ended up veering into places nowhere near where their pilots intended them to go, and from which they often had to be extricated with shovels.
A pilot once wrote that the first time he got into a B-24 cockpit, “it was like sitting on the front porch and flying the house.” The sentiment was common. The Liberator was one of the heaviest planes in the world; the D model then in production weighed 71,200 pounds loaded. Flying it was like wrestling a bear, leaving pilots weary and sore. Because pilots usually manned the yoke with their left hands while their right hands worked the other controls, B-24 pilots were instantly recognizable when shirtless, because the muscles on their left arms dwarfed those on their right arms. The plane was so clumsy that it was difficult to fly in the tight formations that were critical to fending off attack. A squiggle of turbulence, or a crewman walking inside the fuselage, would tip the plane off its axis.
The B-24 was plagued with mechanical difficulties. If one of the four engines quit, staying airborne was challenging; the failure of two engines was often an emergency. Shortly after the plane was introduced, there were several incidents in which B-24 tails dropped off in midair. And though the war was young, the plane was winning a reputation for being delicate, especially in the skinny wings, which could snap off if struck in combat. Some of the men at Ephrata thought of the B-24 as a death trap.
After a long wait, the 372nd squadron’s planes flew into Ephrata. Phil’s crew walked out and squinted at the horizon. Even from a distance, there was no mistaking the silhouettes. As the men grumbled, Louie heard one voice pipe up.
“It’s the Flying Coffin.”
——
They were assigned to a B-24D that looked like all the others. For the next three months—in Ephrata in August and September and Sioux City in October—they practically lived in it. They flew in formation, fired at targets pulled by tow planes, simulated combat runs, and dive-bombed. One day they buzzed so low over Iowa that the propellers kicked up a storm of sand, skinning the paint off the plane’s belly and scouring the legs of Pillsbury, who was sitting by the open hatch in the tail, trying to photograph their dummy bombs as they fell into target nets. Throughout it all, Louie perched in the glass-windowed “greenhouse” in the plane’s nose, bombing targets. The COs soon learned of the squadron’s prowess; angry farmers came calling after the 372nd’s hundred-pound bombs flattened an outhouse and one unfortunate cow.
Phil’s crew had their first scare at Ephrata. On a training flight, they had radio trouble and got lost, flew around in a blind confusion for hours, and ended up landing at nearly midnight in Spokane, half a state away from their slated destination. They’d been missing for three and a half hours, and the entire West Coast air corps had been hunting for them. When Phil stepped off the plane, he got one chewing out from a colonel. When he flew back to Ephrata, he got another, in stereo, from a colonel and major. “I grew a little older that night, sweet, believe me,” he wrote to Cecy.
The panic had been justified, for accidents were common and deadly. Before Louie had begun his bombardier training, he had received a letter from a friend who was an air corps cadet.
I guess you read about the cadet and instructor who was killed here last week. The poor devils never had a chance. They stalled their ship while turning from base leg onto landing approach. The ship made a one-turn spin and then really hit the ground … When they hit it tore their bodies to peaces. The safety belt cut the instructor half in-two. All over the wrecked part of the airplane it look like somebody took and threw about three pans of tomatoes and crakers all over it (blood and flesh) They were mangled to bits, couldn’t even identify them looking at them.
It was the kind of story that was filling the letters of would-be airmen all over the country. Pilot and navigator error, mechanical failure, and bad luck were killing trainees at a stunning rate. In the Army Air Forces, or AAF,* there were 52,651 stateside aircraft accidents over the course of the war, killing 14,903 personnel. Though some of these personnel were probably on coastal patrol and other duties, it can be presumed that the vast majority were trainees, killed without ever seeing a combat theater. In the three months in which Phil’s men trained as a crew, 3,041 AAF planes—more than 33 per day—met with accidents stateside, killing nine men per day. In subsequent months, death tallies exceeding 500 were common. In August 1943, 590 airmen would die stateside, 19 per day.
Louie, Phil, and their crew saw the dying firsthand. In July, Phil’s close friend had been killed in a B-24, just after Phil had had dinner with him. On another day, Phil’s crew spent part of a rainy morning sitting in a briefing room with another crew as they awaited flights. Both crews went to their planes, but at the last minute, Phil’s crew was ordered back. The other crew took off, flew two miles, and crashed, killing the pilot and navigator. In October in Sioux City, another bomber from their group plowed onto a field, killing two. When he learned that the press was reporting on the crash without giving the crewmen’s names, Phil ran out of a meeting to get word to his family that he hadn’t been on the plane.
The air corps did its best to teach men how to survive a crash. Men were drilled in preparing their planes for impact and equipping themselves for postcrash survival. Each man was assigned to a crash station, which in Louie’s case was by the waist window behind the right wing. They were also schooled in bailout simulations, jumping from parked planes. Some rolled off the catwalk and dropped through the open bomb bay doors; others leapt from the waist windows, wondering how, if jumping from an airborne plane, they’d avoid being cut in two by the twin rudders just behind the windows. They were also taught how to ditch, or make a controlled landing on water. Phil studied dutifully, but he found the idea of landing a giant bomber on water “kind of silly.” The training films surely deepened his doubts; in every film, the ditching B-24 broke apart.
Training was a crucible, and it transformed Phil’s crew. They would not all live through what lay ahead, but the survivors would speak of their good fortune in serving among such skilled men. They worked together with seamless efficiency, and judging by their training scores, in the grim business of bombs and bullets, there was no better crew in the squadron. Among surviving crewmen and men from other crews, the warmest praise would be reserved for Phil. B-24s were built for tall pilots, and though Phil needed a cushion to get his feet to the pedals and his eyes over the control panel, by all accounts he was superb at his job. Phil, Louie told a reporter, was “a damn swell pilot.”
The B-24 assigned to Phil’s crew had its own personality. It had a valve that oozed fuel into the bomb bay, prompting Pillsbury to develop a nervous habit of pacing the fuselage, sniffing the air. It had a curmudgeonly fuel transfer valve that Pillsbury and Douglas had to finesse into place, lest it stick wide open, slow an engine, or trigger a deafening backfire. The fuel gauges were reliable only until the tanks neared empty, at which point they sometimes reported that the plane was magically gaining fuel. One engine, for reasons known only to the plane, was thirstier than the others, so the gauges had to be watched constantly.
In time, the men’s misgivings about the Liberator fell away. In hundreds of hours of intense training, their plane never failed them. For all its ugliness and quirks, it was a noble thing, rugged and inexhaustible. The ground crewmen felt the same, nursing Phil’s plane with affection and fretting while it flew. When it returned, they received it with relief, scolding the crew for any scratches. Airmen talked of “flying boxcars,” but Phil and Louie dismissed them. Louie described it as “our home.”
On the ground, the crew drank together, swam in the local lakes, and cruised around Ephrata and Sioux City. In the latter, Louie discovered that the enlisted ground crewmen, who had preceded them into town, had convinced the local women that their insignia indicated that they were officers. As Louie set off to right this wrong, Phil pulled night duty at the operations office. Sometime one night, he drifted into a troubled dream. In it, he came home from the war only to find that Cecy had given him up.
——
On a Saturday afternoon in mid-October of 1942, the men of the 372nd were told to pack their bags. Their training was being cut short, and they were to be sent to California’s Hamilton Field, then rushed overseas. Phil was crestfallen; Cecy was about to come see him. He would miss her by three days. On October 20, the squadron flew out of Iowa.
At Hamilton Field, an artist was working his way down the planes, painting each one’s name and accompanying illustration. Naming bombers was a grand tradition. Many B-24 crews dreamed up delightfully clever names, among them E Pluribus Aluminum, Axis Grinder, The Bad Penny, and Bombs Nip On. Quite a few of the rest were shamelessly bawdy, painted with scantily clad and unclad women. One featured a sailor chasing a naked girl around the fuselage. Its name was Willie Maker. Louie had a snapshot taken of himself grinning under one of the more ribald examples.
