Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Louie rotated the dead turret by hand and Mitchell climbed out. The gunners kept firing, and Super Man trembled on. There were still two Zeros circling it.

——

In the top turret, facing backward, Stanley Pillsbury had fearsome weapons, twin .50-caliber machine guns. Each gun could fire eight hundred rounds per minute, the bullets traveling about three thousand feet per second. Pillsbury’s guns could kill a man from four miles away, and they could take out a Zero if given the chance. But the Zeros were staying below, where Pillsbury couldn’t hit them. He could feel their rounds thumping into Super Man’s belly, but all he could see were his plane’s wings. Fixated on the nearest Zero, Pillsbury thought, If he’d just come up, I can knock him down.

He waited. The plane groaned and shook, the gunners fired, the Zeros pounded them from below, and still Pillsbury waited. Then Louie saw a Zero swoop up on the right. Pillsbury never saw it. The first he knew of it was an earsplitting ka-bang! ka-bang! ka-bang!, a sensation of everything tipping and blowing apart, and excruciating pain.

The Zero had sprayed the entire right side of Super Man with cannon shells. The first rounds hit near the tail, spinning the plane hard on its side. Shrapnel tore into the hip and left leg of tail gunner Ray Lambert, who hung on sideways as Super Man rolled. The plane’s twist saved him; a cannon round struck exactly where his head had been an instant earlier, hitting so close to him that his goggles shattered. Ahead, shrapnel dropped Brooks and Douglas at the waist guns. In the belly turret, two hunks of shrapnel penetrated the back of Glassman, who was so adrenalized that he felt nothing. Another round hit the passenger, Nelson. Finally, a shell blew out the wall of the top turret, disintegrating on impact and shooting metal into Pillsbury’s leg from foot to knee. Half of the crew, and all of the working gunners, had been hit. Super Man reeled crazily on its side, and for a moment it felt about to spiral out of control. Phil and Cuppernell wrenched it level.

Clinging to his gun as the shrapnel struck his leg and the plane’s spin nearly flung him from his seat, Pillsbury shouted the only word that came to mind.

“Ow!”

——

Louie heard someone scream. When the plane was righted, Phil yelled to him to find out how bad the damage was. Louie climbed from the nose turret. The first thing he saw was Harry Brooks, in the bomb bay, lying on the catwalk. The bomb bay doors were wide open, and Brooks was dangling partway off the catwalk, one hand gripping the catwalk and one leg swinging in the air, with nothing but air and ocean below him. His eyes bulged, and his upper body was wet with blood. He lifted one arm toward Louie, a plaintive expression on his face.

Louie grabbed Brooks by the wrists and pulled him into a seated position. Brooks slumped forward, and Louie could see holes dotting the back of his jacket. There was blood in his hair.

Louie dragged Brooks to the flight deck and pulled him into a corner. Brooks passed out. Louie found a cushion and slid it under him, then returned to the bomb bay. He remembered having turned the valve to close the doors, and couldn’t understand why they were open. Then he saw: There was a slash in the wall, and purple fluid was splattered everywhere. The hydraulic lines, which controlled the doors, had been severed. With these lines broken, Phil would have no hydraulic control of the landing gear or the flaps, which they would need to slow the plane on landing. And without hydraulics, they had no brakes.

Louie cranked the bomb bay doors shut by hand. He looked to the rear and saw Douglas, Lambert, and Nelson lying together, bloody. Douglas and Lambert were pawing along the floor, trying to reach their guns. Nelson didn’t move. He’d taken a shot to the stomach.

Louie shouted to the cockpit for help. Phil yelled back that he was losing control of the plane and needed Cuppernell. Louie said that this was a dire emergency. Phil braced himself at the controls, and Cuppernell got up, saw the men in back, and broke into a run. He found morphine, sulfa, oxygen masks, and bandages and dropped down next to each man in turn.

Louie knelt beside Brooks, who was still unconscious. Feeling through the gunner’s hair, he found two holes in the back of his skull. There were four large wounds in his back. Louie strapped an oxygen mask to Brooks’s face and bandaged his head. As he worked, he thought about the state of the plane. The waist, nose, and tail gunners were out, the plane was shot to hell, Phil was alone in the cockpit, barely keeping the plane up, and the Zeros were still out there. One more pass, he thought, will put us down.

Louie was bending over Brooks when he felt a tickle on his shoulder, something dripping. He looked up and saw Pillsbury in the top turret. Blood was streaming from his leg. Louie rushed to him.

Pillsbury was still in his seat, facing sideways, gripping the gun and sweeping his eyes around the sky. He looked absolutely livid. His leg dangled below him, his pant leg hanging in shreds and his boot blasted. Next to him was a jagged hole, the shape of Texas and almost as large as a beach ball, clawed out of the side of the plane. The turret was shot with holes, and the floor was jingling with flakes of metal and turret motor.

Top turret gunner Stanley Pillsbury, shown at the waist gun. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Louie began doctoring Pillsbury’s wounds. Pillsbury, swinging his head back and forth, ignored him. He knew that the Zero would come back to finish the kill, and he had to find it. The urgency of the moment drove the pain into a distant place.

Suddenly, there was a whoosh of dark, close, upward motion, a gray shining body, a red circle. Pillsbury shouted something unintelligible, and Louie let go of his foot just as Pillsbury banged the high-speed rotator on his turret. The turret grunted to life, whirling Pillsbury around ninety degrees.

The Zero reached the top of its arc, leveled off, and sped directly toward Super Man. Pillsbury was terrified. In an instant, the end would come with the most minute of gestures—the flick of the Zero pilot’s finger on his cannon trigger—and Super Man would carry ten men into the Pacific. Pillsbury could see the pilot who would end his life, the tropical sun illuminating his face, a white scarf coiled about his neck. Pillsbury thought: I have to kill this man.

Pillsbury sucked in a sharp breath and fired. He watched the tracers skim away from his gun’s muzzle and punch through the cockpit of the Zero. The windshield blew apart and the pilot pitched forward.

The fatal blow never came to Super Man. The Zero pilot, surely seeing the top turret smashed and the waist windows vacant, had probably assumed that the gunners were all dead. He had waited too long.

The Zero folded onto itself like a wounded bird. Pillsbury felt sure that the pilot was dead before his plane struck the ocean.

The last Zero came up from below, then faltered and fell. Clarence Douglas, standing at the waist gun with his thigh, chest, and shoulder torn open, brought it down.

In the ocean behind them, the men on the submarine watched the planes tussle over the water. One by one, the Zeros dropped, and the bombers flew on. The submarine crew would later report that not one Zero made it back to Nauru. It is believed that thanks to this raid and others, the Japanese never retrieved a single shipment of phosphate from the island.

——

The pain that had been far away during the gunfight surged over Pillsbury. Louie pushed the release on the turret chair, and the gunner slid into his arms. Louie eased him to the floor next to Brooks. Grasping Pillsbury’s boot, he began easing it off as gently as he could. Pillsbury hollered for all he was worth. The boot slid off. Pillsbury’s left big toe was gone; it was still in the boot. The toe next to it hung by a string of skin, and portions of his other toes were missing. So much shrapnel was embedded in his lower leg that it bristled like a pincushion. Louie thought that there would be no way to save the foot. He bandaged Pillsbury, gave him a shot of morphine, fed him a sulfa pill, then hurried away to see if they could save the plane.

Super Man was dying. Phil couldn’t turn it from side to side with the normal controls, and the plane was pulling upward so hard, trying to flip, that Phil couldn’t hold it with his arms. He put both feet on the yoke and pushed as hard as he could. The nose kept rearing up so high that the plane was on the verge of stalling. It was porpoising, up and down.

The men who could walk rushed through the plane, assessing its condition. The peril of their situation was abundantly clear. The right rudder was completely shot, a large portion of it missing and its cables severed. The cables for the elevators, which controlled the plane’s pitch, were badly damaged. So were the cables for the trim, which gave the pilot fine control of the plane’s attitude—its orientation in the air—and thus greatly reduced the effort needed to handle the plane. Fuel was trickling onto the floor under the top turret. No one knew the condition of the landing gear, but with the entire plane perforated, it was likely that the tires had been struck. The bomb bay was sloshing with hydraulic fluid.

Phil did what he could. Slowing the engines on one side created a power differential that forced the plane to turn. Pushing the plane to higher speed eased the porpoising and reduced the risk of stalling. If Phil kept his feet on the yoke and pushed hard, he could stop the plane from flipping. Someone shut off the fuel feed near Pillsbury, and the leaking stopped. Louie took a bomb-arming wire and spliced the severed rudder and elevator cables together. It didn’t result in immediate improvement, but if the left rudder cables failed, it might help.

Funafuti was five hours away. If Super Man could carry them that far, they would have to land without hydraulic control of the landing gear, flaps, or brakes. They could lower the gear and extend the flaps with hand pumps, but there was no manual alternative to hydraulic brakes. Without bombs or much fuel aboard, the plane weighed some forty thousand pounds. A B-24 without brakes, especially one coming in “hot”—over the standard of 90 to 110 miles per hour landing speed—could eat up 10,000 feet before it stopped. Funafuti’s runway was 6,660 feet long. At its end were rocks and sea.

Hours passed. Super Man shook and struggled. Louie and Cuppernell moved among the injured men. Pillsbury lay on the floor, watching his leg bleed. Mitchell hunched over his navigation table, and Phil wrestled with the plane. Douglas limped about, looking deeply traumatized, his shoulder and arm, said Pillsbury, “all torn to pieces.” Brooks lay next to Pillsbury, blood pooling in his throat, making him gurgle as he breathed. Pillsbury couldn’t bear the sound. Once or twice, when Louie knelt before him, Brooks opened his eyes and whispered something. Louie put his ear near Brooks’s lips, but couldn’t understand him. Brooks drifted off again. Everyone knew he was almost surely dying. No one spoke of it.

It was likely, they all knew, that they’d crash on landing, if not before. Whatever thoughts each man had, he kept them to himself.

——

Daylight was fading when the palms of Funafuti brushed over the horizon. Phil began dropping the plane toward the runway. They were going much too fast. Someone went to the hand crank on the catwalk and opened the bomb bay doors, and the plane, dragging on the air, began to slow. Douglas went to the pump for the landing gear, just under the top turret. He needed two hands to work it—one to push the valve and one to work the pump—but he was in too much pain to hold up either of his arms for more than a few seconds. Pillsbury couldn’t stand, but by stretching as far as he could, he reached the selector valve. Together, they got the gear down while Louie peered out the side window, looking for a yellow tab that would signify that the gear was locked. The tab appeared. Mitchell and Louie pumped the flaps down.

Louie scrounged up parachute cord and went to each injured man, looping cord around him as a belt, then wrapping the rope around stationary parts of the plane. Nelson, with his belly wound, couldn’t have a rope wrapped around his torso, so Louie fed the line around his arm and under his armpit. Fearing that they’d end up on fire, he didn’t knot the cords. Instead, he wound the ends around the hands of the injured men, so they could free themselves easily.

The question of how to stop the bomber remained. Louie had an idea. What if they were to tie two parachutes to the rear of the plane, pitch them out of the waist windows at touchdown, and pull the rip cords? No one had ever tried to stop a bomber in this manner. It was a long shot, but it was all they had. Louie and Douglas placed one parachute in each waist window and tied them to a gun mount. Douglas went to his seat, leaving Louie standing between the waist windows, a rip cord in each hand.

Super Man sank toward Funafuti. Below, the journalists and the other bomber crews stood, watching the crippled plane come in. Super Man dropped lower and lower. Just before it touched down, Pillsbury looked at the airspeed gauge. It read 110 miles per hour. For a plane without brakes, it was too fast.

——

For a moment, the landing was perfect. The wheels kissed the runway so softly that Louie stayed on his feet. Then came a violent gouging sensation. What they had feared had happened: The left tire was flat. The plane caught hard, veered left, and careened toward two parked bombers. Cuppernell, surely more out of habit than hope, stomped on the right brake. There was just enough hydraulic fluid left to save them. Super Man spun in a circle and lurched to a stop just clear of the other bombers. Louie was still in the back, gripping the parachute cords. He had not had to use them.^*

Douglas popped open the top hatch, dragged himself onto the roof, raised his injured arm over his head, and crossed it with his other arm, the signal that there were wounded men inside. Louie jumped down from the bomb bay and gave the same signal. There was a stampede across the airfield, and in seconds the plane was swarming with marines. Louie stood back and ran his eyes over the body of his ruined plane. Later, ground crewmen would count the holes in Super Man, marking each one with chalk to be sure that they didn’t count any twice. There were 594 holes. All of the Nauru bombers had made it back, every one of them shot up, but none so badly as this.

Brooks was laid on a stretcher, placed on a jeep, and driven to a rudimentary, one-room infirmary. He was bleeding inside his skull.

They carried Pillsbury to a barracks to await treatment. He was lying there about an hour later when the doctor came in and asked him if he knew Harry Brooks. Pillsbury said yes.

“He didn’t make it,” the doctor said.

——

Technical Sergeant Harold Brooks died one week before his twenty-third birthday. It took more than a week for word to reach his widowed mother, Edna, at 511½ Western Avenue in Clarksville, Michigan. Across town on Harley Road, the news reached his fiancée, Jeannette Burtscher. She learned that he was gone nine days before the wedding date that they had set before he left for the war.

Harry Brooks.

*

Eight months later, Charlie Pratte became the first pilot to stop a B-24 with parachutes. His bomber,

Belle of Texas

, had been shot up over the Marshall Islands and had no brakes, leaving Pratte to attempt a landing on a runway far too short for bombers. To make matters worse, Pratte had eaten bad eggs and was vomiting as he flew. Touching down at a scorching 140 miles per hour, Pratte ordered his men to deploy three parachutes. With the parachutes open behind it, the plane shot off the end of the runway and onto the beach before stopping just short of the ocean. Pratte and his crew were given special commendations.

Ten

The Stinking Six

AS EVENING FELL OVER FUNAFUTI, THE GROUND CREWS nursed the damaged bombers. When the holes were patched and mechanical problems repaired, the planes were fueled up and loaded with six five-hundred-pound bombs each, ready for a strike on Tarawa the next day. Super Man, still standing where it had spun to a halt, its entire length honeycombed, wouldn’t join them. It would probably never fly again.

Worn out from the mission and hours spent helping at the infirmary, Louie walked to a grove of coconut trees where there were tents that served as barracks. He found his tent and flopped down on a cot, near Phil. The journalists were in a tent next to theirs. At the infirmary, Stanley Pillsbury lay with his bleeding leg hanging off his cot. Nearby, the other wounded Super Man crewmen tried to sleep. Blackout descended, and a hush fell.

At about three in the morning, Louie woke to a forlorn droning, rising and falling. It was a small plane, crossing back and forth overhead. Thinking that it was a crew lost in the clouds, Louie lay there listening, hoping they’d find home. Eventually, the sound faded away.

Before Louie could fall back asleep, he heard the growl of heavy aircraft engines. Then, from the north end of the atoll, came a BOOM! A siren began sounding, and there was distant gunfire. Then a marine ran past the airmen’s tents, screaming, “Air raid! Air raid!” The droning overhead hadn’t been a lost American crew. It had probably been a scout plane, leading Japanese bombers. Funafuti was under attack.

The airmen and journalists, Louie and Phil among them, jammed their feet into their boots, bolted from the tents, and stopped, some shouting, others spinning in panic. They couldn’t see any bomb shelters. From down the atoll, the explosions were coming in rapid succession, each one louder and closer. The ground shook.

“I looked around and said, ‘Holy hell! Where are we going to go?’ ” remembered pilot Joe Deasy. The best shelter he could find was a shallow pit dug around a coconut sapling, and he plowed into it, along with most of the men near him. Herman Scearce, Deasy’s radioman, leapt into a trench next to an ordnance truck, joining five of his crewmates. Pilot Jesse Stay jumped into another hole nearby. Three men crawled under the ordnance truck; another flung himself into a garbage pit. One man ran right off the end of the atoll, splashing into the ocean even though he didn’t know how to swim. Some men, finding nowhere to go, dropped to their knees to claw foxholes in the sand with their helmets. As he dug in the dark with the bombs coming, one man noisily cursed the sonofabitch generals who had left the atoll without shelters.

Dozens of natives crowded into a large missionary church that stood in a clearing. Realizing that the white church would stand out brilliantly on the dark atoll, a marine named Fonnie Black Ladd ran in and yelled at the natives to get out. When they wouldn’t move, he drew his sidearm. They scattered.

In the infirmary, Stanley Pillsbury lay in startled confusion. One moment he’d been sleeping, and the next, the atoll was rocking with explosions, a siren was howling, and people were sprinting by, dragging patients onto stretchers and rushing them out. Then the room was empty, and Pillsbury was alone. He had apparently been forgotten. He sat up, frantic. He couldn’t stand.