Phil’s plane needed a name, and no one could think of one. After the war, the survivors would have different memories of who named the plane, but in a letter penned that fall, Phil would write that it was copilot George Moznette who suggested Super Man. Everyone liked it, and the name was painted on the plane’s nose, along with the superhero himself, a bomb in one hand and a machine gun in the other. Louie didn’t think much of the painting—in photographs, the gun looks like a shovel—but Phil loved it. Most crews referred to their planes as “she.” Phil insisted that his plane was all man.
The men were slated for combat, but they hadn’t been told where they would serve. Judging by the heavy winter gear, Louie thought that they were bound for Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, which had been invaded by the Japanese months before. He was happily wrong: they were going to Hawaii. On the evening of October 24, Louie called home for a last good-bye. He just missed Pete, who came for a visit only a few minutes after his brother hung up.
Sometime after speaking to Louie, Louise pulled out a set of note cards on which she kept lists of Christmas card recipients. After Louie’s last visit home, she’d taken out one of the cards and, on it, jotted down the date and a few words about Louie’s departure. This day, she noted Louie’s phone call. These were the first two entries in what would become Louise’s war diary.
Phil at the helm of Super Man. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
Before he left Hamilton Field, Louie dropped a little package in the mail, addressed to his mother. When Louise opened it, she found inside a pair of airman’s wings. Every morning, through all that lay ahead for her, Louise would pin the wings to her dress. Every night, before she went to bed, she’d take them off her dress and pin them to her nightgown.
——
On November 2, 1942, Phil’s crew climbed aboard Super Man and readied to go to war. They were heading into a desperate fight. North to south, Japan’s new empire stretched five thousand miles, from the snowbound Aleutians to Java, hundreds of miles south of the equator. West to east, the empire sprawled over more than six thousand miles, from the border of India to the Gilbert and Marshall islands in the central Pacific. In the Pacific, virtually everything above Australia and west of the international date line had been taken by Japan. Only a few eastward islands had been spared, among them the Hawaiian Islands, Midway, Canton, Funafuti, and a tiny paradise called Palmyra. It was from these outposts that the men of the AAF were trying to win the Pacific, as the saying went, “one damned island after another.”
That day, Super Man banked over the Pacific for the first time. The crew was bound for Oahu’s Hickam Field, where the war had begun for America eleven months before, and where it would soon begin for them. The rim of California slid away, and then there was nothing but ocean. From this day forward, until victory or defeat, transfer, discharge, capture, or death took them from it, the vast Pacific would be beneath and around them. Its bottom was already littered with downed warplanes and the ghosts of lost airmen. Every day of this long and ferocious war, more would join them.
*
In June 1941, the air corps became a subordinate arm of the Army Air Forces. It remained in existence as a combat branch of the army until 1947.
Seven
“This Is It, Boys”
OAHU WAS STILL RINGING FROM THE JAPANESE ATTACK. The enemy had left so many holes in the roads that the authorities hadn’t been able to fill them all yet, leaving the local drivers swerving around craters. There were still a few gouges in the roof of the Hickam Field barracks, making for soggy airmen when it rained. The island was on constant alert for air raids or invasion, and was so heavily camouflaged, a ground crewman wrote in his diary, that “one sees only about ⅓ of what is actually there.” Each night, the island disappeared; every window was fitted with lightproof curtains, every car with covered headlights, and blackout patrols enforced rules so strict that a man wasn’t even permitted to strike a match. Servicemen were under orders to carry gas masks in hip holsters at all times. To reach their beloved waves, local surfers had to worm their way under the barbed wire that ran the length of Waikiki Beach.
The 372nd squadron was sent to Kahuku, a beachside base at the foot of a blade of mountains on the north shore. Louie and Phil, who would soon be promoted to first lieutenant, were assigned to a barracks with Mitchell, Moznette, twelve other young officers, and hordes of mosquitoes. “You kill one,” Phil wrote, “and ten more come to the funeral.” Outside, the building was picturesque; inside, Phil wrote, it looked “like a dozen dirty Missouri pigs have been wallowing on it.” The nonstop revelry didn’t help matters. After one four A.M. knock-down, drag-out water fight involving all sixteen officers, Phil woke up with floor burns on his elbows and knees. On another night, as Louie and Phil wrestled over a beer, they crashed into the flimsy partition separating their room from the next. The partition keeled over, and Phil and Louie kept staggering forward, toppling two more partitions before they stopped. When Colonel William Matheny, the 307th Bomb Group commander, saw the wreckage, he grumbled something about how Zamperini must have been involved.
There was one perk to life in the barracks. The bathroom was plastered in girlie pinups, a Sistine Chapel of pornography. Phil gaped at it, marveling at the distillation of frustrated flyboy libido that had inspired it. Here in the pornographic palace, he was a long way from his minister father’s house in Indiana.
——
Everyone was eager to take a crack at the enemy, but there was no combat to be had. In its place were endless lectures, endless training, and, when Moznette was transferred to another crew, the breaking in of a series of temporary copilots. Eventually, Long Beach, California, native Charleton Hugh Cuppernell joined the crew as Moznette’s replacement. A smart, jovial ex–football player and prelaw student, built like a side of beef, Cuppernell got along with everyone, dispensing wisecracks through teeth clenched around a gnawed-up cigar.
Louie, ready for the chill of high altitude. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
When they first went up over Hawaii, the men were surprised to learn that their arctic gear hadn’t been issued in error. At ten thousand feet, even in the tropics, it could be sharply cold, and occasionally the bombardier’s greenhouse windows froze. Only the flight deck up front was heated, so the men in the rear tramped around in fleece jackets, fur-lined boots, and, sometimes, electrically heated suits. The ground crewmen used the bombers as flying iceboxes, hiding soda bottles in them and retrieving them, ice-cold, after missions.
Training mostly over Kauai, the men discovered their talent. Though they had a few mishaps—Phil once taxied Super Man straight into a telephone pole—in aerial gunning, they nailed targets at a rate more than three times the squadron average. Louie’s bombing scores were outstanding. In one dive-bombing exercise, he hit the target dead center seven of nine times. The biggest chore of training was coping with the nitpicking, rank-pulling, much-loathed lieutenant who oversaw their flights. Once, when one of Super Man’s engines quit during a routine flight, Phil turned the plane back and landed at Kahuku, only to be accosted by the furious lieutenant in a speeding jeep, ordering them back up. When Louie offered to fly on three engines so long as the lieutenant joined them, the lieutenant abruptly changed his mind.
When the men weren’t training, they were on sea search, spending ten hours a day patrolling a wedge of ocean, looking for the enemy. It was intensely dull work. Louie killed time by sleeping on Mitchell’s navigator table and taking flying lessons from Phil. On some flights, he sprawled behind the cockpit, reading Ellery Queen novels and taxing the nerves of Douglas, who eventually got so annoyed at having to step over Louie’s long legs that he attacked him with a fire extinguisher. Once, the gunners got so bored that they fired at a pod of whales. Phil yelled at them to knock it off, and the whales swam on, unharmed. The bullets, it turned out, carried lethal speed for only a few feet after entering the water. One day, this would be very useful knowledge.
One morning on sea search, Phil’s crew passed over an American submarine sitting placidly on the surface, crewmen ambling over the deck. Louie flashed the identification code three times, but the sub crew ignored him. Louie and Phil decided to “scare the hell out of them.” As Louie rolled open the bomb bay doors, Phil sent the plane screaming down over the submarine. “The retreat from the deck was so hasty, it looked like they were sucked into the sub,” Louie wrote in his diary. “I gave the skipper an F for identification, but an A+ for a quick dive.”
The tedium of sea search made practical joking irresistible. When a loudmouth ground officer griped about the higher pay allotted to airmen, the crew invited him to fly the plane himself. During the flight, they sat him in the copilot’s seat while Louie hid under the navigator’s table, next to the chains that linked the plane’s yokes to the control surfaces. When the officer took the yoke, Louie began tugging the chains, making the plane swoop up and down. The officer panicked, Louie smothered his laughter, and Phil kept a perfect poker face. The officer never again complained about airmen’s pay.
Copilot Charleton Hugh Cuppernell. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
Louie’s two proudest moments as a prankster both involved chewing gum. After Cuppernell and Phil swiped Louie’s beer, Louie retaliated by sneaking out to Super Man and jamming gum into the cockpit “piss pipe”—the urine relief tube. During that day’s flight, the call of nature was followed by an inexplicably brimming piss pipe, turbulence, and at least one wet airman. Louie hid in Honolulu for two days to escape retribution. On another day, to get even with Cuppernell and Phil for regularly stealing his chewing gum, Louie replaced his ordinary gum with a laxative variety. Just before a long day of sea search, Cuppernell and Phil each stole three pieces, triple the standard dose. As Super Man flew over the Pacific that morning, Louie watched with delight as pilot and copilot, in great distress, made alternating dashes to the back of the plane, yelling for someone to get a toilet bag ready. On his last run, Cuppernell discovered that all the bags had been used. With nowhere else to go, he dropped his pants and hung his rear end out the waist window while four crewmen clung to him to prevent him from falling out. When the ground crew saw the results all over Super Man’s tail, they were furious. “It was like an abstract painting,” Louie said later.
Phil’s remedy for boredom was hotdogging. After each day of sea search, he and another pilot synchronized their returns to Oahu. The one in front would buzz the island with wheels up, seeing how low he could get without skinning the plane’s underside, then goad the other into going lower. Phil hummed Super Man so close to the ground that he could look straight into the first-floor windows of buildings. It was, he said in his strolling cadence, “kind of daring.”
——
For each day in the air, the crew got a day off. They played poker, divvied up Cecy’s care packages, and went to the movies. Louie ran laps around the runway, keeping his body in Olympic condition. On the beach at Kahuku, he and Phil inflated their mattress covers, made a go at the waves, and nearly drowned themselves. Tooling around the island in borrowed cars, they came upon several airfields, but when they drew closer, they realized that all of the planes and equipment were fake, made of plywood, an elaborate ruse designed to fool Japanese reconnaissance planes. And in Honolulu, they found their Everest. It was the House of P. Y. Chong steakhouse, where for $2.50 they could get a steak nearly as fat as a man’s arm and as broad as his head. Louie never saw a Chong diner finish his meal.
For the officer half of the crew, paradise was Honolulu’s North Shore officers’ club, where there were tennis courts, pretty girls with ten-thirty curfews, and boilermakers. When the crew got the best gunnery scores in the squadron, Louie rewarded the enlisted men by pinning his insignia to their uniforms and sneaking them into the club. Just after Louie got up to dance with a girl, Colonel Matheny sat down in his place and began talking to the terrified Clarence Douglas, who was pretending to be a second lieutenant. When Louie finally got free and ran to Douglas’s rescue, the unsuspecting colonel stood up and told him what a damn fine man Douglas was.
Waiting to fly. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
One day on the club’s dance floor, Louie spotted the lieutenant who had ordered them to fly on three engines. He scrounged up a bag of flour, recruited a girl, and began dancing in circles near the lieutenant, dropping a pinch of flour down the officer’s collar each time he swung past. After an hour of this, the whole club was watching. Finally, Louie snagged a glass of water, danced up behind his victim, dumped the water down his shirt, and took off. The lieutenant spun around, his back running with dough. Unable to find the culprit, he stormed out, and Louie was the toast of the club. “We had one more girl for us,” he said.
November became December, and the crew still hadn’t seen any Japanese. There was hard fighting down on Guadalcanal, and the men felt excluded, frustrated, and intensely curious about combat. Every time a B-17 was brought up from the fighting, Louie and his friends went to the airfield to gawk at it. At first, all the planes looked the same. Then an airman showed them a lone bullet hole. “My golly!” Louie said later. “Our hair stood on end.”
——
Three days before Christmas, the crew’s hour finally came. They and twenty-five other crews were told to pack three days’ worth of clothes and report to their planes. Walking out to Super Man, Louie found the bomb bay fitted with two auxiliary fuel tanks and six five-hundred-pound bombs. Judging by the auxiliary tanks, Louie wrote in his diary, their destination was likely “a long hop somewhere.” Instead of the Norden bombsight, Louie was given the handheld sight, which probably meant that they’d be dive-bombing. The crew was handed a packet of orders and told not to open them until airborne.
Five minutes after Super Man lifted off, the crewmen tore open the orders and learned that they were to make a heading for Midway. When they landed there eight hours later, they were greeted with a case of Budweiser and very big news: The Japanese had built a base on Wake Atoll. In the biggest raid yet staged in the Pacific war, the AAF was going to burn the base down.
The next afternoon, the crew was called to the briefing room, which was actually the base theater, strung with limp Christmas tinsel and streamers. They were going to hit Wake that night, with dive-bombing. The mission would take sixteen hours, nonstop, the longest combat flight the war had yet seen. This would push the B-24s as far as they could go. Even with auxiliary fuel tanks, they would be cutting it extremely close.
Before the flight, Louie walked to the airfield. The ground crewmen were preparing the planes, stripping out every ounce of excess weight and rolling black paint on the bellies and wings to make them harder to see against a night sky. Coming to Super Man, Louie climbed into the bomb bay, where the bombs sat ready. In honor of his college buddy Payton Jordan, who had just married his high school sweetheart, Louie scrawled Marge and Payton Jordan on a bomb.
At 4:00 P.M. on December 23, 1942, twenty-six B-24s, laden with some 73,000 gallons of fuel and 75,000 pounds of bombs, rose up from Midway. Super Man slipped toward the rear of the procession. All afternoon and into the evening, the planes flew toward Wake. The sun set, and the bombers pressed on under the timid glow of moon and stars.
At eleven P.M., when his plane was about 150 miles from Wake, Phil switched off the outside lights. Clouds closed in. The bombers were supposed to approach the atoll in formation, but with clouds around and the lights off, the pilots couldn’t find their flightmates. They couldn’t risk breaking radio silence, so each plane went on alone. The pilots craned into the dark, swerving away from the faint shadows of others, trying to avoid collisions. Wake was very close now, but they couldn’t see it. Sitting in the top turret of Super Man, Stanley Pillsbury wondered if he’d make it back alive. In the greenhouse below, Louie felt a buzzing inside himself, the same sensation that he had felt before races. Ahead, Wake slept.
——
At exactly midnight, Colonel Matheny, piloting the lead plane, Dumbo the Avenger, broke radio silence.
“This is it, boys.”
Matheny dropped Dumbo’s nose and sent the bomber plunging out of the clouds. There beneath him was Wake, three slender islands joining hands around a lagoon. As his copilot called out speed and altitude figures, Matheny pushed his plane toward a string of buildings on Peacock Point, the atoll’s southern tip. On either side of Matheny’s plane, B-24s followed him down. When he reached his bombing altitude, Matheny hauled the plane’s nose up and yelled to the bombardier.
“When are you going to turn loose those incendiaries?”
“Gone, sir!”
At that instant, the buildings on Peacock Point exploded. It was forty-five seconds past midnight.
Matheny tipped his bomber and looked down. Peacock Point, struck by Dumbo’s bombs and those of its flanking planes, was engulfed in fire. Matheny knew he’d been lucky; the Japanese had been caught sleeping, and no one had yet manned the antiaircraft guns. As Matheny turned back toward Midway, wave after wave of B-24s dove at Wake. The Japanese ran for their guns.