Louie and Phil ran through the coconut grove, searching for anything that might serve as shelter. The bombs were overtaking them, making a sound that one man likened to the footfalls of a giant: Boom … boom … BOOM … BOOM! At last, Louie and Phil spotted a native hut built on flood stilts. They dove under it, landing in a heap of more than two dozen men. The bombs were now so close that the men could hear them spinning in the air; Deasy remembered the sound as a whirr, Scearce as a piercing whistle.

An instant later, everything was scalding whiteness and splintering noise. The ground heaved, and the air whooshed around, carrying an acrid smell. Trees blew apart. A bomb struck the tent in which Louie and Phil had been sleeping a minute before. Another burst beside a pile of men in a ditch, and something speared into the back of the man on top. He said, “This feels like it, boys,” and passed out. A bomb hit the ordnance truck, sending it into the air in thousands of pieces. The remains of the truck and the men under it skimmed past Jesse Stay’s head. A nose gunner heard a singing sound as the parts of the truck flew by him. It was apparently this truck that landed on one of the tents, where two airmen were still on their cots. Another bomb tumbled into Scearce’s trench, plopping right on top of a tail gunner. It didn’t go off, but sat there hissing. The gunner shouted, “Jesus!” It took them a moment to realize that what they’d thought was a bomb was actually a fire extinguisher. Yards away, Louie and Phil huddled. The hut shook, but still stood.

The bombs moved down the atoll. Each report sounded farther away, and then the explosions stopped. A few men climbed from their shelters to help the wounded and douse fires. Louie and the others stayed where they were, knowing that the bombers would be back. Matches were struck and cigarettes were pinched in trembling fingers. If we’re hit, one man grumbled, there’ll be nothing left of us but gravy. Far away, the bombers turned. The booming began again.

Someone running by the infirmary saw Pillsbury, hurried in, threw him on a stretcher, and dragged him into a tiny cement building where the other wounded had been taken. The building was so crowded that men had been laid on shelves. It was pitch-dark, and doctors were shuffling around, peering at their patients by flashlight. Pillsbury lay panting in the darkness, listening to the bombs coming, feeling claustrophobic, his mind flashing with images of bombs entombing them. With men stacked everywhere and no one speaking, he thought of a morgue. His leg hurt. He began groaning, and the doctor felt his way to him and gave him morphine. The booming was louder, louder, and then it was over them again, tremendous crashing. The ceiling shuddered, and cement dust sifted down.

Outside, it was hell on earth. Men moaned and screamed, one calling for his mother. A pilot thought the voices sounded “like animals crying.” Men’s eardrums burst. A man died of a heart attack. Another man’s arm was severed. Others sobbed, prayed, and lost control of their bowels. “I wasn’t only scared, I was terrified,” one airman would write to his parents. “I thought I was scared in the air, but I wasn’t. [It was] the first time in my life I saw how close death could come.” Phil felt the same; never, even during the fight over Nauru, had he known such terror. Louie crouched beside him. As he had run through the coconut grove, he had moved only on instinct and roaring adrenaline, feeling no emotion. Now, as explosions went off around him, fear seized him.

Staff Sergeant Frank Rosynek huddled in a coral trench, wearing nothing but a helmet, untied shoes, and boxer shorts. The tonnage coming down, he later wrote, “seemed like a railroad carload. The bombs sounded like someone pushing a piano down a long ramp before they hit and exploded. Big palm trees were shattered and splintered all around us; the ground would rise up in the air when a bomb exploded and there was this terrific flash of super bright light that it made. The concussion blew pieces of coral into our hole and we blindly groped for them and tossed them out as quick as we could find them. At intervals between a bomb falling it sounded like church: voices from nearby slit trenches all chanting the Lord’s prayer together—over and over again. Louder when the bombs hit closer. I thought I even heard some guys crying. You were afraid to look up because you felt your face might be seen from above.”

Two more soldiers were killed on the third pass. On the fourth pass, the Japanese hit the jackpot. Two bombs bull’s-eyed the gassed-up, loaded B-24s parked by the runway. The first went up in a huge explosion, sending bomber parts showering all over the island. Another burst into flames. The fires set off machine gun bullets, which whizzed in all directions, their tracers drawing ribbons in the air. Then the five-hundred-pound bombs on the planes started going off.

Finally, the atoll fell silent. A few of the men, shaking, stood up. As they walked among the wreckage, another B-24 blew up, the explosion accelerated by its 2,300 gallons of fuel, 3,000 pounds of bombs, and cache of .50-caliber ammunition. A copilot wrote that it sounded “like the whole island was blowing up.” With that, it was over.

——

When dawn broke, men began creeping from their hiding places. The man who had run into the ocean waded ashore, having clung to a rock for three hours as the tide rose. With the morning light, the man who had cursed his generals as he had dug his foxhole discovered that those generals had been digging right next to him. Louie and Phil crawled out from beneath the hut. Phil was unscathed; Louie had only a cut on his arm. They joined a procession of exhausted, stunned men.

Funafuti, the morning after. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Funafuti was wrecked. A bomb had struck the church roof, sending the building down onto itself, but thanks to Corporal Ladd, there had been no one inside. There was a crater where Louie and Phil’s tent had been. Another tent lay collapsed, a bomb standing on its nose in the middle of it. Someone tied the bomb to a truck, dragged it to the beach, and turned sharply, sending the bomb skidding into the ocean. Rosynek walked up the runway and found six Japanese bombs lying in a neat row. The bombs were armed by spinning as they fell, but whoever had dropped them had come in too low, not leaving the bombs enough drop space to arm themselves. The men dragged them into the ocean too.

Where the struck B-24s had been, there were deep holes ringed by decapitated coconut trees. One crater, Louie noted in his diary, was thirty-five feet deep and sixty feet across. Bits of bomber were sprinkled everywhere. Landing gear and seats that had seen the sunset from one side of Funafuti greeted the sunrise from the other. All that was left of one bomber was a tail, two wingtips, and two propellers, connected by a black smudge. There was a 1,200-horsepower Pratt and Whitney engine sitting by itself on the runway; the plane that it belonged to was nowhere to be found. Louie came upon a reporter staring into a crater, in tears. Louie walked to him, bracing to see a dead body. Instead, he saw a typewriter, flattened.

The wounded and dead were everywhere. Two mechanics who’d been caught in the open were bruised all over from the concussive force of the explosions. They were so traumatized that they couldn’t talk, and were using their hands to communicate. Men stood in a solemn circle around a couple of seats and twisted metal, all that was left of the ordnance truck. The three men who had sought shelter under it were beyond recognition. A radioman was found dead, a bomb shard in his head. Louie came upon the body of a native, dressed in a loincloth, lying on his back. Half of his head was missing.

A radio operator would say that there had been about fourteen Japanese bombers, but thinking that there had been two sets of three, someone dubbed them “the Stinking Six.” Everyone expected them to return. Phil and Louie joined a group of men digging foxholes with shovels and helmets. When they had a moment, they walked to the beach and sat together for an hour, trying to collect their thoughts.

——

Sometime that day, Louie went to the infirmary to help out. Pillsbury was back in his cot. His leg was burning terribly, and he lay with it dangling in the air, dripping blood into a puddle on the floor. Cuppernell sat with him, thanking him for shooting down that Zero.

The doctor was concerned that Pillsbury’s foot wouldn’t stop bleeding. Surgery was necessary, but there was no anesthetic, so Pillsbury was just going to have to do without. With Pillsbury gripping the bed with both hands and Louie lying over his legs, the doctor used pliers to tear tissue from Pillsbury’s foot, then pulled a long strip of hanging skin over his bone stump and sewed it up.

Super Man sat by the airstrip, listing left on its peg-legged landing gear, the shredded tire hanging partway off. The air raid had missed the plane, but it didn’t look like it. Its 594 holes were spread over every part of it: swarms of bullet holes, slashes from shrapnel, four cannon-fire gashes at least as large as a man’s head, the gaping punch hole beside Pillsbury’s turret, and the hole in the rudder, as big as a doorway. The plane looked as if it had flown through barbed wire, its paint scoured off the leading edge of the engines and sides. Journalists and airmen circled it, amazed that it had stayed airborne for five hours with so much damage. Phil was hailed as a miracle worker, and everyone had cause to reassess the supposedly fainthearted B-24. A photographer climbed inside the plane and snapped a picture. Taken in daylight in the dark of the plane’s interior, the image showed shafts of light streaming through the holes, a shower of stars against a black sky.

Louie, looking as battered as his plane, walked to Super Man. He leaned his head into one of the cannon holes and saw the severed right rudder cables, still spliced together as he had left them. He ran his fingers along the tears in Super Man’s skin. The plane had saved him and all but one of his crew. He would think of it as a dear friend.

Louie at Super Man on the day after Nauru. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Louie boarded another plane and began his journey back to Hawaii with Phil, Cuppernell, Mitchell, and the bandaged Glassman. Pillsbury, Lambert, and Douglas were too badly wounded to rejoin the crew. In a few days, they’d be sent to Samoa, where a doctor would take one look at Pillsbury’s leg and announce that it had been “hamburgered.” Lambert would be hospitalized for five months.^* When a general presented him with a Purple Heart, Lambert apparently couldn’t sit up, so the general pinned the medal to his sheet. Douglas’s war was done. Brooks was lying in a grave in Funafuti’s Marine Corps cemetery.

The crew was broken up forever. They would never see Super Man again.

——

An oppressive weight settled on Louie as he flew away from Funafuti. He and the remains of the crew stopped at Canton, then flew on to Palmyra Atoll, where Louie took a hot shower and watched They Died with Their Boots On at the base theater. It was the movie he’d been working on as an extra when the war had begun, a lifetime ago.

Back on Hawaii, he sank into a cold torpor. He was irritable and withdrawn. Phil, too, was off-kilter, drinking a few too many, seeming not himself. With a gutted crew and no plane, the men weren’t called for assignments, so they killed time in Honolulu. When a drunken hothead tried to pick a fight, Phil stared back indifferently, but Louie obliged. The two stomped outside to have it out, and the hothead backed out. Later, drinking beer with friends, Louie couldn’t bring himself to be sociable. He holed up in his room, listening to music. His only other solace was running, slogging through the sand around the Kahuku runway, thinking of the 1944 Olympics, trying to forget Harry Brooks’s plaintive face.

On May 24, Louie, Phil, and the other Super Man veterans were transferred to the 42nd squadron of the 11th Bomb Group. The 42nd would be stationed on the eastern edge of Oahu, on the gorgeous beach at Kualoa. Six new men were brought in to replace the lost Super Man crewmen. Flying with unfamiliar men worried Louie and Phil. “Don’t like the idea a bit,” Louie once wrote in his diary. “Every time they mix up a crew, they have a crack up.” Among the Super Man veterans, the only thing that seemed noteworthy about the new men was that their tail gunner, a sergeant from Cleveland named Francis McNamara, had such an affinity for sweets that he ate practically nothing but dessert. The men called him “Mac.”

For the moment, they had no plane. Liberators destined for the 11th Bomb Group were being flown in from other combat areas, and the first five, peppered with bullet holes, had just arrived. One of them, Green Hornet, looked haggard, its sides splattered with something black, the paint worn off the engines. Even with an empty bomb bay and all four engines going, it was only just able to stay airborne. It tended to fly with its tail dragging below its nose, something the airmen called “mushing,” a reference to the mushy feel of the controls of a faltering plane. Engineers went over the bomber, but found no explanation. All of the airmen were wary of Green Hornet. The bomber was relegated to errands, and the ground crewmen began prying parts off it for use on other planes. Louie went up in it for a short hop, came away referring to it as “the craziest plane,” and hoped he’d never have to fly in it again.

On May 26, Louie packed up his belongings and caught a ride to his new Kualoa digs, a private cottage thirty feet from the ocean. Louie, Phil, Mitchell, and Cuppernell would have the place all to themselves. That afternoon, Louie stayed in, transforming the garage into his private room. Phil went to a squadron meeting, where he met a rookie pilot, George “Smitty” Smith, by coincidence a close friend of Cecy’s. After the meeting, Phil lingered late with Smitty, talking about Cecy. At the cottage, Louie turned in. The next day, he, Phil, and Cuppernell were going to go to Honolulu to take another crack at P. Y. Chong’s steaks.

Across the island at Hickam Field, nine crewmen and one passenger climbed aboard a B-24. The crew, piloted by a Tennessean named Clarence Corpening, had just come from San Francisco and was on its way to Canton, then Australia. As men on the ground watched, the plane lifted off, banked south, and flew out of sight.

*

Lambert eventually returned to duty with another crew and amassed an astounding record, completing at least ninety-five missions.

Eleven

“Nobody’s Going to Live Through This”

ON THURSDAY, MAY 27, 1943, LOUIE ROSE AT FIVE A.M. Everyone else in the cottage was asleep. He tiptoed out and hiked up the hill behind the cottage to rouse himself, then walked back, pulled on his workout clothes, and started for the runway. On his way, he found a sergeant and asked him to pace him in a jeep. The sergeant agreed, and Louie jogged off with the jeep beside him. He turned a mile in 4:12, a dazzling time given that he was running in sand. He was in the best shape of his life.

He walked back to the cottage, cleaned himself up, and dressed, donning a pair of tropical-weight khaki pants, a T-shirt, and a muslin top shirt that he’d bought in Honolulu. After breakfast and some time spent fixing up his new room, he wrote a letter to Payton Jordan, tucked the letter into his shirt pocket, climbed into a borrowed car with Phil and Cuppernell, and headed for Honolulu.

At the base gate, they were flagged down by the despised lieutenant who had ordered them to fly Super Man on three engines. The lieutenant was on urgent business. Clarence Corpening’s B-24, which had left for Canton the day before, had never landed. The lieutenant, who was under the impression that the plane was a B-25 instead of a much larger B-24, was looking for volunteers to hunt for it. Phil told him that they had no plane. The lieutenant said they could take Green Hornet. When Phil said that the plane wasn’t airworthy, the lieutenant replied that it had passed inspection. Both Louie and Phil knew that though the word “volunteer” was used, this was an order. Phil volunteered. The lieutenant woke pilot Joe Deasy and talked him into volunteering as well. Deasy and his crew would take the B-24 Daisy Mae.

Phil, Louie, and Cuppernell turned back to round up their crew. Stopping at the cottage, Louie grabbed a pair of binoculars that he had bought at the Olympics. He flipped open his diary and jotted down a few words on what he was about to do. “There was only one ship, ‘The Green Hornet,’ a ‘musher,’ ” he wrote. “We were very reluctant, but Phillips finally gave in for rescue mission.”

Just before he left, Louie scribbled a note and left it on his footlocker, in which he kept his liquor-filled condiment jars. If we’re not back in a week, it read, help yourself to the booze.

——

The lieutenant met the crews at Green Hornet. He unrolled a map. He believed that Corpening had gone down two hundred miles north of Palmyra. His reason for believing this is unclear; the official report of the downing states that the plane wasn’t seen or heard from after takeoff, so it could have been anywhere. Whatever his reason, he told Phil to follow a heading of 208 and search to a point parallel to Palmyra. He gave Deasy roughly the same instruction but directed him to a slightly different area. Both crews were told to search all day, land at Palmyra, then resume searching the next day, if necessary.

As they prepared for takeoff, everyone on Phil’s crew worried about Green Hornet. Louie tried to reassure himself that without bombs or ammunition aboard, the plane should have enough power to stay airborne. Phil was concerned that he’d never been in this plane and didn’t know its quirks. He knew that it had been cannibalized, and he hoped that critical parts weren’t missing. The crew reviewed crash procedures and made a special inspection to be sure that the survival equipment was aboard. There was a provisions box in the plane, and retrieving this was the tail gunner’s responsibility. There was also an extra raft, stored in a yellow bag on the flight deck. This raft was Louie’s responsibility, and he checked to be sure it was there. He put on his Mae West, as did some other crewmen. Phil left his off, perhaps because it was difficult to fly with it on.

At the last moment, an enlisted man ran to the plane and asked if he could hitch a ride to Palmyra. There were no objections, and the man found a seat in the back. With the addition of the enlisted man, there were eleven on board.

Green Hornet. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

As Phil and Cuppernell turned the plane up the taxiway, Louie remembered his letter to Payton Jordan. He fished it from his pocket, leaned from the waist window, and tossed it to a ground crewman, who said he’d mail it for him.

——

Daisy Mae lifted off at almost the same time as Green Hornet, and the planes flew side by side. On Green Hornet, other than the four Super Man veterans, the crewmen were strangers and had little to say to one another. Louie passed the time on the flight deck, chatting with Phil and Cuppernell.

Green Hornet, true to form, flew with its tail well below its nose, and couldn’t keep up with Daisy Mae. After about two hundred miles, Phil radioed to Deasy to go on without him. The crews lost sight of each other.

Sometime around two P.M., Green Hornet reached the search area, about 225 miles north of Palmyra. Clouds pressed around the plane, and no one could see the water. Phil dropped the plane under the clouds, leveling off at eight hundred feet. Louie took out his binoculars, descended to the greenhouse, and began scanning. Phil’s voice soon crackled over the interphone, asking him to come up and pass the binoculars around. Louie did as told, then remained on the flight deck, just behind Phil and Cuppernell.