Up in Super Man, well behind and above Matheny’s plane, Louie saw broad, quick throbs of light in the clouds. He hit the bomb bay door control valve, and the doors rumbled open. He set his bomb rack on the “select” position, flipped on his bomb switches, and fixed the settings. Phil’s orders were to dive to 4,000 feet before dropping the bombs, but when he reached that altitude, he was still lost in clouds. Louie’s target was the airstrip, but he couldn’t see it. Phil pushed the plane still lower, moving at terrific speed. Suddenly, at 2,500 feet, Super Man speared through the clouds and Wake stretched out, sudden and brilliant, beneath it.
Pillsbury would never shake the memory of what he saw. “It looked like a star storm,” he remembered. The islands, sealed in blackness a moment before, were a blaze of garish light. Several large infernos, spewing black smoke, were consuming the atoll’s oil tanks. Everywhere, bombs were striking targets, sending up mushrooms of fire. Searchlights swung about, their beams reflecting off the clouds and back onto the ground, illuminating scores of Japanese, wearing only fundoshi undergarments, sprinting around in confusion. What neither Pillsbury nor any of the other airmen knew was that among the men under their bombers that night were the ninety-eight Americans who had been captured and enslaved.
Waist and tail gunners in the bombers fired downward, and one by one, the searchlights blew to pieces. To Pillsbury, “every gun in the world” seemed to be firing skyward. Antiaircraft guns lobbed shells over the planes, where they erupted, sending shrapnel showering down. Tracers from the firing above and below streaked the air in yellow, red, and green. As Pillsbury watched the clamor of colors, he thought of Christmas. Then he remembered: They had crossed the international date line and passed midnight. It was Christmas.
Phil wrestled Super Man out of its dive. As the plane leveled off, Louie spotted the taillight of a Zero rolling down the north-south runway. He began synchronizing on the light, hoping to hit the Zero before it took off. Below, very close, something exploded, and Super Man rocked. A shell burst by the left wing, another by the tail. Louie could see tracers cutting neat lines in the sky to the right. He loosed a bomb over the south end of the runway, counted two seconds, then dropped his five other bombs over a set of bunkers and parked planes beside the runway.
Relieved of three thousand pounds of bombs, Super Man bobbed upward. Louie yelled “Bombs away!” and Phil rolled the plane roughly to the left, through streams of antiaircraft fire. Louie looked down. His group of five bombs landed in splashes of fire on the bunkers and planes. He’d been a beat too late to hit the Zero. His bomb fell just behind it, lighting up the runway. Phil turned Super Man back for Midway. Wake was a sea of fire and running men.
——
The crew was jumpy, coursing with adrenaline. There were several Zeros in the air, but in the darkness, no one knew where they were. Somewhere in the galaxy of planes, a Zero fired on a bomber, which fired back. The Zero disappeared. Pillsbury looked to the side and saw yellow dashes of tracer fire, heading directly toward them. A B-24 gunner had mistaken them for an enemy plane and was firing on them. Phil saw it just as Pillsbury did, and swung the plane away. The firing stopped.
The bomb bay doors were stuck open. The motors strained, but couldn’t budge them. Louie climbed back and looked. When Phil had wrenched the plane out of its dive, the enormous g-forces had nudged the auxiliary fuel tanks out of place, just enough to block the doors. Nothing could be done. With the bomb bay yawning open and dragging against the air, the plane was burning much more fuel than usual. Given that this mission was stretching the plane’s range to the limit, it was sobering news.
The men could do nothing but wait and hope. They passed around pineapple juice and roast beef sandwiches. Louie was drained, both from the combat and the incessant quivering of the plane. He stared out, sleepy, watching the stars through breaks in the clouds.
Seventy-five miles away from Wake, one of the men looked back. He could still see the island burning.
——
As day broke over the Pacific, Brigadier General Howard K. Ramey stood by the Midway airstrip, looking at the clouds and waiting for his bombers. His face was furrowed. A brow of fog hung two hundred feet over the ocean, spilling rain. In some places, visibility was down to a few yards. Finding tiny, flat Midway would be difficult, and there was the question of whether the bombers’ fuel would last long enough to bring them home.
One plane appeared, then another and another. One by one, they landed, all critically low on fuel, one with a dead engine. Super Man wasn’t in sight.
Out in the fog, Phil must have looked at his fuel gauge and known that he was in real trouble. With his bomb bay open and wind howling through the fuselage, he had dragged away most of his fuel and was running on empty. He didn’t know if he’d be able to find Midway, and he didn’t have enough fuel to make a second pass. At last, at around eight A.M., he saw Midway dimly through the mist. A moment later, one of Super Man’s engines sputtered and died.
Phil knew that the other engines would quit almost immediately. He nursed the plane along, spotting the runway and aiming for it. The engines kept turning. Phil dropped Super Man and touched down. Just after the plane turned off the runway, a second engine died. As it reached its bunker, the other two engines quit. Had the route been only slightly longer, Super Man would have hit the ocean.
General Ramey ran to each bomber, calling out congratulations. The tired Super Man crewmen dropped out of the plane and into a mob of marines, who’d spent a year waiting to deliver retribution to the Japanese for what they’d done to their brothers at Wake. The marines passed out shots of liquor and feted the airmen.
The mission had been a smashing success. Every plane had returned safely. Only one bomb had missed its target, plopping into the water twenty feet offshore. The Japanese base had been gravely damaged—by one estimate, half of its personnel had been killed—and America had demonstrated the reach and power of its B-24s. And though the men didn’t know it, the American captives had all survived.
Phil’s crew spent the day sitting in the rain, watching several albatrosses make comically inept attempts at landing on the flooded runway. Early the next morning, Super Man carried them back to Kahuku. Louie spent New Year’s Eve at a party with Moznette and his bombardier, James Carringer, Jr., and didn’t drag himself back to the pornographic palace until four-thirty. He pulled himself together a few hours later, when Admiral Chester Nimitz presented the Wake pilots with Distinguished Flying Crosses and their crewmen with Air Medals.
News of the raid broke, and the men were lauded as heroes. The press played up their Christmas gift to the Allies. STEEL FILLS JAP SOX, read one headline. In Tokyo, radio broadcasters had a different take. They reported that the Americans, upon encountering Japanese defenses, had “fled in terror.” In the Honolulu Advertiser, Louie found a cartoon depicting his role in bombing Wake. He clipped it out and tucked it in his wallet.
With the dawn of 1943 and the success at Wake, the men felt cocky. It had all been so easy. One admiral predicted that Japan might be finished within the year, and Phil overheard men talking about going home.
“Methinks,” he wrote to his mother, “it’s a little premature.”
Eight
“Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was”
IT WAS EARLY MORNING ON JANUARY 8, 1943. THE SUN HADN’T yet risen. George Moznette and James Carringer, who had spent New Year’s Eve with Louie, joined their crew at the beachside airstrip at Barking Sands on Kauai, preparing to lead a three-plane training run over Pearl Harbor. The pilot was Major Jonathan Coxwell, one of Phil’s closest friends.
As he taxied out for his flight, Coxwell tried to reach the control tower, but the tower’s radio was down. He powered his plane down the runway, lifted off, and flew over the beach and into the darkness. The two other planes took off after Coxwell. Later that morning, they returned. Coxwell’s plane did not. No one had seen it since takeoff.
During a briefing at eight, Louie was told that Coxwell’s plane was missing. Phil’s crew was slated for practice bombing off Barking Sands that morning, so they went early and walked the beach, looking for some sign of their friends. Someone found a $400 paycheck that had washed ashore. It was made out to Moznette.
The Super Man crew was fifteen thousand feet up when the lost B-24 was found, lying on the ocean floor not far offshore. All ten crewmen were dead.
Coxwell had barely made it past takeoff. He had cleared the runway, turned, and slammed into the water. Several crewmen had survived the crash and tried to swim to land, but sharks had found them. The men were, Louie wrote in his diary, “literally ripped to pieces.” Five, including Moznette, had lived in the pornographic palace with Louie and Phil. Carringer had just been promoted to first lieutenant, but had died before anyone could tell him. They were buried in the cemetery in Honolulu, joining the men killed at Pearl Harbor.