While they searched the ocean, Cuppernell asked Phil if he could switch seats with him, taking over the first pilot’s duties. This was a common practice, enabling copilots to gain experience to qualify as first pilots. Phil assented. The enormous Cuppernell squeezed around Phil and into the left seat as Phil moved to the right. Cuppernell began steering the plane.

A few minutes later, someone noticed that the engines on one side were burning more fuel than those on the other, making one side progressively lighter. They began transferring fuel across the wings to even out the load.

Suddenly, there was a shudder. Louie looked at the tachometer and saw that the RPMs on engine No. 1—on the far left—were falling. He looked out the window. The engine was shaking violently. Then it stopped. The bomber tipped left and began dropping rapidly toward the ocean.

Phil and Cuppernell had only seconds to save the plane. They began working rapidly, but Louie had the sense that they were disoriented by their seat swap. To minimize drag from the dead No. 1 engine, they needed to “feather” it—turn the dead propeller blades parallel to the wind and stop the propeller’s rotation. Normally, this was Cuppernell’s job, but now he was in the pilot’s seat. As he worked, Cuppernell shouted to the new engineer to come to the cockpit to feather the engine. It is unknown if he or anyone else specified which engine needed feathering. It was a critical piece of information; because a dead engine’s propeller continues turning in the wind, it can look just like a running engine.

On the control panel, there were four feathering buttons, one for each engine, covered by a plastic shield. Leaning between Cuppernell and Phil, the engineer flipped the shield and banged down on a button. The moment he did it, Green Hornet heaved and lurched left. The engineer had hit the No. 2 button, not the No. 1 button. Both leftward engines were now dead, and No. 1 still wasn’t feathered.

Phil pushed the two working engines full on, trying to keep the plane aloft long enough to restart the good left engine. The racing right engines, pulling against the dragging, liftless side, rolled the plane halfway onto its left side, sending it into a spiral. The engine wouldn’t start. The plane kept dropping.

Green Hornet was doomed. The best Phil could do was to try to level it out to ditch. He grunted three words into the interphone:

“Prepare to crash.”

Louie ran from the flight deck, yelling for everyone to get to crash stations. As the plane whirled, he dug out the extra life raft, then clambered toward his crash position by the right waist window. He saw Mac, the new tail gunner, clutching the survival provisions box. Other men were frantically pulling on Mae Wests. Louie was distantly aware that Mitchell hadn’t emerged from the nose. It was Mitchell’s duty to calculate the plane’s position, relay this to the radioman so he could send a distress signal, and strap the sextant and celestial navigation kit to his body. But with the plane gyrating down nose first and the escape passage narrow, perhaps the navigator couldn’t pull himself out.

As the men behind the cockpit fled toward the comparative safety of the waist and rear of the plane, one man, almost certainly the engineer who had hit the wrong feathering button, apparently stayed in front. Because life rafts didn’t deploy automatically in a crash, it was the engineer’s duty to stand behind the cockpit to pull the overhead raft-release handle. To ensure that the rafts would be near enough to the plane for survivors to swim to them, he would have to wait until just before the crash to pull the handle. This meant that he would have little or no chance to get to a crash position, and thus, little chance of survival.

Phil and Cuppernell fought the plane. Green Hornet rolled onto its left side, moving faster and faster as the right engines thundered at full power. There was no time to radio a distress call. Phil looked for a swell over which to orient the plane for ditching, but it was no use. He couldn’t haul the plane level, and even if he’d been able to, he was going much too fast. They were going to crash, very hard. Phil felt strangely devoid of fear. He watched the water rotating up at him and thought: There’s nothing more I can do.

Louie sat down on the floor by the bulkhead, facing forward. There were five men near him. Everyone looked stunned; no one said anything. Louie looked out the right waist window. All he saw was the cloudy sky, turning around and around. He felt intensely alive. He recalled the bulkhead in front of him and thought of how his skull would strike it. Sensing the ocean coming up at the plane, he took a last glance at the twisting sky, then pulled the life raft in front of him and pushed his head into his chest.

One terrible, tumbling second passed, then another. An instant before the plane struck the water, Louie’s mind throbbed with a single, final thought: Nobody’s going to live through this.

——

For Louie, there were only jagged, soundless sensations: his body catapulted forward, the plane breaking open, something wrapping itself around him, the cold slap of water, and then its weight over him. Green Hornet, its nose and left wing hitting first at high speed, stabbed into the ocean and blew apart.

As the plane disintegrated around him, Louie felt himself being pulled deep underwater. Then, abruptly, the downward motion stopped and Louie was flung upward. The force of the plane’s plunge had spent itself, and the fuselage, momentarily buoyed by the air trapped inside, leapt to the surface. Louie opened his mouth and gasped. The air hissed from the plane, and the water rushed up over Louie again. The plane slipped under and sank toward the ocean floor as if yanked downward.

Louie tried to orient himself. The tail was no longer behind him, the wings no longer ahead. The men who’d been around him were gone. The impact had rammed him into the waist gun mount and wedged him under it, facedown, with the raft below him. The gun mount pressed against his neck, and countless strands of something were coiled around his body, binding him to the gun mount and the raft. He felt them and thought: Spaghetti. It was a snarl of wires, Green Hornet’s nervous system. When the tail had broken off, the wires had snapped and whipped around him. He thrashed against them but couldn’t get free. He felt frantic to breathe, but couldn’t.

In the remains of the cockpit, Phil was fighting to get out. When the plane hit, he was thrown forward, his head striking something. A wave of water punched through the cockpit, and the plane carried him under. From the darkness, he knew that he was far below the surface, sinking deeper by the second. He apparently saw Cuppernell push his big body out of the plane. Phil found what he thought was the cockpit window frame, its glass missing. He put his foot on something hard and pushed himself through the opening and out of the cockpit. He swam toward the surface, the light coming up around him.

He emerged in a puzzle of debris. His head was gushing blood and his ankle and one finger were broken. He found a floating hunk of wreckage, perhaps four feet square, and clung to it. It began to sink. There were two life rafts far away. No one was in them. Cuppernell was nowhere to be seen.

Far below, Louie was still ensnared in the plane, writhing in the wires. He looked up and saw a body, drifting passively. The plane coursed down, and the world fled away above. Louie felt his ears pop, and vaguely recollected that at the swimming pool at Redondo Beach, his ears would pop at twenty feet. Darkness enfolded him, and the water pressure bore in with greater and greater intensity. He struggled uselessly. He thought: Hopeless.

He felt a sudden, excruciating bolt of pain in his forehead. There was an oncoming stupor, a fading, as he tore at the wires and clenched his throat against the need to breathe. He had the soft realization that this was the last of everything. He passed out.

He woke in total darkness. He thought: This is death. Then he felt the water still on him, the heavy dropping weight of the plane around him. Inexplicably, the wires were gone, as was the raft. He was floating inside the fuselage, which was bearing him toward the ocean floor, some seventeen hundred feet down. He could see nothing. His Mae West was uninflated, but its buoyancy was pulling him into the ceiling of the plane. The air was gone from his lungs, and he was now gulping reflexively, swallowing salt water. He tasted blood, gasoline, and oil. He was drowning.

Louie flung out his arms, trying to find a way out. His right hand struck something, and his USC ring snagged on it. His hand was caught. He reached toward it with his left hand and felt a long, smooth length of metal. The sensation oriented him: He was at the open right waist window. He swam into the window, put his feet on the frame, and pushed off, wrenching his right hand free and cutting his finger. His back struck the top of the window, and the skin under his shirt scraped off. He kicked clear. The plane sank away.

Louie fumbled for the cords on his Mae West, hoping that no one had poached the carbon dioxide canisters. Luck was with him: The chambers ballooned. He was suddenly light, the vest pulling him urgently upward in a stream of debris.

He burst into dazzling daylight. He gasped in a breath and immediately vomited up the salt water and fuel he had swallowed. He had survived.

Twelve

Downed

THE OCEAN WAS A JUMBLE OF BOMBER REMAINS. THE LIFE-BLOOD of the plane—oil, hydraulic fluid, and some one thousand gallons of fuel—slopped about on the surface. Curling among the bits of plane were threads of blood.

Louie heard a voice. He turned toward it and saw Phil, a few dozen feet away, clinging to what looked like a fuel tank. With him was the tail gunner, Mac. Neither man had a Mae West on. Blood spouted in rhythmic arcs from Phil’s head and washed in sheets down his face. His eyes lolled about in dazed bewilderment. Phil looked at the head bobbing across the debris field and registered that it was Louie. None of the other men had surfaced.

Louie saw one of the life rafts bobbing on the water. It was possible that the raft had been thrown loose by the disintegrating plane, but it was much more likely that the engineer, in the last act of his life, had yanked the raft-release handle just before the crash. The raft had inflated itself and was drifting away rapidly.

Louie knew that he had to get Phil’s bleeding stopped, but if he went to him, the raft would be lost and all of them would perish. He swam for the raft. His clothing and shoes weighed him down, and the current and wind carried the raft away faster than he could swim. As it slipped farther and farther from reach, Louie gave up. He looked back at Phil and Mac, sharing the recognition that their chance was lost. Then he saw a long cord trailing off the raft, snaking not two feet from his face. He snatched the cord, reeled the raft to him, and climbed aboard. A second raft was sliding away. Louie pulled out his raft’s oars, rowed as hard as he could, and just managed to catch the cord and pull the raft to him. He fed the cords through grommets in the rafts and tied them together.

He rowed to Phil and Mac. Realizing that the jagged hunk that he was clinging to might perforate the rafts, Phil pushed it away. Louie pulled Phil aboard, and Mac climbed up under his own power. Both men, like Louie, were filmy with fuel and oil. With all three of them in one raft, it was cramped; the raft was only about six feet long and a little more than two feet wide.

There were two gashes on the left side of Phil’s forehead, by the hairline. Blood was spurting from the wounds and, mixed with seawater, sloshing in the bottom of the raft. Remembering what he had learned in Boy Scouts and his Honolulu first aid course, Louie ran his fingers down Phil’s throat until he felt a pulse, the carotid artery. He showed Mac the spot and told him to press down. He pulled off his muslin top shirt and T-shirt and pulled Phil’s shirts off as well. He asked Mac to do the same. Setting aside the top shirts, Louie dipped Phil’s T-shirt in the water, folded it into a compress, and pressed it to the wounds. He took the other T-shirts and tied them tightly around Phil’s head, then slid Phil into the second raft.

Phil’s mind was woozy. He knew that he’d crashed, that someone had pulled him from the water, that he was in a raft, and that Louie was with him. He felt frightened, though not panicked. As the pilot, he was officially in command, but he grasped his situation well enough to know that he was in no condition to make decisions. He could see that Louie had a nasty cut on his finger, near his USC ring, but was otherwise unhurt and lucid. He asked Louie to take command, and Louie agreed.

“I’m glad it was you, Zamp,” Phil said softly. Then he fell quiet.

From somewhere nearby, there was a small sound, a moan trailing off into a gargle, a mouth trying to form a word, a throat filling with water—then silence. Louie grabbed an oar and circled around as rapidly as he could, searching for the drowning man. Maybe it was Cuppernell, who hadn’t been seen since he was deep underwater. They would never know. Whoever had made the sound had slipped under. He didn’t come up again.

——

With Phil relatively stable, Louie turned his attention to the rafts. Made of two layers of canvas coated in rubber and divided into two air pockets bisected by a bulkhead, each was in good condition. The critical question regarded provisions. The provisions box, which Mac had been holding as the plane went down, was gone, either ripped from his hands during the crash or lost in his escape from the wreckage. In their pockets, the men had only wallets and a few coins. Their watches were still on their wrists, but the hands had stopped when the plane had hit the water. Probably for the first time since Phil had arrived in Oahu, Cecy’s lucky bracelet wasn’t on his wrist, and the silver dollar he’d been keeping for his reunion with her wasn’t in his pocket. Maybe in the hurry to dress for the flight, he had forgotten them, or maybe they’d been lost in the crash.

Pockets in the rafts contained some survival provisions. Whatever was in them was all that they’d have. Louie untied the pocket flaps and looked inside. He found several thick chocolate bars—probably the Hershey Company’s military-issue Ration D bars—divided into segments and packaged in wax-dipped containers to resist gas attack. Designed to be unpalatably bitter so soldiers would eat them only in dire circumstances, they were formulated to be highly caloric and melt-resistant. The package instructions said that each man was to be given two segments a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, to be held on the tongue and allowed to dissolve over thirty minutes.

With the chocolate, Louie found several half-pint tins of water, a brass mirror, a flare gun, sea dye, a set of fishhooks, a spool of fishing line, and two air pumps in canvas cases. There was also a set of pliers with a screwdriver built into the handle. Louie pondered it for a long while, trying to come up with a reason why someone would need a screwdriver or pliers on a raft. Each raft also had a patch kit, to be used if the raft leaked. That was all there was.

The provisions were grossly inadequate. One year later, each B-24 raft would be equipped with a sun tarpaulin for shade, blue on one side, yellow on the other. For camouflage in enemy waters, the tarpaulin could be spread blue side up; for signaling, the yellow side could be waved. Each standard 1944 raft would also be equipped with a bailing bucket, a mast and sail, a sea anchor, sun ointment, a first aid kit, puncture plugs, a flashlight, fishing tackle, a jackknife, scissors, a whistle, a compass, and religious pamphlets. None of these items, not even a knife, was in Green Hornet’s rafts. The rafts also had no “Gibson Girl,” a radio transmitter that could send signals over some two hundred miles. Newer planes had been carrying them for nearly a year, and in two months, all planes would be equipped, but Green Hornet hadn’t been furnished with one. And they had no navigation instruments. It had been Mitchell’s job to strap them to his body, but if he had done so, the instruments had gone to the bottom with him.

Most worrisome was the water situation. A few half-pints wouldn’t last them long. The men were surrounded by water, but they couldn’t drink it. The salt content in seawater is so high that it is considered a poison. When a person drinks seawater, the kidneys must generate urine to flush the salt away, but to do so, they need more water than is contained in the seawater itself, so the body pulls water from its cells. Bereft of water, the cells begin to fail. Paradoxically, a drink of seawater causes potentially fatal dehydration.

Adrift near the equator with little water and no shelter, Phil, Louie, and Mac would soon be in dire trouble. The rafts hadn’t been equipped with water desalinizing or distilling materials, nor did they have containers in which to catch rain. Five months earlier, General Hap Arnold had ordered that all life rafts be equipped with the Delano Sunstill, a device that could generate small amounts of drinking water indefinitely. Delivery had been delayed.

——

From the moment that he had come out of the water, Mac hadn’t said a word. He had somehow escaped the crash without injury. He had done everything that Louie had asked of him, but his face had never lost its glazed, startled expression.

Louie was bent over the raft when Mac suddenly began wailing, “We’re going to die!” Louie reassured him that the squadron would come for them, that they were likely to be found that night, at the latest the next day. Mac continued to shout. Louie, exasperated, threatened to report Mac when they returned. It had no effect. At his wits’ end, Louie whacked Mac across the cheek with the back of his hand. Mac thumped back and fell silent.

Louie came up with ground rules. Each man would eat one square of chocolate in the morning, one in the evening. Louie allotted one water tin per man, with each man allowed two or three sips a day. Eating and drinking at this rate, they could stretch their supplies for a few days.

With inventory taken and rules established, there was nothing to do but wait. Louie made a deliberate effort to avoid thinking about the men who had died, and had to push away the memory of the gurgling voice in the water. Considering the crash, he was amazed that three men had survived. All three had been on the plane’s right side; the fact that the plane had struck on its left had probably saved them. What mystified Louie was his escape from the wreckage. If he had passed out from the pressure, and the plane had continued to sink and the pressure to build, why had he woken again? And how had he been loosed from the wires while unconscious?

The men watched the sky. Louie kept his hand on Phil’s head, stanching the bleeding. The last trace of Green Hornet, the shimmer of gas, hydraulic fluid, and oil that had wreathed the rafts since the crash, faded away. In its place, rising from below, came dark blue shapes, gliding in lithe arcs. A neat, sharp form, flat and shining, cut the surface and began tracing circles around the rafts. Another one joined it. The sharks had found them. Fluttering close to their sides were pilot fish, striped black and white.

The sharks, which Louie thought were of the mako and reef species, were so close that the men would only have to extend their hands to touch them. The smallest were about six feet long; some were double that size, twice the length of the rafts. They bent around the rafts, testing the fabric, dragging their fins along them, but not trying to get at the men on top. They seemed to be waiting for the men to come to them.

The sun sank, and it became sharply cold. The men used their hands to bail a few inches of water into each raft. Once their bodies warmed the water, they felt less chilled. Though exhausted, they fought the urge to sleep, afraid that a ship or submarine would pass and they’d miss it. Phil’s lower body, under the water, was warm enough, but his upper body was so cold that he shook.

It was absolutely dark and absolutely silent, save for the chattering of Phil’s teeth. The ocean was a flat calm. A rough, rasping tremor ran through the men. The sharks were rubbing their backs along the raft bottoms.

Louie’s arm was still draped over the side of his raft, his hand resting on Phil’s forehead. Under Louie’s hand, Phil drifted to sleep, attended by the sensation of sharks scraping down the length of his back. In the next raft, Louie, too, fell asleep.

Mac was alone in his wakefulness, his mind spinning with fear. Grasping at an addled resolution, he began to stir.

Thirteen

Missing at Sea

DAISY MAE TOUCHED DOWN ON PALMYRA LATE THAT AFTERNOON. The crew had searched for Corpening’s plane all day but had seen no trace of it. Deasy had dinner, then went to the base theater. He was watching the film when someone told him to report to the base commander immediately. When he got there, he was told that Green Hornet had never come in. “Holy smoke!” he said. He knew that there were two possibilities. One was that Phillips’s crew had turned back to Hawaii; the other was that they were, as Deasy phrased it, “in the drink.” Someone went to check with Hawaii. Knowing that if Green Hornet was indeed down, they’d still have to wait until morning to search, Deasy went to bed.

At around midnight, a sailor woke Deasy’s radioman, Herman Scearce, and told him that Phil’s plane was missing. The navy wanted to check Scearce’s radio log to see when the last contact with the plane was. Scearce asked the sailor to wake Deasy, and he, Deasy, and navy officials reviewed the log at the base office. It yielded little information.

At four-thirty A.M., Green Hornet was declared missing. Two planes were now down—Corpening’s and Phillips’s—taking twenty-one men with them.

The navy assumed command of the rescue effort. Once the sun was up, Daisy Mae would be sent out, along with at least two navy flying boats and at least one other AAF plane. Because Daisy Mae and Green Hornet had flown side by side early in the journey, the searchers knew that Green Hornet had not crashed during the first two hundred miles of the trip. It had apparently gone down somewhere between the point at which Daisy Mae had left it and Palmyra, a stretch of eight hundred miles. The trick was figuring out the direction in which any survivors would be drifting. The ocean around Palmyra was a whorl of currents, lying at the meeting point of the westward-carrying north equatorial current and the eastward-carrying equatorial countercurrent. A few miles of difference in latitude could mean a 180-degree difference in current direction, and no one knew where the plane had hit. The search area would have to be enormous.

Each crew was given search coordinates. From Palmyra, Daisy Mae would fly north. From Oahu, several planes would fly south. Not long after sunup, the planes took off. Everyone knew that the odds of finding the crew were very long, but, said Scearce, “we kept hoping, hoping, hoping …”

——

Louie woke with the sun. Mac was beside him, lying back. Phil lay in his raft, his mind still fumbling. Louie sat up and ran his eyes over the sky and ocean in search of rescuers. Only the sharks stirred.

Louie decided to divvy up breakfast, a single square of chocolate. He untied the raft pocket and looked in. All of the chocolate was gone. He looked around the rafts. No chocolate, no wrappers. His gaze paused on Mac. The sergeant looked back at him with wide, guilty eyes.

The realization that Mac had eaten all of the chocolate rolled hard over Louie. In the brief time that Louie had known Mac, the tail gunner had struck him as a decent, friendly guy, although a bit of a reveler, confident to the point of flippancy. The crash had undone him. Louie knew that they couldn’t survive for long without food, but he quelled the thought. A rescue search was surely under way. They’d be on Palmyra later today, maybe tomorrow, and the loss of the chocolate wouldn’t matter. Curbing his irritation, Louie told Mac that he was disappointed in him. Understanding that Mac had acted in panic, he reassured him that they’d soon be rescued. Mac said nothing.

The chill of the night gave way to a sweltering day. Louie watched the sky. Phil, weak from blood loss, slept. Mac, a shade short of being a redhead, burned in the sun. He remained in a dreamy, distant place. All three men were hungry, but they could do nothing about it. The fishhooks and line were useless. There was no bait.

As the men lay in silence, a purring sound began drifting gently between their thoughts. Then all three realized that they were hearing a plane. Searching the sky, they saw a B-25, high up and well to the east. Flying much too high to be a search plane, it was probably on its way to Palmyra.

Louie lunged for the raft pocket, retrieved the flare gun, and loaded a flare cartridge. He couldn’t stand in the soft-bottomed raft, so he tipped up onto his knees and raised the gun. He squeezed the trigger, the gun bucked in his hand, and the flare, roaring red, streaked up. As it shot overhead, Louie dug out a dye pack and shook it hurriedly into the water, and a pool of vivid greenish yellow bloomed over the ocean.

With the flare arcing over them, Louie, Phil, and Mac watched the bomber, willing the men aboard to see them. Slowly, the flare sputtered out. The bomber kept going, and then it was gone. The circle of color around the rafts faded away.

The sighting left the castaways with one important piece of information. They had known that they were drifting, but without points of reference, they hadn’t known in which direction, or how fast. Since planes on the north-south passage from Hawaii followed a flight lane that ran close to Green Hornet’s crash site, the appearance of a B-25 far to the east almost certainly meant that the rafts were drifting west, away from the view of friendly planes. Their chances of rescue were already dimming.

That evening, the search planes turned back for their bases. No one had seen anything. They would be back in the air at first light.

Over the rafts, the daylight died. The men took sips of water, bailed seawater around themselves, and lay down. The sharks came to the rafts again to rub their backs on the undersides.

——

Phil slept for most of the next day. Louie sipped water and thought about food. Mac continued to hunker down, speaking little. For another day, rescue did not come.

It was sometime early the next morning, May 30, when Louie, Mac, and Phil heard a broad, deep rumble of B-24 engines, the sound of home. Then there it was, low and right overhead, a blunt-faced whale of a plane, heading southeast, plowing through the clouds, disappearing and reappearing. It was a search plane. It was so near the rafts that Louie thought he recognized the insignia of their squadron, the 42nd, on the plane’s tail.

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

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

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

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

——

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

Sometime on the fifth day, Mac snapped. After having said almost nothing for days, he suddenly began screaming that they were going to die. Wild-eyed and raving, he couldn’t stop shouting. Louie slapped him across the face. Mac abruptly went silent and lay down, appearing strangely contented. Maybe he was comforted by Louie’s assertion of control, protected thereby from the awful possibilities that his imagination hung before him.

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

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

——

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

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

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

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

In Saranap, California, Payton Jordan opened the letter that Louie had tossed out the window of Green Hornet as the plane taxied for its last takeoff. “Dear Payton and Marge,” it read. “I am still alive and kickin around, why I don’t know.”

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

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

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

——

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

At Kualoa, a second lieutenant named Jack Krey walked into the cottage to perform the grim duty of cataloging the men’s things and sending them to their families. Louie’s room was mostly as it had been when Louie had walked out that Thursday morning: clothes, a footlocker, a diary that ended with a few words about a rescue mission, a pinup of actress Esther Williams on the wall. The note that Louie had left on the locker was gone, as was the liquor. Among Louie’s things, Krey found photographs that Louie had taken inside his plane. In some of them, Louie had forgotten to aim the camera away from the Norden bombsight, so Krey had to confiscate those. The rest of Louie’s belongings were packed into his footlocker and readied to be sent to Torrance.

——

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

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

The telegram reached the Zamperinis that same evening. Louise called Sylvia, who had recently married a firefighter, Harvey Flammer, and now lived in a nearby suburb with her husband. Upon hearing that her brother was missing, Sylvia became hysterical, sobbing so loudly that her neighbor ran to her. When the neighbor asked her what was wrong, Sylvia was crying too hard to speak. Eventually she pulled herself together enough to call Harvey at the fire station. She was frantic and confused and didn’t know what to do. Harvey told her to go to her mother. Sylvia put the phone down and ran straight out the door.

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

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

——

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

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

“The crew went down,” he said.

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

Fourteen

Thirst

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

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

On the third day without water, a smudge appeared on the horizon. It grew, darkened, billowed over the rafts, and lidded the sun. Down came the rain. The men threw back their heads, spilled their bodies back, spread their arms, and opened their mouths. The rain fell on their chests, lips, faces, tongues. It soothed their skin, washed the salt and sweat and fuel from their pores, slid down their throats, fed their bodies. It was a sensory explosion.

They knew it wouldn’t last. They had to find a way to save the water. The narrow water tins, opened to the downpour, caught virtually nothing. Louie, keeping his head tipped up and his mouth open, felt around the raft for something better. He dug into the raft pockets and pulled out one of the air pumps. It was sheathed in a canvas case about fourteen inches long, stitched down one side. He tore the seam open, spread the fabric to form a triangular bowl, and watched happily as the rain pooled on the fabric.

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

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

——

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

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

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

It occurred to Phil that from the point of view of the birds, their still forms, obscured by canvas hoods, must have looked like lifeless debris. He was right. One day, nine or ten days into their odyssey, Louie felt something alight on his hood, and saw its shadow fall before him. It was an albatross. With Louie’s head hidden, the bird hadn’t recognized that he was landing on a man.

Slowly, slowly, Louie raised his hand toward the bird, his motion so gradual that it was little more noticeable than the turning of a minute hand on a clock. The bird rested calmly. In time, Louie’s hand was beside the bird, his fingers open. All at once, Louie snapped his hand shut, clamping down on the bird’s legs. The bird pecked frantically, slashing his knuckles. Louie grabbed its head and broke its neck.

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

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

It was the first food to cross their lips in more than a week. Between three men, a small fish didn’t go far, but the protein gave them a push of energy. Louie had demonstrated that if they were persistent and resourceful, they could catch food, and both he and Phil felt inspired. Only Mac remained unchanged.

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

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

——

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

The men floated in a sensory vacuum. When the weather was calm, the ocean was silent. There was nothing to touch but water, skin, hair, and canvas. Other than the charred smell of the raft, there were no odors. There was nothing to look at but sky and sea. At some point, Louie stuck his finger in his ear and felt wax there. He smelled his finger, and by virtue of being new, the scent of the wax was curiously refreshing. He developed a habit of twisting his finger in his ear and sniffing it. Phil began doing it too.

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

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

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

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

Rickenbacker’s story, familiar to Louie also, was important for another reason. Exposure, dehydration, stress, and hunger had quickly driven many of Rickenbacker’s party insane, a common fate for raft-bound men. Louie was more concerned about sanity than he was about sustenance. He kept thinking of a college physiology class he had taken, in which the instructor had taught them to think of the mind as a muscle that would atrophy if left idle. Louie was determined that no matter what happened to their bodies, their minds would stay under their control.

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

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

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

Once the food was eaten and the past exhausted, they moved to the future. Louie laid plans to buy the Torrance train depot and turn it into a restaurant. Phil fantasized about getting back to Indiana, maybe to teach school. He couldn’t wait to see the Indy 500 again. The race had been suspended because of the war, but Phil revived it in his mind, spreading a blanket on the infield grass, heaping it with food, and watching the cars blur past. And he thought about Cecy. It hadn’t occurred to him to tuck her picture in his wallet before he left the cottage, but in his mind, she never left him.

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

In all of these bull sessions, not once did they broach the subject of the crash. Louie wanted to talk about it, but something about Phil stopped him. There were times when Phil seemed lost in troubled thoughts, and Louie guessed that he was reliving the crash, and perhaps holding himself responsible for the deaths of his men. Louie wanted to reassure Phil that he’d done nothing wrong, but he decided that raising the issue would deepen Phil’s preoccupation. So he said nothing.

——

As Louie and Phil grilled each other, Mac usually sat in silence. Sometimes he’d ask Louie to describe a recipe, and occasionally he would interject, but getting him to fully participate was rough going. He shared few memories, and though the other two encouraged him, he couldn’t imagine a future. To him, it seemed, the world was too far gone.

Given the dismal record of raft-bound men, Mac’s despair was reasonable. What is remarkable is that the two men who shared Mac’s plight didn’t share his hopelessness. Though Phil was constantly wondering how long this would go on, it had not yet occurred to him that he might die. The same was true for Louie. Though they both knew that they were in an extremely serious situation, both had the ability to warn fear away from their thoughts, focusing instead on how to survive and reassuring themselves that things would work out.

It remains a mystery why these three young men, veterans of the same training and the same crash, differed so radically in their perceptions of their plight. Maybe the difference was biological; some men may be wired for optimism, others for doubt. As a toddler, Louie had leapt from a train and watched it bear his family away, yet had remained cheerfully unconcerned about his safety, suggesting that he may have been a born optimist. Perhaps the men’s histories had given them opposing convictions about their capacity to overcome adversity. Phil and Louie had survived Funafuti and performed uncommonly well over Nauru, and each trusted the other. “If there was one thing left, he’d a given it to me,” Phil once said of Louie. Mac had never seen combat, didn’t know these officers, and was largely an unknown quantity to himself. All he knew about his ability to cope with this crisis was that on the first night, he had panicked and eaten the only food they had. As time passed and starvation loomed, this act took on greater and greater importance, and it may have fed Mac’s sense of futility.

For Phil, there was another source of strength, one of which even Louie was unaware. According to his family, in his quiet, private way, Phil was a deeply religious man, carrying a faith instilled in him by his parents. “I had told Al several times before to always do his best as he knew how to do it,” Phil’s father once wrote, “and when things get beyond his skill and ability to ask the Lord to step in and help out.” Phil never spoke of his faith, but as he sang hymns over the ocean, conjuring up a protective God, perhaps rescue felt closer, despair more distant.

From earliest childhood, Louie had regarded every limitation placed on him as a challenge to his wits, his resourcefulness, and his determination to rebel. The result had been a mutinous youth. As maddening as his exploits had been for his parents and his town, Louie’s success in carrying them off had given him the conviction that he could think his way around any boundary. Now, as he was cast into extremity, despair and death became the focus of his defiance. The same attributes that had made him the boy terror of Torrance were keeping him alive in the greatest struggle of his life.

Though all three men faced the same hardship, their differing perceptions of it appeared to be shaping their fates. Louie and Phil’s hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac’s resignation seemed to paralyze him, and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who faded the most. Louie and Phil’s optimism, and Mac’s hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling.

——

Two weeks had passed. The men’s skin was burned, swollen, and cracked. Mysterious white lines striped their fingernails and toenails, and salt sores were marching up their legs, buttocks, and backs. The rafts were decomposing in the sun and salt water, bleeding vivid yellow dye onto the men’s clothing and skin and making everything sticky.

The men’s bodies slowly winnowed. Each day, Louie noticed incremental differences in his weight, and the weight of his raftmates, from the day before: the pants looser, the faces narrower. As they passed the fortnight mark, they began to look grotesque. Their flesh had evaporated. Their cheeks, now bearded, had sunken into concavity. Their bodies were digesting themselves.

They were reaching a stage of their ordeal that for other castaways had been a gruesome turning point. In 1820, after the whaling ship Essex was sunk by an enraged whale, the lifeboat-bound survivors, on the brink of death, resorted to cannibalism. Some sixty years later, after nineteen days adrift, starving survivors of the sunken yacht Mignonette killed and ate a teenaged crewman. Stories of cannibalism among castaways were so common that the British gave a name to the practice of choosing a victim, dubbing it the “custom of the sea.” To well-fed men on land, the idea of cannibalism has always inspired revulsion. To many sailors who have stood on the threshold of death, lost in the agony and mind-altering effects of starvation, it has seemed a reasonable, even inescapable solution.

For Louie, the idea of consuming a human being was revolting and unthinkable. To eat a human being, even if the person had died naturally, would be abhorrent for him. All three men held the same conviction. Cannibalism wouldn’t be considered, then or ever.

The two-week mark was a different kind of turning point for Louie. He began to pray aloud. He had no idea how to speak to God, so he recited snippets of prayers that he’d heard in movies. Phil bowed his head as Louie spoke, offering “Amen” at the end. Mac only listened.

The rafts slid on the current, their tethers snaking behind them. It seemed that they were still drifting west, but without any points of reference, the men weren’t sure. At least they were going somewhere.

——

The second albatross fluttered onto Louie’s head sometime around the fourteenth day. Again Louie slowly raised his hand, snatched it, and killed it. The men sat there looking at it, remembering the stench of the first albatross. When Louie opened it up, they were happily surprised to find that it didn’t smell that bad. Still, no one wanted to eat it. Louie portioned the meat and insisted that everyone eat. All three men forced the meat down. Because Mac seemed to need food the most, they gave him all of the blood.

In the bird’s stomach they found several small fish, which they decided to use as bait, and with them, Louie caught one more fish. He saved some of the bird meat for bait and set the bones out to dry in hopes that they might be useful as fishhooks.

——

Time spun out endlessly. Louie caught a few fish, once parlaying a tiny one, thrown into the raft by a whitecap, into bait that yielded a comparatively fat pilot fish. Rains came intermittently, leaving the men sucking up every drop that fell into their rain catchers. Louie and Phil took turns leading prayers each night. Mac remained in his own world.

The men grew thinner. Phil was gradually regaining his strength after his initial state of concussed exhaustion; Mac’s body grew weaker, following his broken spirit. Then the rains stopped and the water tins dried up. They reached day twenty-one. They caught a fish and had a little celebration for passing what they thought was Rickenbacker’s mark.