The B-24 Stevenovich II just after being struck by flak. The plane spun several times, then exploded. The radar operator, First Lieutenant Edward Walsh, Jr., was thrown from the plane and managed to open his parachute. He survived. The other crewmen were presumed dead.
——
Louie was shaken. He’d been in Hawaii for only two months, yet already several dozen men from his bomb group, including more than a quarter of the men in his barracks, had been killed.
The first loss had come on the flight from San Francisco, when a B-24 had simply vanished. This fate was sadly common; between 1943 and 1945, four hundred AAF crews were lost en route to their theaters. Next, a plane had caught fire and crashed at Kahuku, killing four men. Another plane had hit a mountain. A bomber had been forced down after losing all four engines, killing two. In one bomber, a green engineer transferring fuel across the wings had caused gasoline to pool on the floor of the bomb bay. When the bomb bay doors had scraped open, igniting a spark, the plane had exploded. Three men had survived, including a passenger whose hand had happened to be resting on a parachute when the blast flung him from the plane. After the Wake raid, a plane sent to photograph the damage had been hit by antiaircraft fire. The crew had sent out a last message—“Can’t make it”—and was never heard from again. Then had come Coxwell’s crash.
These losses, only one due to enemy action, were hardly anomalous. In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.
As planes went, so went men. In the air corps, 35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in accidental crashes.* Even in combat, airmen appear to have been more likely to die from accidents than combat itself. A report issued by the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.
In many cases, the problem was the planes. In part because they were new technology, and in part because they were used so heavily, planes were prone to breakdowns. In January 1943 alone, Louie recorded in his diary ten serious mechanical problems in Super Man and other planes in which he flew, including two in-flight engine failures, a gas leak, oil-pressure problems, and landing gear that locked—fortunately, in the down position. Once, Super Man’s brakes failed on landing. By the time Phil got the plane stopped, the bomber was three feet short of the runway’s end. Just beyond it lay the ocean.
Flak.
The weather also took a toll. Storms reduced visibility to zero, a major problem for pilots searching for tiny islands or threading through the mountains that flanked some Hawaiian runways. B-24s were hard to manage even in smooth skies; in some tropical tempests, not even the combined strength of pilot and copilot could keep the plane in hand. Twice in one week, Super Man flew into storms that buffeted the plane so violently that Phil lost control. Once, the plane was flung around the sky for ten minutes, leaving the temporary copilot so paralyzed with fear that Phil had to call Louie to take his place.
One day after sea search, as Phil was detouring around a squall, Cuppernell asked him if he’d dare fly into it. “I can fly this thing anywhere,” Phil said, turning the plane into the storm. Super Man was instantly swallowed, and Phil could see nothing. Rain drummed on the plane, wind pivoted it sideways, and it began porpoising, leaving the crewmen clinging to anything bolted down. They had only been at one thousand feet when they’d flown into the storm. Now the plane was pitching so erratically that they couldn’t read their altitude, and with no visibility, they didn’t know where the ocean was. Each time the plane plunged, the men braced for a crash. Oahu had been in sight before they entered the storm, but now they had no idea where it was. Phil gripped the yoke, sweat streaming down his face. Pillsbury strapped on his parachute.
Riding the bucking plane at his radio table, Harry Brooks picked up a signal from a Hawaiian radio station. The plane was equipped with a radio compass that enabled Harry to determine the direction from which the signal was coming. Phil strong-armed the plane around and headed toward it. They broke out of the storm, found the airfield, and landed. Phil was exhausted, his shirt wringing wet.
The runways were another headache. Many islands were so short that engineers had to plow coral onto one end to create enough length for a runway. Even with the amendments, there often wasn’t enough space. After long missions, groups of planes occasionally came back so low on fuel that none of them could wait for the others to land, so they’d land simultaneously, with the lead pilot delaying his touchdown until he was far enough down the runway for the planes behind him to land at the same time. So many planes shot off the end of Funafuti’s runway and into the ocean that the ground crews kept a bulldozer equipped with a towing cable parked by the water.
For loaded B-24s, which needed well over four thousand feet for takeoff, the cropped island runways, often abutted by towering palm trees, were a challenge. “The takeoff proved exciting,” wrote Staff Sergeant Frank Rosynek of one overloaded departure. “Six of us had to stand on the narrow beam between the bomb bay doors with our arms spread out on each side over the tops of the twin auxiliary fuel tanks. The smell of the high-octane aviation fuel was almost intoxicating. The plane lumbered down the runway for an eternity and we could see the hard packed coral through the cracks where the bomb bay doors came up against the beam we were standing on, one foot in front of the other. There was a SWOOSH and pieces of palm fronds suddenly appeared jammed in the cracks, on both sides!… Only the laundry knew how scared I was.”
And then there was human error. Pilots flew or drove their planes into each other. In B-24s notorious for fuel leaks, airmen lit cigarettes and blew up their planes. On one flight, when Super Man’s No. 3 engine died, Pillsbury found the temporary copilot, oblivious, sitting with his boot resting against the engine’s ignition switch, pushing it into the “off” position. Louie was once asked to join a crew whose bombardier had gotten sick. Louie, too, was feeling ill, so the crew found another man. During the flight, the tower warned the pilot that he was heading toward a mountain. The pilot replied that he saw it, then flew right into it. The strangest incident occurred when a bomber made a sharp pull-up on a training run. A man inside, trying to avoid falling, inadvertently grabbed the life raft–release handle. The raft sprang from the roof and wrapped around the plane’s horizontal stabilizer. Barely able to control the plane, the pilot ordered his men to bail out. He and his copilot somehow landed safely, and everyone survived.
Finally, there was the formidable difficulty of navigation. Making extraordinarily complex spherical trigonometry calculations based on figures taken from a crowd of instruments, navigators groped over thousands of miles of featureless ocean toward targets or destination islands that were blacked out at night, often only yards wide, and flat to the horizon. Even with all the instruments, the procedures could be comically primitive. “Each time I made a sextant calibration,” wrote navigator John Weller, “I would open the escape hatch on the flight deck and stand on my navigation desk and the radio operator’s desk while [the radioman] held on to my legs so I would not be sucked out of the plane.” At night, navigators sometimes resorted to following the stars, guiding their crews over the Pacific by means not so different from those used by ancient Polynesian mariners. In a storm or clouds, even that was impossible.
Given that a plane had to be only a tick off course to miss an island, it’s amazing that any crews found their destinations. Many didn’t. Martin Cohn, an ordnance officer on Oahu, was once in a radar shack as a lost plane, unequipped with radar, tried to find the island. “We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back,” he said. “I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.”
——
The risks of flying were compounded exponentially in combat. From the sky came Japanese fighters, chief among them the swift, agile Zero, which dominated the sky in the first half of the war. Zero pilots pummeled bombers with machine gun fire and massively destructive 20mm cannon shells, which rammed gaping holes in their targets. When these failed, some Zero pilots rammed their planes into bombers, kamikaze-style; one B-24 returned to base with half of a Zero hanging from his wing. From the ground came antiaircraft fire, including flak, which burst into razor-sharp metal shards that sliced planes open. To survive AA fire and enemy aircraft, bomber pilots needed to change their altitude and direction constantly. But on approach, the Norden bombsight, not the pilot, flew the plane, so evasive action was impossible. B-24s were in the control of the bombsight for three to five minutes on approach; Japanese range finders needed less than sixty seconds to pinpoint bomber altitude. The math favored the Japanese.
In combat, bombers even posed risks to one another. To fend off fighter attack and hit narrow target islands, planes had to bunch very close together. In the chaos, planes collided, fired on each other, and worse. In one incident, three B-24s on a mission to mine a harbor flew in tight formation through a narrow canyon at fifty feet, under intense ground fire. As they dropped over the harbor, the right wingtip of a plane piloted by Lieutenant Robert Strong struck the greenhouse window on the plane to his right, piloted by a Lieutenant Robinson. The collision rotated Strong’s bomber onto its left side and under Robinson’s plane just as Robinson’s bombardier dropped a thousand-pound mine. The mine crashed into Strong’s plane, and though it didn’t detonate, it tore an eighteen-square-foot hole in the fuselage and lodged itself just behind the waist gunners. Strong’s B-24 was nearly cut in two, and the mine’s parachute deployed, dragging the plane down. Crewmen cut the parachute free and shoved at the mine, but it wouldn’t budge, so they dismantled their guns and used the barrels to crowbar the mine out. As Strong tried to get the nearly bisected plane home, the tail flapped in the wind, and a huge crack crept up the fuselage. Impossibly, Strong flew his Liberator eight hundred miles and landed. When Jesse Stay, a pilot in Louie’s squadron, went to see the bomber, he was nearly able to pull its tail off with one hand.
The risks of combat created grim statistics. In World War II, 52,173 AAF men were killed in combat. According to Stay, who would become a squadron commander, airmen trying to fulfill the forty combat missions that made up a Pacific bomber crewman’s tour of duty had a 50 percent chance of being killed.*
Along with safe return, injury, and death, airmen faced another possible fate. During the war, thousands of airmen vanished, some during combat missions, some on routine flights. Many had been swallowed by the ocean. Some were alive but lost on the sea or islands. And some had been captured. Unable to find them, the military declared them missing. If they weren’t found within thirteen months, they were declared dead.
——
Most of the time, stricken Pacific bombers came down on water, either by ditching or by crashing. Crewmen who crashed were very unlikely to survive, but ditching offered better odds, depending on the bomber. The B-17 and its soon-to-be-introduced cousin, the gigantic B-29, had wide, low wings that, with the fuselage, formed a relatively flat surface that could surf onto water. Their sturdy bomb bay doors sat flush to the fuselage and tended to hold in a ditching, enabling the plane to float. The first ditched B-29 not only survived, it floated onto an Indian beach, completely intact, the following day. The B-24 was another story. Its wings were narrow and mounted high on the fuselage, and its delicate bomb bay doors protruded slightly from the bottom of the plane. In most B-24 ditchings, the bomb bay doors would catch on the water and tear off and the plane would blow apart. Less than a quarter of ditched B-17s broke up, but a survey of B-24 ditchings found that nearly two-thirds broke up and a quarter of the crewmen died.
For B-24 survivors, quick escape was crucial. Without sealed fuselages, Liberators sank instantly; one airman recalled watching his ditched B-24 sink so quickly that he could still see its lights when it was far below the surface. Every airman was given a “Mae West” life vest,* but because some men stole the vests’ carbon dioxide cartridges for use in carbonating drinks, some vests didn’t inflate. Life rafts were deployed manually: from inside the plane, crewmen could pull a release handle just before ditching or crashing; from outside a floating plane, they could climb on the wings and turn raft-release levers. Once deployed, rafts inflated automatically.
Survivors had to get to rafts immediately. Airmen would later speak of sharks arriving almost the moment that their planes struck the water. In 1943, navy lieutenant Art Reading, Louie’s USC track teammate, was knocked unconscious as he ditched his two-man plane. As the plane sank, Reading’s navigator, Everett Almond, pulled Reading out, inflated their Mae Wests, and lashed himself to Reading. As Reading woke, Almond began towing him toward the nearest island, twenty miles away. Sharks soon began circling. One swept in, bit down on Almond’s leg, and dove, dragging both men deep underwater. Then something gave way and the men rose to the surface in a pool of blood. Almond’s leg had apparently been torn off. He gave his Mae West to Reading, then sank away. For the next eighteen hours, Reading floated alone, kicking at the sharks and hacking at them with his binoculars. By the time a search boat found him, his legs were slashed and his jaw broken by the fin of a shark, but thanks to Almond, he was alive. Almond, who had died at twenty-one, was nominated for a posthumous medal for bravery.*
Everyone had heard stories like Reading’s, and everyone had looked from their planes to see sharks roaming below. The fear of sharks was so powerful that most men, faced with the choice of riding a crippled plane to a ditching or bailing out, chose to take their chances in a ditching, even in the B-24. At least that would leave them near the rafts.
The military was dedicated to finding crash and ditching survivors, but in the sprawling Pacific theater, the odds of rescue were extremely daunting. Many doomed planes sent no distress call, and often, no one knew a plane was down until it missed its estimated time of arrival, which could be as long as sixteen hours after the crash. If the absence went unnoticed until night, an air search couldn’t be commenced until morning. In the meantime, raft-bound men struggled with injuries and exposure and drifted far from their crash site.
For rescuers, figuring out where to look was tremendously difficult. To keep radio silence, many crews didn’t communicate any position during flights, so all searchers had to go on was the course the plane would have followed had everything gone right. But downed planes had often been flying over huge distances, and may have veered hundreds of miles off course. Once a plane was down, currents and wind could carry a raft dozens of miles a day. Because of this, search areas often extended over thousands of square miles. The longer rafts floated, the farther they drifted, and the worse the odds of rescue became.
The most heartbreaking fact was that, if searchers were lucky enough to fly near a raft, chances were good that they wouldn’t see it. Rafts for small planes were the size of small bathtubs; those for large planes were the length of a reclining man. Though search planes generally flew at just one thousand feet, even from that height, a raft could easily be mistaken for a whitecap or a glint of light. On days with low clouds, nothing could be seen at all. Many planes used for rescue searches had high stall speeds, so they had to be flown so fast that crewmen barely had a moment to scan each area before it was gone behind them.
In mid-1944, in response to the dismal results of Pacific rescue searches, the AAF implemented a vastly enhanced rescue system. Life rafts were stocked with radios and better provisions, boats were set out along the paths flown by military planes, and searches were handled by designated rescue squadrons equipped with float planes. These advances improved the odds of rescue, but even after their advent, most downed men were never found. According to reports made by the Far East Air Force air surgeon, fewer than 30 percent of men whose planes went missing between July 1944 and February 1945 were rescued. Even when the plane’s location was known, only 46 percent of men were saved. In some months, the picture was far worse. In January 1945, only 21 of 167 downed XXI Bomber Command airmen were rescued—just 13 percent.
As bleak as these odds were late in the war, men who went down before mid-1944 faced far worse. Flying before the rescue system was modernized, they faced a situation in which searches were disorganized, life rafts poorly equipped, and procedures ineffective. Everyone on Phil’s crew knew that should they go down, their chances of rescue were very low.
The improbability of rescue, coupled with the soaring rate of accidental crashes, created a terrible equation. Search planes appear to have been more likely to go down themselves than find the men they were looking for. In one time frame, in the Eastern Air Command, half of the Catalina flying boats attempting rescues crashed while trying to land on the ocean. It seems likely that for every man rescued, several would-be rescuers died, especially in the first years of the war.
——
With every day that passed without rescue, the prospects for raft-bound men worsened dramatically. Raft provisions lasted a few days at most. Hunger, thirst, and exposure to blistering sun by day and chill by night depleted survivors with frightening rapidity. Some men died in days. Others went insane. In September 1942, a B-17 crashed in the Pacific, stranding nine men on a raft. Within a few days, one had died and the rest had gone mad. Two heard music and baying dogs. One was convinced that a navy plane was pushing the raft from behind. Two scuffled over an imaginary case of beer. Another shouted curses at a sky that he believed was full of bombers. Seeing a delusory boat, he pitched himself overboard and drowned. On day six, when a plane flew by, the remaining men had to confer to be sure that it was real. When they were rescued on day seven, they were too weak to wave their arms.