For some time, Louie had noticed a stomach-turning reek wafting to and fro over them. It was coming from Phil’s head. The blood on his T-shirt bandage was rotting, and cakes of it were chipping off and falling into the raft. Phil couldn’t smell it, but Louie couldn’t bear it. Louie untied the T-shirt and gently unwrapped it. Beneath a thick cake of dried blood, the wounds had knit neatly. The bleeding didn’t resume. The T-shirt could go.

A few days later, Louie saw something bizarre. The edge of the sea, flush to the horizon, was peeling upward. A vast black rim formed, rose up, and began speeding toward them with a tumbling motion. Louie shouted a warning and the other two men wheeled around toward it. They dropped down, getting their weight as low as possible so they wouldn’t be flipped over. As the wave closed in, they braced themselves.

Just as the wave reached them, they realized it wasn’t a wave at all. It was a giant school of dolphins, swimming with astonishing speed. The dolphins rushed at the rafts and were soon muscling all around them. Looking into the water, Phil saw small fish, thousands of them, seeming to fill the ocean. The dolphins were chasing them. The men thrust their arms into the water and tried to grab some, but the fish slipped through their fingers. If they had had a net, they could have whisked it through the water and filled the rafts. But with only their fingers, they couldn’t snare even one.

Louie was out of bait. Other than the sharks, the only fish that ventured near the rafts were pilot fish, which hugged the sides of the sharks as they circled. They were within easy reach, only when Louie tried to grab them, they squirted away. The sharks had stolen every hook small enough to fit in the mouths of pilot fish, so Louie tried albatross bones, but the fish spat them out.

Looking at the fish line that he had left, he got an idea. He cut off small portions of line, tied them to the large fishhooks, and then tied three hooks to the fingers of one hand, one on his pinkie, one on his middle finger, one on his thumb, orienting them as if they were claws. He held his hand over the water’s surface and waited.

A shark, attended by a pilot fish, swam by. Once its head had passed, Louie sank his hand into the water. When the unsuspecting pilot fish moved under his hand, he snapped his fingers shut around its back. The hooks dug in. Louie yanked the fish out of the water, jubilant.

Sometime that week, a small tern landed on the wall of the raft, right between the men. It was closest to Phil, and without speaking, the men indicated to each other that he’d catch it. Phil clapped down on the bird. It was tiny, and offered little meat, but not long after, another tern settled on the raft. This time, Mac caught it. Louie was so famished that he went at it with his teeth, ripping the feathers loose and spitting them out in whuffs. Almost immediately, he felt a crawling sensation on his chin. The tern had been covered in lice, which were now hopping over his face.

Something about the tickle of lice on his skin rattled Louie more than anything he had yet encountered. He began scratching and rubbing at his face, but he couldn’t get at the lice, which had burrowed into his beard and were moving up his head and into his hair. He pitched his upper body into the water. Phil and Mac, realizing that Louie was going to get his head ripped off, grabbed the oars and bumped the sharks away while Louie splashed about, trying to drown the lice. After about half a dozen dunks, the tickle was gone.

As the days passed, the men caught three, perhaps four more birds. One bird kept dipping low over the raft, then soaring off again. Mac suddenly shot his hand up and snagged the bird by the leg in midair, then handed the squirming animal to Louie, who was amazed at Mac’s alacrity. The men ate every morsel of the bird, and every other bird that they caught, leaving only feathers and bones.

——

For days, Louie lay over the side of the raft, fishhooks tied to his fingers, trying to catch another pilot fish. He caught none. The water ran out again, and the thirst was agonizing. Day after day passed with no rain. Twice, the men rowed toward distant squalls, but each time, the rain sputtered out just as they reached it, leaving them exhausted and demoralized. When the next squall inched along the horizon, none of them had the strength to chase it.

The intense thirst and overheating drove Phil to do something almost suicidal. He waited for the sharks to wander a short distance away, then pulled himself overboard. Louie and Mac knelt near him, jabbing at sharks with the oars as Phil hung on the raft, savoring the cool water and swishing big mouthfuls of it over his tongue before spitting them out. He only just had the strength to drag himself back in. Since Phil had gotten away with it, the other two thought it worth a try, and took their turns in the water. The men were able to keep the sharks away long enough for all three to have a dip.

On the sixth day without water, the men recognized that they weren’t going to last much longer. Mac was failing especially quickly.

They bowed their heads together as Louie prayed. If God would quench their thirst, he vowed, he’d dedicate his life to him.

The next day, by divine intervention or the fickle humors of the tropics, the sky broke open and rain poured down. Twice more the water ran out, twice more they prayed, and twice more the rain came. The showers gave them just enough water to last a short while longer. If only a plane would come.

*

In 1942,

Poon Lim survived for 133 days alone on a raft after his ship was sunk by a German submarine. Lim’s feat was a record, but his vessel was a large, wood-and-metal “Carley float boat” raft, equipped with ten gallons of water, a fair amount of food, an electric torch, and other supplies.

Fifteen

Sharks and Bullets

ON THE MORNING OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH DAY, A PLANE came.

It began with a rumble of engines, and then a spot in the sky. It was a twin-engine bomber, moving west at a brisk clip. It was so far away that expending the flares and dye was questionable. The men conferred and voted. They decided to take a shot.

Louie fired one flare, reloaded, then fired a second, drawing vivid lines across the sky. He opened a dye container and spilled its contents into the ocean, then dug out the mirror and angled a square of light toward the bomber.

The men waited, hoping. The plane grew smaller, then faded away.

As the castaways slumped in the rafts, trying to accept another lost chance, over the western horizon there was a glimmer, tracing a wide curve, then banking toward the rafts. The bomber was coming back. Weeping with joy, Louie, Phil, and Mac tugged their shirts over their heads and snapped them back and forth in the air, calling out. The bomber leveled off, skimming over the water. Louie squinted at the cockpit. He made out two silhouettes, a pilot and copilot. He thought of Palmyra, food, solid ground underfoot.

And then, all at once, the ocean erupted. There was a deafening noise, and the rafts began hopping and shuddering under the castaways. The gunners were firing at them.

Louie, Phil, and Mac clawed for the raft walls and threw themselves overboard. They swam under the rafts and huddled there, watching bullets tear through the rafts and cut bright slits in the water around them. Then the firing stopped.

The men surfaced. The bomber had overshot them and was now to the east, moving away. Two sharks were nosing around. The men had to get out of the water immediately.

Clinging to the side of Louie and Mac’s raft, Phil was completely done in. The leap into the water had taken everything that was left in him. He floundered, unable to pull himself over the raft wall. Louie swam up behind him and gave him a push, and Phil slopped up on board. Mac, too, needed Louie’s help to climb over the wall. Louie then dragged himself up, and the three sat there, stunned but uninjured. They couldn’t believe that the airmen, mistaking them for Japanese, would strafe unarmed castaways. Under them, the raft felt doughy. It was leaking air.

In the distance, the bomber swung around and began flying at the rafts again. Louie hoped that the crew had realized the mistake and was returning to help them. Flying about two hundred feet over the water, the bomber raced at them, following a path slightly parallel to the rafts, so that its side passed into view. All three men saw it at once. Behind the wing, painted over the waist, was a red circle. The bomber was Japanese.

Louie saw the gunners taking aim and knew he had to go back in the water. Phil and Mac didn’t move. They were both exhausted. They knew that if they went overboard again, they wouldn’t be strong enough to get back in, and the sharks would take them. If they stayed on the raft, it seemed impossible that the gunners could miss them.

As the bomber flew toward them, they lay down. Phil pulled his knees to his chest and covered his head in his hands. Mac balled himself up beside him. Louie took a last glance at them, then dropped into the water and swam back under the rafts.

The bullets showered the ocean in a glittering downpour. Looking up, Louie saw them popping through the canvas, shooting beams of intensely bright tropical sunlight through the raft’s shadow. But after a few feet, the bullets spent their force and fluttered down, fizzing. Louie straightened his arms over his head and pushed against the bottom of one of the rafts, trying to get far enough down to be outside the bullets’ lethal range. Above him, he could see the depressions formed by Mac and Phil’s bodies. Neither man was moving.

As the bullets raked overhead, Louie struggled to stay under the rafts. The current clutched at him, rotating his body horizontally and dragging him away. He kicked against it, but it was no use. He was being sucked away, and he knew that if he lost touch with the rafts, he wouldn’t be able to swim hard enough against the current to get back. As he was pulled loose, he saw the long cord that strayed off the end of one of the rafts. He grabbed it and tied it around his waist.

As he lay underwater, his legs tugged in front of him by the current, Louie looked down at his feet. His left sock was pulled up on his shin; his right had slipped halfway off. He watched it flap in the current. Then, in the murky blur beyond it, he saw the huge, gaping mouth of a shark emerge out of the darkness and rush straight at his legs.

Louie recoiled, pulling his legs toward his body. The current was too strong for him to get his legs beneath him, but he was able to swing them to the side, away from the shark’s mouth. The shark kept coming, directly at Louie’s head. Louie remembered the advice of the old man in Honolulu: Make a threatening expression, then stiff-arm the shark’s snout. As the shark lunged for his head, Louie bared his teeth, widened his eyes, and rammed his palm into the tip of the shark’s nose. The shark flinched, circled away, then swam back for a second pass. Louie waited until the shark was inches from him, then struck it in the nose again. Again, the shark peeled away.

Above, the bullets had stopped coming. As quickly as he could, Louie pulled himself along the cord until he reached the raft. He grabbed its wall and lifted himself clear of the shark.

Mac and Phil were lying together in the fetal position. They were absolutely still, and bullet holes dappled the raft around them. Louie shook Mac. Mac made a sound. Louie asked if he’d been hit. Mac said no. Louie spoke to Phil. Phil said he was okay.

The bomber circled back for another go. Phil and Mac played dead, and Louie tipped back into the ocean. As bullets knifed the water around him, the shark came at him, and again Louie bumped its snout and repelled it. Then a second shark charged at him. Louie hung there, gyrating in the water and flailing his arms and legs, as the sharks snapped at him and the bullets came down. The moment the bomber sped out of firing range, he clambered onto the raft again. Phil and Mac were still unhit.

Four more times the Japanese strafed them, sending Louie into the water to kick and punch at the sharks until the bomber had passed. Though he fought them to the point of exhaustion, he was not bitten. Every time he emerged from the water, he was certain that Phil and Mac would be dead. Impossibly, though there were bullet holes all the way around the men, even in the tiny spaces between them, not one bullet had hit either man.

The bomber crew made a last gesture of sadism. The plane circled back, and Louie ducked into the water again. The plane’s bomb bay doors rolled open, and a depth charge tumbled out, splashing down some fifty feet from the rafts. The men braced themselves for an explosion, but none came. Either the charge was a dud or the bombardier had forgotten to arm it. If the Japanese are this inept, Phil thought, America will win this war.

Louie rolled back onto the raft and collapsed. When the bomber came back, he was too tired to go overboard. As the plane passed a final time, Louie, Mac, and Phil lay still. The gunners didn’t fire. The bomber flew west and disappeared.

——

Phil’s raft had been slashed in two. A bullet had struck the air pump and ricocheted straight across the base of the raft, slitting it from end to end. Everything that had been in the raft had been lost in the water. Because the ruined raft was made from rubberized canvas, it didn’t sink, but it was obviously far beyond repair. Shrunken and formless, it lapped about on the ocean surface.

The men were sardined together on what remained of Mac and Louie’s raft, which was far too small for all three of them. The canvas was speckled with tiny bullet holes. The raft had two air chambers, but both were punctured. Each time one of the men moved, air sighed out of the chambers and the canvas wrinkled a little more. The raft sat lower and lower in the water. The sharks whipped around it, surely excited by the bullets, the sight and smell of men in the water, and the sinking raft.

As the men sat together, exhausted and in shock, a shark lunged up over a wall of the raft, mouth open, trying to drag a man into the ocean. Someone grabbed an oar and hit the shark, and it slid off. Then another shark jumped on and, after it, another. The men gripped the oars and wheeled about, frantically swinging at the sharks. As they turned and swung and the sharks flopped up, air was forced out of the bullet holes, and the raft sank deeper. Soon, part of the raft was completely submerged.

If the men didn’t get air into the raft immediately, the sharks would take them. One pump had been lost in the strafing; only the one from Mac and Louie’s raft remained. The men hooked it up to one of the two valves and took turns pumping as hard as they could. Air flowed into the chamber and seeped out through the bullet holes, but the men found that if they pumped very quickly, just enough air passed through the raft to lift it up in the water and keep it mostly inflated. The sharks kept coming, and the men kept beating them away.

As Phil and Mac pumped and struck at the sharks, Louie groped for the provisions pocket and grabbed the patching kit, which contained sheets of patching material, a tube of glue, and sandpaper to roughen up the raft surface so the glue could adhere. The first problem declared itself immediately: The sandpaper wasn’t waterproof. When Louie pulled it out, only the paper emerged; the sand that had been stuck to it had washed off. For the umpteenth time, Louie cursed whoever had stocked the raft. He had to devise something that could etch up the patch area so the glue would stick. He pondered the problem, then picked up the brass mirror that he had used to hail the bomber. Using the pliers, he cut three teeth into the edge of the mirror. Phil and Mac kept fighting the sharks off.

Louie began patching, starting with the holes on the top of the raft. He lifted the perforated area clear of the water, wiped the water from the surface, and held it away from the waves, letting it dry in the sun. Then, with each perforation, he used the mirror edge to cut an X across the hole. The material consisted of two layers of canvas with rubber between. After cutting the X, he peeled back the canvas to reveal the rubber layer, used the mirror to scratch up the rubber, squeezed glue onto it, and stuck the patch on. Then he waited for the sun to dry the glue. Sometimes, a whitecap would drench the patch before it dried, and he’d have to begin again.

As Louie worked, keeping his eyes on the patches, the sharks kept snapping at him. Growing wiser, they gave up flinging themselves haphazardly at the men and began stalking about, waiting for a moment when an oar was down or a back was turned before bulling their way aboard. Over and over again, they lunged at Louie from behind, where he couldn’t see them. Mac and Phil smacked them away.

Hour after hour, the men worked, rotating the duties, clumsy with fatigue. The pumping was an enormous exertion for the diminished men. They found that instead of standing the pump up and pushing the handle downward, it was easier to press the pump handle to their chests and pull the base toward themselves. All three men were indispensable. Had there been only two, they couldn’t have pumped, patched, and repelled the sharks. For the first time on the raft, Mac was truly helpful. He was barely strong enough to pull the pump handle a few times in a row, but with the oar he kept every shark away.

Night fell. In the darkness, patching was impossible, but the pumping couldn’t be stopped. They pumped all night long, so drained that they lost the feeling in their arms.

In the morning the patching resumed. The rate of air loss gradually lessened, and they were able to rest for longer periods. Eventually, the air held enough for them to begin brief sleep rotations.

Once the top was patched, there was the problem of patching the bottom, which was underwater. All three men squeezed onto one side of the raft, balancing on one air tube. They opened up the valve and let the air out of the side they weren’t sitting on, lifted it clear of the water, turned it over so the bottom faced skyward, wiped it off, and held it up to dry. Then Louie began patching. When that half of the bottom was patched, they reinflated it, crawled onto the repaired side, deflated the other side, and repeated the process. Again, whitecaps repeatedly washed over the raft and spoiled the patches, and everything had to be redone.

Finally, they could find no more holes to patch. Because bubbles kept coming up around the sides of the raft, they knew there were holes someplace where they couldn’t reach. They had to live with them. The patches had slowed the air loss dramatically. Even when struck by whitecaps, the patches held. The men found that they could cut back on their pumping to one session every fifteen minutes or so during the day, and none at night. With the raft now reasonably inflated, the sharks stopped attacking.

——

Losing Phil’s raft was a heavy blow. Not only had they lost all of the items stored on it, but now three men were wedged in a two-man raft, so close together that to move, each man had to ask the others to give him room. There was so little space that they had to take turns straightening their legs. At night, they had to sleep in a bony pile, feet to head.

But two good things came from the strafing. Looking at the dead raft, Louie thought of a use for it. Using the pliers, he pulled apart the layers of canvas on the ruined raft, creating a large, light sheet. At last, they had a canopy to block the sun in daytime and the cold at night.

The other benefit of the strafing was the information it gave the men. When they had a moment to collect themselves, Louie and Phil discussed the Japanese bomber. They thought that it must have come from the Marshall or Gilbert islands. If they were right in their belief that they were drifting directly west, then the Marshalls and Gilberts were roughly equidistant from them. They thought that the bomber had probably been on sea search, and if the Japanese followed the same sea search procedures as the Americans, it would have taken off at around seven A.M., a few hours before it had reached the rafts.

Estimating the bomber’s cruising speed and range, they made rough calculations to arrive at how many hours the bomber could remain airborne after it left them, and thus how far they were from its base. They guessed that they were some 850 miles from the bomber’s base. If this was correct, given that they had crashed about 2,000 miles east of the Marshalls and Gilberts, they had already traveled more than half the distance to those islands and were covering more than 40 miles per day. Phil thought over the numbers and was surprised. They had had no idea that they were so far west.