There were fates even worse than this. In February 1942, a wooden raft was found drifting near Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. Upon it was the body of a man, lying in a makeshift coffin that appeared to have been built on the raft. The man’s boilersuit had been in the sun for so long that its blue fabric had been bleached white. A shoe that didn’t belong to the man lay beside him. No one ever determined who he was, or where he had come from.
Of all of the horrors facing downed men, the one outcome that they feared most was capture by the Japanese. The roots of the men’s fear lay in an event that occurred in 1937, in the early months of Japan’s invasion of China. The Japanese military surrounded the city of Nanking, stranding more than half a million civilians and 90,000 Chinese soldiers. The soldiers surrendered and, assured of their safety, submitted to being bound. Japanese officers then issued a written order: ALL PRISONERS OF WAR ARE TO BE EXECUTED.
What followed was a six-week frenzy of killing that defies articulation. Masses of POWs were beheaded, machine-gunned, bayoneted, and burned alive. The Japanese turned on civilians, engaging in killing contests, raping tens of thousands of people, mutilating and crucifying them, and provoking dogs to maul them. Japanese soldiers took pictures of themselves posing alongside hacked-up bodies, severed heads, and women strapped down for rape. The Japanese press ran tallies of the killing contests as if they were baseball scores, praising the heroism of the contestants. Historians estimate that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including the 90,000 POWs, in what became known as the Rape of Nanking.
Every American airman knew about Nanking, and since then, Japan had only reinforced the precedent. Among the men of Louie’s squadron, there was a rumor circulating about the atoll of Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands, a Japanese territory. On Kwajalein, the rumor said, POWs were murdered. The men called it “Execution Island.” It is testament to the reputation of the Japanese that of all the men in one fatally damaged B-24 falling over Japanese forces, only one chose to bail out. The rest were so afraid of capture that they chose to die in the crash.
——
For airmen, the risks were impossible to shrug off. The dead weren’t numbers on a page. They were their roommates, their drinking buddies, the crew that had been flying off their wing ten seconds ago. Men didn’t go one by one. A quarter of a barracks was lost at once. There were rarely funerals, for there were rarely bodies. Men were just gone, and that was the end of it.
Airmen avoided the subject of death, but privately, many were tormented by fear. One man in Louie’s squadron had chronic, stress-induced nosebleeds. Another had to be relieved because he froze with terror in the air. Pilot Joe Deasy recalled a distraught airman who came to him with a question: If a crewman went mad during a mission, would the crew shoot him? The man was so jittery that he accidentally fired his sidearm into the ground as he spoke.
Some men were certain that they’d be killed; others lived in denial. For Louie and Phil, there was no avoiding the truth. After only two months and one combat mission, five of their friends were already dead, and they had survived several near misses themselves. Their room and icebox, inherited from friends whose bodies were now in the Pacific, were constant reminders.
Before Louie had left the States, he’d been issued an olive-drab Bible. He tried reading it to cope with his anxiety, but it made no sense to him, and he abandoned it. Instead, he soothed himself by listening to classical music on his phonograph. He often left Phil sprawled on his bed, penning letters to Cecy on an upturned box, as he headed out to run off his worries on the mile-long course that he had measured in the sand around the runway. He also tried to prepare for every contingency. He went to the machine shop, cut a thick metal slab, lugged it to Super Man, and plunked it down in the greenhouse in hopes that it would protect him from ground fire. He took classes on island survival and wound care, and found a course in which an elderly Hawaiian offered tips on fending off sharks. (Open eyes wide and bare teeth, make football-style stiff-arm, bop shark in nose.)
And like everyone else, Louie and Phil drank. After a few beers, Louie said, it was possible to briefly forget dead friends. Men were given a ration of four beers a week, but everyone scoured the landscape for alternatives. Alcohol was to Louie what acorns are to squirrels; he consumed what he wanted when he found it and hid the rest. In training, he had stashed his hooch in a shaving cream bottle. Once deployed, he graduated to mayonnaise jars and ketchup bottles. He stowed a bottle of a local rotgut called Five Island Gin—nicknamed Five Ulcer Gin—in radioman Harry Brooks’s gas mask holster. When an MP tapped Brooks’s hip to check for the mask, the bottle broke and left Brooks with a soggy leg. It was probably for the best. Louie noticed that when he drank the stuff, his chest hair spontaneously fell out. He later discovered that Five Island Gin was often used as paint thinner. After that, he stuck to beer.
Phil, like all airmen, had to cope with the possibility of dying, but he had an additional burden. As a pilot, he was keenly conscious that if he made a mistake, eight other men could die. He began carrying two talismans. One was a bracelet Cecy had given him. Believing that it kept him from harm, he wouldn’t go up without it. The other was a silver dollar that jingled endlessly in his pocket. On the day that he finally ran away with Cecy, he said, he’d use it to tip the bellboy. “When I do get home,” he wrote to her, “I’m going to hide with you where no one will find us.”
In the early days of 1943, as men died one after another, every man dealt with the losses in a different way. Somewhere along the way, a ritual sprang up. If a man didn’t return, the others would open his footlocker, take out his liquor, and have a drink in his honor. In a war without funerals, it was the best they could do.
*
The military didn’t break down nonbattle deaths by cause, but statistics strongly indicate that accidental crashes accounted for most deaths. First, the nonbattle death figure excludes those who died while interned, captured, or MIA. Disease, too, can be excluded as a major cause of death: given that in the entire army, including infantry fighting in malarial jungles, 15,779 personnel died of disease, disease deaths in the air corps had to be a small percentage of nonbattle deaths. Finally, given that some 15,000 airmen died in accidental crashes stateside, it seems highly likely that the huge number of accidental crashes in the war would have produced similarly high numbers of deaths.
*
When Louie and Phil were deployed, a tour was thirty missions. The number was later adjusted upward.
*
It was called a Mae West because it gave the wearer a bountiful bust. In the 1970s, service personnel updated the name, calling them Dolly Partons.
*
Two published accounts of this incident mistakenly identify Reading as the one who was eaten by the shark. Newspaper reports in which Reading was interviewed confirm that it was Almond.
Nine
Five Hundred and Ninety-four Holes
IN FEBRUARY 1943, DURING A BRIEF VISIT TO THE EQUATORIAL island of Canton, the Super Man crew had its first encounter with exploding sharks. Canton was a seething purgatory in the shape of a pork chop, consisting mostly of coral and scrubby plants huddled close to the ground, as if cringing from the heat. There was only one tree on the entire island. The surrounding waters were tumbling with sharks, which got trapped in the lagoon at low tide. Bored out of their wits, the local servicemen would tie garbage to long sticks and dangle them over the lagoon. When the sharks snapped at the bait, the men would lob hand grenades into their mouths and watch them blow up.
The Super Man crew had been sent to Canton for two missions over Japanese-occupied Makin and Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands. On the first mission, the lead plane made a wrong turn, and the men found themselves over Howland, the island that Amelia Earhart had been aiming for when she had vanished six years earlier. They noticed gouges in the Howland runway, the calling cards of the Japanese. Once they got sorted out and found Makin, Louie couldn’t see his target through the clouds. They made three circles with no luck, so their colonel ordered them to drop the bombs anywhere and get going. Through a gap in the clouds, Louie spotted a row of outhouses and, with giggling glee, walloped them with three thousand pounds of demolition bombs. To a cheer from the crew, the outhouses blew sky-high.
Two days later, the men flew back to the Gilberts to photograph the islands, bringing a six-man camera crew. They buzzed several islands under fire, snapping photos. With Super Man’s nose bloodied from an antiaircraft round, they turned back for Canton. Three hundred miles from home, engineer Douglas made a discovery. Super Man’s eccentric fuel gauges, which had been jiggling around, had settled very low. Douglas announced that at their current rate, they wouldn’t make Canton.
Phil slowed the propellers as far as he dared and “leaned” the fuel mixture so that the least possible fuel was used. The crew shoved out almost everything that wasn’t bolted down, and all fifteen men crowded into the front of the plane, in the belief that it would improve air speed. Knowing that their chances of making Canton were slim, they considered Howland, but then recalled the pitted runway. They discussed ditching near Howland, but that raised the issue of sharks. In the end, they agreed to try for Canton.
Wedged together in the front of the plane, all the men could do was wait. The sun set. Louie stared into the dark below and thought about what it would feel like to crash. The fuel gauges inched lower, and everyone waited to hear the engines sputtering out. At last, with the fuel gauges at absolute bottom, Phil spotted a searchlight craning around the sky and runway lights dotting the dark below. Realizing that he was way too high, Phil dropped the plane so sharply that Pillsbury bobbed into the air and hung there a moment, weightless, before slapping down.
As Super Man touched down on Canton, its tail settled lower than it had been in the air, causing the last drops of fuel to shift back. A moment later, one engine quit.
Two weeks later, the men saw what would have awaited them had they gone down at sea. A B-25 flying off Oahu radioed that it was low on fuel, then went silent. Super Man was scrambled to hunt for it. After an hour and a half of searching, Louie spotted a curl of gray smoke. Two Catalina flying boats were heading toward it. Super Man followed.
When they arrived at the crash site, the men were astonished by what they saw. Two life rafts, holding the entire five-man B-25 crew, floated amid plane debris. Around them, the ocean was churning with hundreds of sharks, some of which looked twenty feet long. Knifing agitated circles in the water, the creatures seemed on the verge of overturning the rafts.
The Catalinas reached the men before the sharks could, and the B-25 men treated their rescuers to drinks that night. But the Super Man crew now understood the feelings of the grenade throwers on Canton. On a later flight, when they saw several sharks harassing six whales, they dove low over the water and shot at the sharks. Later, they felt guilty. On future flights, when they saw sharks, they let them be.
——
Nauru was a little afterthought of land, eight square miles of sand sitting alone in the Pacific, about twenty-five hundred miles southwest of Hawaii. It was the kind of place that the world might have left alone, were it not for the fifty thousand tons of high-grade phosphate that lay under the feet of the grass-skirted natives. A central ingredient in fertilizer and munitions, the phosphate had been discovered in 1900, and since then the island had been home to a community of European businessmen and Chinese workers who mined the land. When the war began, Nauru became a priceless prize.
Japan seized Nauru in August 1942, imprisoning the Europeans who had not fled and forcing the natives and the Chinese to mine phosphate and build a runway. They enforced their authority with the sword, beheading people for infractions as trivial as the theft of a pumpkin. When the runway was complete, Japan had a rich source of phosphate and an ideal base for air strikes.
On April 17, upon returning from a run, Louie was called to a briefing. America was going after Nauru in a big way, sending Super Man and twenty-two other B-24s to hit the phosphate works. No one in the squadron saw a bed that night. They left just before midnight, refueled on Canton, and flew to Funafuti, the tiny atoll from which they would launch their attack. They found it jostling with journalists brought in by the military to cover the raid.
At a briefing, the crews were told to approach Nauru at eight thousand feet. The altitude gave Louie and the others pause. That week, they had made practice runs from eight to ten thousand feet, and the potential for antiaircraft fire to butcher them at that altitude had alarmed the whole crew. “We only hope,” Louie had written in his diary two days earlier, “we don’t bomb that low in actual combat.” Pillsbury couldn’t stop thinking about something else that the briefing officer had said. There would be ten to twelve Zeros waiting for them. He’d seen a distant Zero at Wake, but had never been engaged by one. The idea of a single Zero was daunting. The prospect of twelve scared him to death.
Before dawn the next day, the men walked together to Super Man. With them was a lieutenant named Donald Nelson. He wasn’t on the crew, but asked if he could tag along so he could see combat. At five A.M., Super Man was airborne.
——
Doglegging to the west to hide their point of origin, the planes took six and a half hours to reach Nauru. No one spoke. Super Man led the mass of bombers, flying with a plane on each wing. The sun rose, and the planes flew into a clear morning. The Japanese would see them coming.
At about twenty past eleven, navigator Mitchell broke the silence: They’d be over the island in fifteen minutes. In the greenhouse, Louie could just make out an apostrophe of land, flat to the horizon. Below, there was a black shadow in the water. It was an American submarine, ready to pick up survivors if bombers were shot down. Super Man passed over it and slid over Nauru. Louie shivered.
It was eerily silent. The first nine planes, Super Man out front, crossed the island unopposed. The air was very still, and the plane glided along without a ripple. Phil relinquished control to the Norden bombsight. Super Man’s first target, a knot of planes and structures beside a runway, came into view. Louie lined up on the gleaming backs of the planes.
And then, shattering. The sky became a fury of color, sound, and motion. Flak hissed up, trailing streamers of smoke over the planes, then burst into black puffs, sparkling with shrapnel. Metal flew everywhere, streaking up from below and raining down from above. With the bombsight in control, Phil could do nothing.
Something struck the bomber on Super Man’s left wing, piloted by Lieutenant John Jacobs. The plane sank as if drowning. At almost the same moment, the plane to Super Man’s right was hit. Just a few feet away, Pillsbury watched the bomber falter, drop, and disappear under Super Man’s wing. Pillsbury could see the men inside, and his mind briefly registered that all of them were about to die. Super Man was alone.
Louie kept his focus below, trying to aim for the parked planes. As he worked, there was a tremendous bang! and a terrific shudder. Much of Super Man’s right rudder, a chunk the size of a dinner table, blew off. Louie lost the target. As he tried to find it again, a shell bit a wide hole in the bomb bay, and the plane rocked again.
At last, Louie had his aim, and the first bombs dropped, spun down, and struck their targets. Then Super Man passed over a set of red-roofed barracks and an antiaircraft battery, Louie’s second and third targets. Louie lined up and watched the bombs crunch into the buildings and battery. He had one bomb left for a target of opportunity. North of the airfield, he saw a shack and took aim. The bomb fell clear, and Louie yelled “Bombs away!” and turned the valve to close the bomb bay doors. In the cockpit, the bomb-release light flicked on, and Phil took control of the plane. As he did, behind and below the plane, there was a pulse of white light and an orb of fire. Louie had made a lucky guess and a perfect drop. The shack was a fuel depot, and he had struck it dead center. In the top turret, Pillsbury pivoted backward and watched a vast cloud of smoke billow upward.
The air battle over Nauru.
There was no time for celebration: Zeros were suddenly all around. Louie counted nine of them, slashing around the bombers, machine guns blazing. The boldness and skill of the Japanese pilots astounded the bomber crews. The Zeros flew at the bombers head-on, cannons firing, slicing between planes that were just feet apart. They passed so close that Louie could see the faces of the pilots. Firing furiously, the bomber gunners tried to take out the Zeros. The shooting was all point-blank, and bullets were flying everywhere. One bomber sustained seventeen hits from friendly planes, or possibly from its own waist guns.
Stricken bombers began slipping behind, and the Zeros pounced. One bomber was hounded by four Zeros and a biplane. Its gunners shot down one Zero before their pilot found a cloud to hide in, scattering his pursuers. Below, Lieutenant Jacobs, Phil’s lost wingman, was still airborne, his plane laboring along on three engines and no right rudder in a circle of Zeros. His gunners sent one Zero down. Thor Hamrin, pilot of the B-24 Jab in the Ass, saw Jacobs struggling. Circling back and speeding down, he opened up on the Zeros with all of his guns. The Zeros backed off, and Jacobs flew on with Hamrin on his wing.
The first bombers, pursued by Zeros, headed out to sea. With its fighters gone and many of its guns destroyed, the Japanese base was left exposed. The trailing B-24s swept in, crossing through rivers of smoke to rain bombs on the phosphate plant. In the last plane over the island, a reporter raised his binoculars. He saw “a volcano-like mass of smoke and fire,” a burning Japanese bomber, a few bursts of antiaircraft fire, and not a single moving person.
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