Extrapolating from these figures, they made educated guesses of when they’d reach the islands. Phil guessed the forty-sixth day; Louie guessed the forty-seventh. If their figures were right, they were going to have to last about twice as long as Rickenbacker. That meant surviving on the raft for almost three more weeks.

It was frightening to imagine what might await them on those islands. The strafing had confirmed what they’d heard about the Japanese. But it was good to feel oriented, to know that they were drifting toward land somewhere out there, on the far side of the earth’s tilt. The bomber had given them something to ground their hope.

Mac didn’t join in on the prognostication. He was slipping away.

Sixteen

Singing in the Clouds

LOUIE SAT AWAKE, LOOKING INTO THE SEA. PHIL WAS ASLEEP. Mac was virtually catatonic.

Two sharks, about eight feet long, were placidly circling the raft. Each time one slid past, Louie studied its skin. He had banged sharks on the nose many times but had never really felt the hide, which was said to feel like sandpaper. Curious, he dropped a hand into the water and laid it lightly on a passing shark, feeling its back and dorsal fin as it slid beneath him. It felt rough, just as everyone said. The shark swished on. The second shark passed, and Louie again let his hand follow its body. Beautiful, he thought.

Soon after, Louie noticed something odd. Both sharks were gone. Never in four weeks had the sharks left. Louie got up on his knees and leaned out over the water, looking as far down as he could, puzzled. No sharks.

He was kneeling there, perched over the edge of the raft, when one of the sharks that he had touched leapt from the water at terrific speed, mouth wide open, lunging straight at his head. Louie threw both hands in front of his face. The shark collided with him head-on, trying to get its mouth around his upper body. Louie, his hands on the animal’s snout, shoved as hard as he could, and the shark splashed back into the water. A moment later, the second shark jumped up. Louie grabbed an oar and struck the shark in the nose, and it jerked back and slid away. Then the first shark lunged for him again. Louie was recoiling when he saw an oar swing past, sending the animal backward into the ocean. To Louie’s surprise, it wasn’t Phil who had saved him. It was Mac.

Louie had no time to thank him. One of the sharks jumped up again, followed by the other. Louie and Mac sat side by side, clubbing each shark as it lunged at them. Mac was a new man. A moment before, he had seemed almost comatose. Now he was infused with frantic energy.

For several minutes, the sharks took turns bellying onto the raft with gaping mouths, always launching themselves from the same spot. Finally, they gave up. Louie and Mac collapsed. Phil, who had been startled awake but had been unable to help because there were only two oars, stared at them in groggy confusion.

“What happened?” he said.

Louie looked at Mac with happy amazement and told him how grateful and proud of him he was. Mac, crumpled on the bottom of the raft, smiled back. He had pushed himself beyond his body’s capacities, but the frightened, childlike expression had left his face. Mac had reclaimed himself.

——

Louie was furious at the sharks. He had thought that they had an understanding: The men would stay out of the sharks’ turf—the water—and the sharks would stay off of theirs—the raft. That the sharks had taken shots at him when he had gone overboard, and when the raft had been mostly submerged after the strafing, had seemed fair enough. But their attempt to poach men from their reinflated raft struck Louie as dirty pool. He stewed all night, scowled hatefully at the sharks all day, and eventually made a decision. If the sharks were going to try to eat him, he was going to try to eat them.

He knelt by the raft wall and watched the sharks, searching for a beatable opponent. One that looked about five feet long passed. Louie thought he could take it. Louie and Phil made a plan.

They had a little bait on the raft, probably the remains of their last bird. Phil hung it on a fishhook and strung it into the water at one end of the raft. At the other end, Louie knelt, facing the water. Smelling the bait, the shark swam toward Phil, orienting itself so that its tail was under Louie. Louie leaned as far overboard as he could without losing his balance, plunged both hands into the water, and grabbed the tail. The shark took off. Louie, gripping the tail, flew out of the raft and crashed into the water, sending a large serving of the Pacific up his nose. The shark whipped its tail and flung Louie off. Louie bolted back onto the raft so quickly that he later had no memory of how he had done it.

Soaking and embarrassed, Louie rethought his plan. His first error had been one of appraisal: Sharks were stronger than they looked. His second had been to fail to brace himself properly. His third had been to allow the shark’s tail to stay in the water, giving the animal something to push against. He settled in to wait for a smaller shark.

In time, a smaller one, perhaps four feet long, arrived. Louie knelt at the raft’s side, tipping his weight backward and keeping his knees far apart to brace himself. Phil dangled a baited hook in the water.

The shark swam for the bait. Louie clapped his hands around the tail and heaved it out of the water. The shark thrashed, but could neither get free nor pull Louie into the water. Louie dragged the animal onto the raft. The shark twisted and snapped, and Phil grabbed a flare cartridge and jammed it into the shark’s mouth. Pinning the shark down, Louie took the pliers and stabbed the screwdriver end of the handle through the animal’s eye. The shark died instantly.

In his Honolulu survival course, Louie had been told that the liver was the only part of a shark that was edible. Getting at it was no mean feat. Even with a knife, sharkskin is about as easy to cut as a coat of mail; with only the edge of a mirror to cut with, the labor was draining. After much sawing, Louie managed to break the skin. The flesh underneath stank of ammonia. Louie cut the liver out, and it was sizable. They ate it eagerly, giving Mac a larger portion, and for the first time since breakfast on May 27, they were all full. The rest of the shark reeked, so they threw it overboard. Later, using the same technique, they caught a second shark and again ate the liver.

Among the sharks, word seemed to get around; no more small sharks came near. Large sharks, some as long as twelve feet, lumbered alongside the raft, but Louie thought better of taking them on. The men’s stomachs were soon empty again.

Mac was in a sharp downward spiral. He rarely moved. All three men had lost a staggering amount of weight, but Mac had shriveled the most. His eyes, sunken in their sockets, stared out lifelessly.

——

It was nightfall somewhere around the thirtieth day. The men went through their usual routine, bailing water into the raft and entwining themselves for warmth. The sky was clear and starry, and the moon shone on the water. The men fell asleep.

Louie woke to a tremendous crash, stinging pain, and the sensation of weightlessness. His eyes snapped open and he realized that he, Mac, and Phil were airborne. They flopped down together onto the raft and twisted about in confusion. Something had struck the bottom of the raft with awesome power. The garden-variety sharks that made up their entourage weren’t large enough to hit them with such force, and had never behaved in this way.

Looking over the side of the raft, they saw it. Swelling up from under the water came a leviathan: a vast white mouth, a broad back parting the surface, and a long dorsal fin, ghostly in the moonlight. The animal was some twenty feet long, more than three times the length of the raft. Louie recognized its features from his survival school training. It was a great white shark.

As the castaways watched in terrified silence, the shark swam the length of one side of the raft, then bent around to the other side, exploring it. Pausing on the surface, it swished its tail away, then slapped it into the raft, sending the raft skidding sideways and splashing a wave of water into the men. Louie, Mac, and Phil came up on their knees in the center of the raft and clung to one another. The shark began to swim around to the other side. Louie whispered, “Don’t make a noise!” Again came the mighty swing, the shower of water, the jolt through the raft and the men.

Around and around the shark went, drenching the raft with each pass. It seemed to be playing with the raft. With every pass, the men cringed and waited to be capsized. Finally, the great back slid under, and the sea smoothed behind it. It did not surface again.

Louie, Phil, and Mac lay down again. The water around them was now cold, and none of them could sleep.

——

The next morning, Mac could no longer sit up. He lay on the floor of the raft, little more than a wrinkled mummy, his gaze fixed far away.

One last albatross landed. Louie caught it, wrenched its head off, and handed it to Phil. Phil turned it upside down over Mac and let the blood flow into his mouth. As Louie and Phil ate the meat, dipping it into the ocean to give it flavor, they fed bits to Mac, but it didn’t revive him.

In subsequent days, Mac became a faint whisper of a man. His water tins ran dry. When Phil opened his tin and took a sip of the little he had left, Mac asked if he could drink from it. For Phil, thirst had been the cruelest trial, and he knew that the water left in his tin, essential to his own survival, couldn’t save Mac. He gently told Mac that he didn’t have enough left to share. Louie was sympathetic to Phil, but he couldn’t bring himself to refuse Mac. He gave him a small sip of his own water.

That evening, Phil heard a small voice. It was Mac, asking Louie if he was going to die. Louie looked over at Mac, who was watching him. Louie thought it would be disrespectful to lie to Mac, who might have something that he needed to say or do before life left him. Louie told him that he thought he’d die that night. Mac had no reaction. Phil and Louie lay down, put their arms around Mac, and went to sleep.

Sometime that night, Louie was lifted from sleep by a breathy sound, a deep outrushing of air, slow and final. He knew what it was.

Francis McNamara on May 26, 1943, the day before the crash. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

——

Sergeant Francis McNamara had begun his last journey with a panicked act, consuming the rafts’ precious food stores, and in doing so, he had placed himself and his raftmates in the deepest jeopardy. But in the last days of his life, in the struggle against the deflating raft and the jumping sharks, he had given all he had left. It wasn’t enough to save him—it had probably hastened his death—but it may have made the difference between life and death for Phil and Louie. Had Mac not survived the crash, Louie and Phil might well have been dead by that thirty-third day. In his dying days, Mac had redeemed himself.

In the morning, Phil wrapped Mac’s body in something, probably part of the ruined raft. They knelt over the body and said aloud all of the good things they knew of Mac, laughing a little at his penchant for mess hall pie. Louie wanted to give him a religious eulogy but didn’t know how, so he recited disjointed passages that he remembered from movies, ending with a few words about committing the body to the sea. And he prayed for himself and Phil, vowing that if God would save them, he would serve heaven forever.

When he was done, Louie lifted the shrouded body in his arms. It felt as if it weighed no more than forty pounds. Louie bent over the side of the raft and gently slid Mac into the water. Mac sank away. The sharks let him be.

The next night, Louie and Phil completed their thirty-fourth day on the raft. Though they didn’t know it, they had passed what was almost certainly the record for survival adrift in an inflated raft. If anyone had survived longer, they hadn’t lived to tell about it.

——

The raft bobbed westward. Petulant storms came over now and then, raining enough to keep the water supply steady. Because the water ration was now divided by two instead of three, each man had more to drink. Louie made a hook out of his lieutenant’s pin and caught one fish before the pin broke.

Phil and Louie could see the bend of their thighbones under their skin, their knees bulging in the centers of birdlike legs, their bellies hollow, their ribs stark. Each man had grown a weedy beard. Their skin glowed yellow from the leached raft dye, and their bodies were patterned with salt sores. They held their sun-scorched eyes to the horizon, searching for land, but there was none. Their hunger dimmed, an ominous sign. They had reached the last stage of starvation.

One morning, they woke to a strange stillness. The rise and fall of the raft had ceased, and it sat virtually motionless. There was no wind. The ocean stretched out in all directions in glossy smoothness, regarding the sky and reflecting its image in crystalline perfection. Like the ancient mariner, Louie and Phil had found the doldrums, the eerie pause of wind and water that lingers around the equator. They were, as Coleridge wrote, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

It was an experience of transcendence. Phil watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they could walk across it. When a fish broke the surface far away, the sound carried to the men with absolute clarity. They watched as pristine ringlets of water circled outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stillness.

For a while they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fell into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren’t hungry or thirsty. They were unaware of the approach of death.

As he watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before. He had thought it as he had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it as he had considered the pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation of color, their slide through the sea. He even recalled the thought coming to him in his youth, when he had lain on the roof of the cabin in the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, looking up from Zane Grey to watch night settling over the earth. Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil.

Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.

——

Given how badly the men’s bodies were faring, it would seem likely that their minds, too, would begin to fail. But more than five weeks into their ordeal, both Louie and Phil were enjoying remarkable precision of mind, and were convinced that they were growing sharper every day. They continued quizzing each other, chasing each other’s stories down to the smallest detail, teaching each other melodies and lyrics, and cooking imaginary meals.

Louie found that the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.

He had always enjoyed excellent recall, but on the raft, his memory became infinitely more nimble, reaching back further, offering detail that had once escaped him. One day, trying to pinpoint his earliest memory, he saw a two-story building and, inside, a stairway broken into two parts of six steps each, with a landing in between. He was there in the image, a tiny child toddling along the stairs. As he crawled down the first set of steps and moved toward the edge of the landing, a tall yellow dog stepped in front of him to stop him from tumbling off. It was his parents’ dog, Askim, whom they had had in Olean, when Louie was very little. Louie had never remembered him before.^*

——

On the fortieth day, Louie was lying beside Phil under the canopy when he abruptly sat up. He could hear singing. He kept listening; it sounded like a choir. He nudged Phil and asked him if he heard anything. Phil said no. Louie slid the canopy off and squinted into the daylight. The ocean was a featureless flatness. He looked up.

Above him, floating in a bright cloud, he saw human figures, silhouetted against the sky. He counted twenty-one of them. They were singing the sweetest song he had ever heard.

Louie stared up, astonished, listening to the singing. What he was seeing and hearing was impossible, and yet he felt absolutely lucid. This was, he felt certain, no hallucination, no vision. He sat under the singers, listening to their voices, memorizing the melody, until they faded away.

Phil had heard and seen nothing. Whatever this had been, Louie concluded, it belonged to him alone.

——

On the men drifted. Several days passed with no food and no rain. The raft was a gelatinous mess, its patches barely holding on, some spots bubbling outward, on the verge of popping. It wouldn’t bear the men’s weight much longer.

In the sky, Phil noticed something different. There were more birds. Then they began to hear planes. Sometimes they’d see a tiny speck in the sky, sometimes two or more together, making a distant buzz. They were always much too far away to be signaled, and both men knew that as far west as they had probably drifted, these planes were surely Japanese. As the days passed, more and more specks appeared, every day arriving earlier.

Louie had come to love sunrise and the warmth it brought, and each morning he’d lie with his eyes on the horizon, awaiting it. On the morning of July 12, the forty-sixth day, the day that Phil had picked for their arrival at land, no sunrise came. There was only a gradual, gloomy illumination of a brooding sky.

Phil and Louie looked up apprehensively. The wind caught them sharply. The sea began to arch its back under the raft, sending the men up to dizzying heights. Louie looked out over the churning water and thought how lovely it was. Phil was fond of roller-coastering over the big swells that came with storms, thrilled as he skidded down one and turned his face up to see the summit of the next, but this was ominous.

To the west, something appeared, so far away that it could be glimpsed only from the tops of the swells. It was a low, gray-green wiggle on the horizon. Phil and Louie would later disagree on who saw it first, but the moment the sea tossed them up, the horizon rolled westward, and their eyes grasped it, they knew what it was.

It was an island.

*

Askim was notorious for his kleptomania; the Zamperinis lived above a grocery, and the dog made regular shoplifting runs downstairs, snatching food and fleeing. His name was a clever joke: When people asked what the dog’s name was, they were invariably confused by the reply, which sounded like “Ask him.”

Seventeen

Typhoon

ALL DAY, UNDER A DARK, GYRATING SKY, LOUIE AND PHIL rode the swells, straining their eyes westward and feeling a weary thrill as the bump on the horizon peeked into view. Slowly, as the current carried them toward it, the island became more distinct. They could see a bright white line where waves dashed against something, maybe a beach, maybe a reef. In the afternoon, one island became two, and then a dozen or so, lined up like railcars. The castaways had expected that if they ever saw land, they’d be rapturous. Instead, they discussed it matter-of-factly. They were too weak for anything more, and there were pressing worries. Overhead, a huge storm was gathering.

In training, Louie and Phil had memorized the geography of the central Pacific. They knew that the islands ahead had to be part of the Gilberts or Marshalls, enemy territory. Between them, the two island groups had dozens of atolls and islands, so there was a good likelihood that there were places unoccupied by the Japanese. Louie and Phil decided to hang offshore until they found an island that looked uninhabited, or inhabited only by natives. They began rowing over the wind-chapped sea, turning parallel to the islands so they could wait until night to slip ashore.

The sky broke all at once. A sudden, slashing rain came down, and the islands vanished. The ocean began heaving and thrashing. The wind slapped the raft in one direction, then another, sending it spinning up swells, perhaps forty feet, then careening down into troughs as deep as canyons. Phil and Louie had drifted into what was almost certainly a typhoon.

Wave after wave slammed into the raft, tipping it sideways and peeling it upward, on the verge of overturning. To try to stop it from flipping, Louie and Phil bailed in water as ballast, positioned themselves on opposite sides to balance their weight, and lay on their backs to keep the center of gravity low. Knowing that if they were thrown loose, they’d never get back in, Louie reeled in the raft cord, looped it around the cushion sewn into the center of the raft, threaded it through a grommet, then wound it around his waist and Phil’s waist, pulling it taut. They pushed their feet under the cushion, leaned back, and held on.

Night fell, and the storm pounded. The raft raced up and down hundreds of mountains of water. At times, in the darkness, they felt the strange lightness of flying as the raft was swept into the air off the tops of the waves. Louie felt more intensely afraid than he had felt as Green Hornet was falling. Across from him, Phil lay in grim silence. Both men thought of the nearness of the land they could no longer see. They feared that any second, they’d be flung into a reef.

Sometime in the night, the storm sagged and softened, then moved on.^* The swells remained, but their tops became smooth. Louie and Phil freed themselves from the raft cord and awaited daylight.

In the dark, they could smell soil, greenness, rain washing over living things. It was the smell of land. It flirted with them all night, growing stronger. As dawn neared, they could hear the hiss of water scouring a reef. Exhausted, they decided to take turns napping, with one man on the lookout for land. Somewhere along the way, they both fell asleep.

——

They woke in a new universe. They had drifted into the embrace of two small islands. On one island, they saw huts, trees heavy with fruit, but no people. They had heard of the Japanese enslaving native populations and moving them en masse off their home islands, and they thought that perhaps this had been the fate of this island’s inhabitants. They pulled their shoes over their sore-pocked feet and began rowing for shore. From overhead came the whine of engines. They looked up and saw Zeros looping through combat maneuvers, far too high for their pilots to notice the raft below. They rowed on.

Louie had predicted that they’d find land on the forty-seventh day. Phil had chosen the day before. Because they had spotted land on the day Phil had chosen and were about to reach it on the day Louie had chosen, they decided that they had both been right.

They could see more islands now. Louie spotted a tiny island to their left and pointed it out to Phil, describing it as having one tree on it. Then a strange thing happened. The lone tree became two trees. After a moment’s confusion, the men suddenly understood. It wasn’t an island, and those weren’t trees. It was a boat. It had been perpendicular to them, leaving only one mast visible, and then it had turned, bringing the rearward mast into view.

Louie and Phil ducked. They rowed as fast as they could, trying to get to shore before the sailors spotted them. They were too late. The boat made a sharp turn and sped toward them. The weakened men couldn’t row fast enough to escape. They gave up and stopped.

The boat drew alongside the raft, and Louie and Phil looked up. Above them was a machine gun, mounted on the boat’s bow. Along the deck stood a line of men, all Japanese. Each one held a weapon, pointed at the castaways.

One of the Japanese opened his shirt and pointed to his chest. He seemed to want the Americans to do the same. As Louie opened his shirt, he braced himself, expecting to be shot, but no shot came. The man had only wanted to see if they were armed.

One of the sailors threw a rope at the raft, and Louie caught it. Louie and Phil tried to climb onto the boat, but their legs were too weak. The sailors brought out a rope ladder, tied the castaways to it, and dragged them up, then pulled the raft aboard. On the deck, Louie and Phil attempted to rise, but their legs buckled. The Japanese were impatient for the men to move across the deck, so the Americans crawled on all fours. When they reached the mast, they were picked up and lashed to it. Their hands were bound behind their backs.

One of the sailors began speaking to them in Japanese. He seemed to be asking questions. Louie and Phil offered responses, trying to guess what the man wanted to know. A soldier waved a bayonet past Louie’s face, trying to hack off his beard. Another man cracked a pistol across Phil’s jaw, then moved to do the same to Louie. Louie tipped his head forward in hopes that the sailor would aim for the front of his face; when the sailor swung, Louie jerked his head back. The man missed, but Louie smacked his head against the mast.

The boat’s captain approached and chastised the crewmen. The mood changed, and Louie’s and Phil’s hands were untied. Someone gave the castaways cigarettes, but the ends kept lighting their beards on fire. Someone else brought them cups of water and one biscuit each. Louie took a bite of the biscuit and held it in his mouth, caressing it, feeling the flavor. He ate slowly, savoring each crumb. It was his first food in eight days.

——

A second boat pulled alongside the first. Louie and Phil were helped onto it, and it began moving. As it sailed, a crewman came to the castaways and fed them more biscuits and some coconut. Then a young sailor approached, Japanese-English dictionary in hand, and asked questions. Phil and Louie gave brief accounts of their journey.

In time, the boat drew up to a large island. A sailor approached with two blindfolds and tied them around Louie’s and Phil’s heads. Men got on either side of them, grabbed their arms, and half-dragged, half-carried them off the boat. After a few minutes, Louie felt himself being laid down on something soft. His blindfold was taken off.

He was inside an infirmary, lying on a soft mattress on an iron bed. Phil was on a bed beside his. There was a small window nearby, and through it, he could see Japanese soldiers thrusting bayonets into dummies. An officer spoke to the Japanese surrounding the castaways, then spoke in English, apparently repeating his statement so Louie and Phil would understand him.

“These are American fliers,” he said. “Treat them gently.”

A doctor came in, smiled warmly, and examined Phil and Louie, speaking English. He smoothed ointment on their salt sores and burned lips, palpated their abdomens, took their temperatures and pulses, and pronounced them healthy. Louie and Phil were helped to their feet and led to a scale. They took turns standing on it, each with a man ready to catch him if his legs failed.

Phil had weighed about 150 pounds when he had stepped aboard Green Hornet. Louie’s war diary, begun shortly after he arrived in Hawaii, noted that he weighed 155 pounds. He believed that weight training had added another 5 pounds by the time of the crash. Now Phil weighed about 80 pounds. According to different accounts, five-foot, ten-inch Louie weighed 67 pounds, 79.5 pounds, or 87 pounds. Whatever the exact number, each man had lost about half of his body weight, or more.

On the doctor’s orders, in came a bottle of Russian cognac and two glasses, which Louie and Phil quickly emptied. Then came a platter of eggs, ham, milk, fresh bread, fruit salad, and cigarettes. The castaways dug in. When they were done, they were helped into another room and seated before a group of Japanese officers, who gaped at the shrunken, canary yellow men. An officer, speaking English, asked how they had ended up there. Louie told the story as the Japanese listened in silent fascination, tracing the journey on a map.

Louie and Phil knew where their journey had begun, but did not yet know where it had ended. The officers told them. They were on an atoll in the Marshall Islands. They had drifted two thousand miles.

As Japanese servicemen crowded around, the raft was spread out and the bullet holes counted. There were forty-eight. The curious servicemen pressed toward the Americans, but the officers kept them back. An officer asked Louie where the bullet holes had come from. Louie replied that a Japanese plane had strafed them. The officer said that this was impossible, a violation of their military code of honor. Louie described the bomber and the attack. The officers looked at one another and said nothing.

Two beds were made up, and Louie and Phil were invited to get as much rest as they wished. Slipping between cool, clean sheets, their stomachs full, their sores soothed, they were deeply grateful to have been received with such compassion. Phil had a relieved thought: They are our friends.

Louie and Phil stayed in the infirmary for two days, attended by Japanese who cared for them with genuine concern for their comfort and health. On the third day, the deputy commanding officer came to them. He brought beef, chocolate, and coconuts—a gift from his commander—as well as news. A freighter was coming to transport them to another atoll. The name he gave sent a tremor through Louie: Kwajalein. It was the place known as Execution Island.

“After you leave here,” Louie would long remember the officer saying, “we cannot guarantee your life.”

——

The freighter arrived on July 15. Louie and Phil were taken into the hold and housed separately. The captain had bountiful portions of food sent to them. The prisoners ate all they could.

One of the cruelties of starvation is that a body dying of hunger often rejects the first food it is given. The food on the atoll had apparently agreed with the castaways, but not the food on the freighter. Louie spent much of that day hunched over the ship railing, vomiting into the sea, while a guard held him. Phil’s meal left him almost as quickly, but by a different route; that evening, he had to be taken on at least six runs to the head.

As the freighter drew up to Kwajalein on July 16, the Japanese became harsh. On came the blindfolds, and Louie and Phil were taken onto what seemed to be a barge. When the barge stopped, they were picked up, heaved over men’s shoulders, and carried. Louie felt himself bobbing through the air, then slapped down on a hard surface. Phil was dropped beside him. Louie said something to Phil, and immediately felt a boot kick into him as a voice shouted, “No!”

An engine started, and they were moving. They were on the flatbed of a truck. In a few minutes, the truck stopped, and Louie was tugged out and flung over a shoulder again. There was walking, two steps up, a darkening, the sense that Phil was no longer near him, and the disorienting feeling of being thrown backward. Louie’s back struck a wall, and he fell to a floor. Someone yanked off his blindfold. A door slammed, a lock turned.

At first, Louie could barely see. His eyes darted about uncontrollably. His mind raced, flitting incoherently from thought to thought. After weeks of endless openness, he was disoriented by the compression of the space around him. Every nerve and muscle seemed in a panic.

Slowly, his thoughts quieted and his eyes settled. He was in a wooden cell, about the length of a man and not much wider than his shoulders. Over his head was a thatched roof, about seven feet up. The only window was a hole, about a foot square, in the door. The floor was strewn with gravel, dirt, and wiggling maggots, and the room hummed with flies and mosquitoes, already beginning to swarm onto him. There was a hole in the floor with a latrine bucket below it. The air hung hot and still, oppressive with the stench of human waste.

Louie looked up. In the dim light, he saw words carved into the wall: NINE MARINES MAROONED ON MAKIN ISLAND, AUGUST 18, 1942. Below that were names: Robert Allard, Dallas Cook, Richard Davis, Joseph Gifford, John Kerns, Alden Mattison, Richard Olbert, William Pallesen, and Donald Roberton.

In August 1942, after a botched American raid on a Japanese base at Makin in the Marshall Islands, nine marines had been mistakenly left behind. Captured by the Japanese, they had disappeared. Louie was almost certainly the first American to learn that they had been taken to Kwajalein. But other than Phil and Louie, there were no prisoners here now. Louie felt a wave of foreboding.

He called to Phil. Phil’s voice answered, distant and small, somewhere to the left. He was down the hall in a squalid hole like Louie’s. Each man asked the other if he was okay. Both knew that this was likely the last time they would talk, but if they wished to say good-bye, neither had the chance. There was shuffling in the corridor as a guard took up his station. Louie and Phil said nothing else.

Louie looked down at his body. Legs that had sprung through a 4:12 mile over bright sand on that last morning on Kualoa were now useless. The vibrant, generous body that he had trained with such vigilance had shrunken until only the bones remained, draped in yellow skin, crawling with parasites.

All I see, he thought, is a dead body breathing.

Louie dissolved into hard, racking weeping. He muffled his sobs so the guard wouldn’t hear him.

*

Several days later, a

catastrophic typhoon, almost certainly the same storm, plowed into the coast of China, collapsing homes, uprooting telephone poles, and causing extensive flooding.

Eighteen

A Dead Body Breathing

SOMETHING FLEW THROUGH THE WINDOW IN THE DOOR of Louie’s cell and struck the floor, breaking into white bits. It was two pieces of hardtack, the dry biscuit that was the standard fare of sailors. A tiny cup of tea—so weak that it was little more than hot water, so small that it constituted a single swallow—was set on the sill. Phil received food also, but no water. He and Louie crawled about their cells, picking up slivers of biscuit and putting them into their mouths. A guard stood outside.

There was a rustle outside Louie’s cell, and a face appeared. The man greeted Louie cheerfully, in English, by name. Louie stared up at him.

The man was a Kwajalein native, and he explained that the American castaways were the talk of the island. A sports fanatic, he had recognized Louie’s name, which Louie had given to his captors. Prattling about track, football, and the Olympics, he paused only rarely to ask Louie questions. Once Louie got one or two words off, the native bounded back into his narrative.

After a few minutes, the native glanced at his watch and said he had to leave. Louie asked him what had happened to the marines whose names were carved into the wall. In the same chipper tone, the native replied that the marines were dead. All of the POWs held on that island, he said, were executed.

As the native walked out, the guard looked challengingly at Louie, lifted a flattened hand to his throat, and made a slashing gesture. He pointed to the names on the wall, then to Louie.

That night, Louie rested his head next to the door, trying to get as far as possible from the waste hole. He had only just settled there when the door swung open and the guard grabbed him and spun him around, pushing his head against the hole. Louie resisted, but the guard became angry. Louie gave up and lay as the guard ordered. He could see that the guard wanted him to lie in this position so he could see him through the window in the door. Every few minutes, all night long, the guard peered in, making sure that Louie didn’t move.

——

The morning of the second day began. Phil and Louie lay in sweltering silence, thinking that at any moment they’d be dragged out and beheaded. The guards stalked back and forth, snarling at the captives and drawing the sides of their hands across their necks with sadistic smiles.

For Louie, the digestive miseries continued. His diarrhea became explosive, and cramps doubled him over. He lay under a blanket of flies and mosquitoes, keeping his buttocks over the waste hole for as long as he could, until the guard snapped at him to move his face back to the hole.

The day passed. Three times, a single wad of rice, a little bigger than a golf ball, sailed through the door window and broke against the floor. Once or twice, a swallow of tea in a cup was left on the sill, and Louie sucked it down. Night came.

Another day came and went, then another. The heat was smothering. Lice hopped over the captives’ skin. Mosquitoes preyed on them in swarms so thick that when Louie snapped his fingers into a fist, then opened his hand, his entire palm was crimson. His diarrhea worsened, becoming bloody. Each day, Louie cried out for a doctor. One day, a doctor came. He leaned into the cell, looked at Louie, chuckled, and walked away.

Curled up on the gravelly floor, both men felt as if their bones were wearing through their skin. Louie begged for a blanket to sit on, but was ignored. He passed the time trying to strengthen his legs, pulling himself upright and standing for a minute or two while holding the wall, then sinking down. He missed the raft.

Two sips of water a day weren’t nearly enough to replace Louie’s torrential fluid loss. His thirst became worse than anything he’d known on the raft. He crawled to the door and pleaded for water. The guard left, then returned with a cup. Louie, grateful, drew close to the door to take a drink. The guard threw scalding water in his face. Louie was so dehydrated that he couldn’t help but keep begging. At least four more times, the response was the same, leaving Louie’s face speckled with blisters. Louie knew that dehydration might kill him, and part of him hoped it would.

One day, as he lay in misery, Louie heard singing. The voices he had heard over the raft had come to him again. He looked around his cell, but the singers weren’t there. Only their music was with him. He let it wash over him, finding in it a reason to hope. Eventually, the song faded away, but silently, in his mind, Louie sang it over and over to himself. He prayed intensely, ardently, hour after hour.

Down the hall, Phil languished. Rats were everywhere, climbing up his waste bucket and wallowing in his urine pail, waking him at night by skittering over his face. Periodically, he was prodded outside, halted before a pan of water, and ordered to wash his face and hands. Phil dropped his face into the pan and slurped up the water.

Louie often stared at the names of the marines, wondering who they were, if they’d had wives and children, how the end had come for them. He began to think of them as his friends. One day he pulled off his belt and bent the buckle upward. In tall, block letters, he carved his name into the wall beside theirs.

Louie couldn’t speak to Phil, nor Phil to him, but occasionally one of them would cough or scuff the floor to let the other know that he was there. Once, the guards left the cells unattended, and for the first time, Phil and Louie were alone. Louie heard Phil’s voice.

“What’s going to happen?”

Louie had no answer. There was a beating of boots in the hall and the Americans fell silent.

——

The guards maintained a fixed state of fury at the captives, glaring at them wrathfully, making threatening gestures, shouting at them. Virtually every day, they flew into rages that usually ended in Phil and Louie being bombarded with stones and lit cigarettes, spat upon, and poked with sticks. Louie always knew that he was in for it when he heard a guard arriving in a stomping fit—a consequence, he hoped, of an American victory. The situation worsened when the guard had company; the guards used the captives to impress each other with their cruelty.

The pretext for many of the outbursts was miscommunication. The captives and their guards came from cultures with virtually no overlap in language or custom. Louie and Phil found it almost impossible to understand what was being asked of them. Sign language was of little help, because even the cultures’ gestures were different. The guards, like nearly all citizens of their historically isolated nation, had probably never seen a foreigner before, and probably had no experience in communicating with a non-Japanese. When misunderstood, they often became so exasperated that they screamed at and beat the captives.

For self-preservation, Louie and Phil studied everything they heard, developing small Japanese vocabularies. Kocchi koi meant “come here.” Ohio was a greeting, used by the occasional civil guard. Though Louie soon knew what it meant, his stock reply was “No, California.” Phil learned that mizu meant water, but the knowledge got him nowhere; his cries for mizu were ignored.

When the guards weren’t venting their fury at the captives, they entertained themselves by humiliating them. Every day, at gunpoint, Louie was forced to stand up and dance, staggering through the Charleston while his guards roared with laughter. The guards made Louie whistle and sing, pelted him with fistfuls of gravel, taunted him as he crawled around his cell to pick up bits of rice, and slid long sticks through the door window so they could stab and swat him, finding his helpless contortions hilarious. Down the hall, the guards did the same to Phil. Sometimes Louie could hear Phil’s voice, tiny and thin, groaning. Once, driven to his breaking point by a guard jabbing him, Louie yanked the stick from the guard’s hands. He knew he might get killed for it, but under this unceasing degradation, something was happening to him. His will to live, resilient through all of the trials on the raft, was beginning to fray.

The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or shelter. But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captors, described the state of mind that his captivity created: “I was literally becoming a lesser human being.”

Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide. This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose. On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

——

Louie had been on Kwajalein for about a week when his cell door was thrown open and two guards pulled him out. He flushed with fear, thinking that he was being taken to the sword. As he was hustled toward what seemed to be an officers’ quarters, he passed two girls with Asian features, walking with heads down, eyes averted, as they retreated from the building. Louie was pulled into a room and stopped before a table covered with a white tablecloth, on which was arranged a selection of foods. Around it sat Japanese officers in dress uniforms, smoking cigarettes. Louie wasn’t here to be executed. He was here to be interrogated.

The officers took long draws on their cigarettes and sighed the smoke toward Louie. Periodically, one of them would open a bottle of cola, pour it into a cup, and drink it slowly, making a show of his enjoyment.

The ranking officer stared coolly at his captive. How do American soldiers satisfy their sexual appetites? he asked. Louie replied that they don’t—they rely on willpower. The officer was amused. The Japanese military, he said, provides women for its soldiers, an allusion to the thousands of Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, and Filipino women whom the Japanese military had kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery. Louie thought of the girls outside.

The interrogators asked about Louie’s plane. They knew, probably from Louie’s conversation with the officers on the first atoll, that it was a B-24. What model was it? On Oahu, Louie had heard that during a battle, a B-24D had crashed on a reef and had been retrieved by the Japanese. Green Hornet had been a D model. Knowing that the Japanese already knew about this model, he decided not to lie, and told them that he had been in a D. They handed him a pencil and paper and asked him to draw the plane. When he was done, his interrogators held up a photograph of a D model. They had been testing him.

What did he know about the E-model B-24? Nothing, he told them. It was a lie; Super Man, while always officially a D model, had undergone upgrades that had effectively made it an E. Where was the radar system? The location of the radar had no bearing on how it worked, so Louie told the truth. How do you operate it? Louie knew the answer, but he replied that as a bombardier, he wouldn’t know. The interrogators asked him to draw the radar system. Louie invented an imaginary system, making a drawing so elaborate that, it was later written, the system looked like “a ruptured octopus.” The interrogators nodded.

They moved on to the Norden bombsight. How do you work it? You just twist two knobs, Louie said. The officers were annoyed. Louie was sent back to his cell.

Suspecting that he’d be brought back, Louie brainstormed, trying to anticipate questions. He thought about which things he could divulge and which things he couldn’t. For the latter, he came up with lies and practiced until he could utter them smoothly. Because he’d been partially truthful in the first session, he was now in a better position to lie.

Phil was pulled in for interrogation. He, too, knew about the captured B-24D, so he spoke freely about the plane’s components. The interrogators asked him to describe American war strategy. He replied that he thought they would attack the outlying captured territories, then work their way in until they defeated Japan. The interrogators responded with whoops of laughter. Phil sensed something forced. These men, he suspected, thought that Japan was going to lose.

——

Louie was sitting in his cell when a new guard appeared at the door. Louie looked up, saw a face he didn’t recognize, and felt an upswell of dread, knowing that a new guard would likely assert his authority.

“You Christian?” the guard asked.

Louie, whose parents had tried to raise him Catholic, hadn’t gone near church since one Sunday in his boyhood, when a priest had punished him for tardiness by grabbing him by the ear and dragging him out. But though Louie emerged with a sore ear, a little religion had stuck with him. He said yes. The guard smiled.

“Me Christian.”

The guard gave his name, which Louie would later recall, with some uncertainty, as Kawamura. He began babbling in English so poor that all Louie could pick out was something about Canadian missionaries and conversion. The guard slipped two pieces of hard candy into Louie’s hand, then moved down the hall and gave two pieces to Phil. A friendship was born.

Kawamura brought a pencil and paper and began making drawings to illustrate things he wished to talk about. Walking back and forth between the cells, he’d draw a picture of something—a car, a plane, an ice cream cone—and say and write its Japanese name. Louie and Phil would then write and say the English name. The prisoners understood almost nothing of what Kawamura said, but his goodwill needed no translation. Kawamura could do nothing to improve the physical conditions in which the captives lived, but his kindness was lifesaving.

When Kawamura was off guard duty, a new guard came. He launched himself at Louie, ramming a stick through the door window and into Louie’s face, as if trying to put out his eyes. The next day, Kawamura saw Louie’s bloody face and asked who had done it. Upon hearing the guard’s name, Kawamura hardened, lifting his arm and flexing his biceps at Louie. When his shift was up, he sped away with an expression of furious determination.

For two days, Louie saw nothing of Kawamura or the vicious guard. Then Kawamura returned, opened Louie’s cell door a crack, and proudly pointed out the guard who had beaten Louie. His forehead and mouth were heavily bandaged. He never guarded the cell again.

——

As Louie and Phil lay in their cells one day, they heard a commotion outside, the clamoring sounds of a mob. Then faces pressed into Louie’s door window, shouting. Rocks started flying in. More men came, one after another, screaming, spitting on Louie, hitting him with rocks, hurling sticks like javelins. Down the hall, the men were doing the same to Phil. Louie balled himself up at the far end of the cell.

On and on the procession went. There were eighty, perhaps ninety men, and each one spent some thirty seconds attacking each captive. At last, the men left. Louie sat in pools of spit and jumbled rocks and sticks, bleeding.

When Kawamura saw what had happened, he was livid. He explained that the attackers were a submarine crew stopping over on the island. When Louie was taken to interrogation, he complained about the attack. The officers replied that this was what he ought to expect.

The interrogators wanted Louie to tell them the numbers of aircraft, ships, and personnel in Hawaii. Louie told them that the last time he’d seen Hawaii, it had been May. Now it was August. He couldn’t be expected to have current information. He was sent back to his cell.

——

Some three weeks after his arrival on Kwajalein, Louie was again pulled from his cell. Outside for the first time since his arrival on the island, he saw Phil. Their eyes met. It looked like this might be the end.

They were taken to the interrogation building, but this time they were halted on the front porch, Phil on one end, Louie on the other. Two men in white medical coats joined them, along with four aides holding paperwork and stopwatches. Japanese began collecting below the porch to watch.

Louie and Phil were ordered to lie down. The doctors pulled out two long hypodermic syringes and filled each with a murky solution. Someone said it was the milk of green coconuts, though whether or not this was true remains unknown. The doctors said that what they were about to do would be good for the prisoners. If the solution worked as hoped—improving their condition, they were told—it would be given to Japanese troops.

The doctors turned the captives’ hands palm-up and swabbed their arms with alcohol. The needles slid in, the plungers depressed, and the aides clicked the stopwatches. The doctors told the captives to describe their sensations.

For Louie, within a few seconds, the porch started gyrating. The doctor pushed more solution into his vein, and the spinning worsened. He felt as if pins were being jabbed all over his body. Then the blood rushed from his head, the same sensation that he used to feel when Phil lifted Super Man out of a dive. His skin burned, itched, and stung. The porch pitched and turned. Across the porch, Phil was experiencing the same symptoms. The doctors, speaking in sterile tones, continued to question them. Then everything blurred. Louie cried out that he was going to faint. The doctor withdrew the needle.

The captives were taken back to their cells. Within fifteen minutes, Louie’s entire body was covered in a rash. He lay awake all night, itching and burning. Several days later, when the symptoms subsided, he and Phil were again taken to the porch and again injected, this time with more solution. Again they rolled through vertigo and burned with rashes. After another few days, they were subjected to a third experiment, and a few days later came a fourth. In the last infusion, a full pint of the fluid was pumped into their veins.

Both men survived, and as terrible as their experience had been, they were lucky. All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for experiments in biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died.

——

Back in his cell, Louie felt a sharp headache coming on, and was soon dizzy and baking with fever. His bones ached. Phil was going through the same ordeal. The guards summoned a doctor. Louie picked out a familiar word: dengue. The prisoners had dengue fever, a potentially fatal mosquito-borne illness that was ravaging the tropics. The doctor offered no treatment.

Louie drifted into a febrile fog. Time slid by, and he felt little connection to his body. As he lay there, feet tramped outside, livid faces appeared again at the door, and Louie felt himself struck with rocks, stabbed with sticks, and slapped with wads of spit. A new crop of submariners had come.

Louie floated through it, too sick to resist. The faces streamed past, and the stones and sticks cracked off his burning bones. Time passed with merciful speed, and the abuse was soon over.

——

Louie was brought to interrogation again. The officers pushed a map of Hawaii in front of him and told him to mark where the air bases were.

Louie resisted for some time, but the interrogators leaned hard on him. At last, he broke. He dropped his head and, with an expression of ashamed resignation, told them everything—the exact location of the bases, the numbers of planes.

The Japanese broke into jubilant smiles. They opened up a bottle of cola and gave it to Louie, along with a biscuit and a pastry. As they celebrated, they had no idea that the “bases” that Louie had identified were the fake airfields he had seen when tooling around Hawaii with Phil. If the Japanese bombed there, the only planes they would hit would be made of plywood.

Louie and Phil’s usefulness had been exhausted. At headquarters, the officers discussed what to do with the captives. The decision was probably easy; the same Japanese officers had been responsible for killing the marines whose names were written on Louie’s cell wall. Louie and Phil would be executed.

On August 24, men gathered before Louie’s cell, and once more he was dragged out. Is this it? he thought. He was tugged to the interrogation building. Expecting to learn that he was condemned to execution, he was told something else: A Japanese navy ship was coming to Kwajalein, and he was going to be put on it and taken to a POW camp in Yokohama, Japan. At the last minute, the officers had decided not to kill him. It would be a long time before Louie learned why.

Louie felt deep relief, believing that at a POW camp, he would be treated under the humane rules of international law, put in contact with the Red Cross, and allowed to contact his family. Phil, too, was told that he was going to Yokohama. He was amazed and hopeful.

On August 26, 1943, forty-two days after arriving at Execution Island, Louie and Phil were led from their cells, stripped naked, splashed with buckets of water, allowed to dress again, and taken toward the ship that would carry them to Japan.

As he walked from his cell for the last time, Louie looked back, searching for Kawamura. He couldn’t find him.

Nineteen

Two Hundred Silent Men

LOUIE AND PHIL WERE SITTING IN A HOLDING ROOM ON the navy ship when the door slapped open and a crowd of agitated, sloppy-drunk Japanese sailors pushed in. One of them asked if Japan would win the war.

“No,” said Phil.

A fist caught Phil in the face, then swung back and struck him again. Louie was asked who would win the war.

“America.”

The sailors fell onto the captives, fists flying. Something connected with Louie’s nose, and he felt a crunch. An officer ran in, peeled the crewmen off, and ordered them out. Louie’s nose was bleeding. When he touched it, he felt a gash and a bone elbowing out sideways.

In choppy English, the officer told them that the crewmen had been rifling through the captives’ wallets, which had been confiscated when they came on board. In Louie’s wallet, they had found a folded, stained bit of newspaper. It was the cartoon that Louie had cut from the Honolulu Advertiser many months before, depicting his service in the raid on Wake. The officer said that about half of the ship’s crew had been on Wake that night, and their ship, apparently anchored offshore, had been sunk.

The crewmen had regrets about attacking the captives. Later, the door opened again, and two of them lurched in, muttered apologies, draped their arms around Louie, and gave him sake.

This clipping was in Louie’s wallet throughout his raft journey, and was stained purple by the wallet dye. Its discovery by the Japanese resulted in Louie and Phil being beaten. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Louie and Phil were separated again, and Louie was locked in an officer’s cabin. Every few days, he had strange visits from a grinning sailor who would lean into the room, say, “Thump on the head for a biscuit?,” rap his knuckles on Louie’s head, hand him a biscuit, and amble away.

Between the sailor’s visits, Louie had nothing to do but sit, pinching his fingers around his nose to set the bones. Bored, he rummaged through the cabin and found a bottle of sake. He began taking furtive sips of the rice wine, little enough that its absence might not be missed. When, during a submarine alert, he panicked and drank so much that no one could fail to notice it, he decided that he might as well finish it off. In the last days of the journey, the skinny American and the fat Japanese bottle had a grand time together.

——

After a three-week journey, including a stopover at Truk Atoll, the ship docked at Yokohama, on the eastern coast of Japan’s central island, Honshu. Louie was blindfolded and led out. Solid ground came underfoot. Through a gap in his blindfold, Louie’s first glimpse of Japan was the word CHEVROLET, stamped on a hubcap. He was standing before a car.

He heard someone stomping off the ship, shouting. The men around Louie froze; the man approaching, he assumed, must be an officer. Louie felt the officer grabbing him and shoving him into the car’s jump seat. As he struggled to get his legs in, the officer cracked him in the face with a flashlight. Louie felt his nose bones splay again. He thought of the sake and wondered if this man was its owner. He folded himself into the seat, alongside Phil.

The Chevy motored up through hilly country. After the better part of an hour, it stopped. Hands pulled Louie onto his feet and led him into an enclosed, humid space. The blindfold was untied. He was in a bathhouse, apparently in the promised POW camp. Phil was no longer with him. There was a tub before him, filled with water that carried the tart smell of disinfectant. Told to undress and get in, he stepped into the water, luxuriating in the warmth, scrubbing himself clean for the first time since he’d left Oahu.

When his bath was over, he was told to dress again. A man came with clippers and shaved his head and beard. Louie was escorted out, led down a hallway, and stopped at a door. The guard told him to go in and wait for orders.

Louie walked into the room. The lights were out, and he could only just make out the silhouette of a man in civilian clothing, facing away from him. Someone flipped on a light, the man turned, and Louie saw his face.

It was his college friend Jimmie Sasaki.

——

“We meet again,” Sasaki said. Louie gaped at him in astonishment. He knew nothing of Sasaki’s alleged spying, and was stunned to see his friend in the service of his enemy. Sasaki looked at him warmly. He’d been prepared to see Louie, but he was disturbed by how thin he was. He made a playful crack about how ugly Louie looked bald.

What followed was a strange and stilted conversation. Sasaki asked a few questions about Louie’s odyssey, then began reminiscing about USC, meals at the student union, ten-cent movies on campus. Louie, uneasy, waited for questions on military matters, but they never came. The closest Sasaki got was to express confidence that Japan would win the war. He told Louie that he was a civilian employee of the Japanese navy, which had made him head interrogator of all POWs in Japan. He said he bore a rank equal to that of admiral.

Louie was taken outside. He was in a large compound with several one-story buildings surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire. There was something spooky about this place. Louie, like every man brought there, noticed it immediately. Gathered in drifts against the buildings were some two hundred whisper-thin captive Allied servicemen. Every one of them had his eyes fixed on the ground. They were as silent as snow.

Louie was led to a bench, some distance from the other captives. He saw Phil far away, sitting alone. A couple of captives sat on other benches across the compound, hiding their hands from the guards’ view and gesturing to each other in Morse code—fists for dots and flat hands for dashes. Louie watched them until a captive approached. The man seemed to have permission to speak. He began to tell Louie about where he was.

This wasn’t a POW camp. It was a secret interrogation center called Ofuna, where “high-value” captured men were housed in solitary confinement, starved, tormented, and tortured to divulge military secrets. Because Ofuna was kept secret from the outside world, the Japanese operated with an absolutely free hand. The men in Ofuna, said the Japanese, weren’t POWs; they were “unarmed combatants” at war against Japan and, as such, didn’t have the rights that international law accorded POWs. In fact, they had no rights at all. If captives “confessed their crimes against Japan,” they’d be treated “as well as regulations permit.” Over the course of the war, some one thousand Allied captives would be hauled into Ofuna, and many would be held there for years.

The man told Louie the rules. He was forbidden to speak to anyone but the guards, to put his hands in his pockets, or to make eye contact with other captives. His eyes were to be directed downward at all times. He had to learn to count in Japanese, because every morning there was tenko, a roll call and inspection in which men had to count off. To use the benjo—latrine—he had to ask in broken Japanese: “Benjo kudasai,” said while bowing. He wouldn’t be given a cup, so if he was thirsty he’d have to beg the guard to escort him to the washstand. There were rules about every detail of life, from the folding of blankets to the buttoning of clothes, each reinforcing isolation and total obedience. The slightest violation would bring a beating.

The Japanese were abundantly clear about one thing. In this secret place, they could, and did, do anything they wanted to their captives, and no one would ever know. They stressed that they did not guarantee that captives would survive Ofuna. “They can kill you here,” Louie was told. “No one knows you’re alive.”

After nightfall, Louie was taken into a barracks and led to a tiny cell. On the floor was a thin tatami (straw mat), which would be his bed, with three paper sheets. There was a small window, but it had no glass, so wind eddied through the room. The walls were flimsy, the floorboards gapped, the ceiling was tarpaper. It was mid-September, and with winter approaching, Louie would be living in a building that was, in one captive’s words, barely a windbreak.

Louie curled up under the paper sheets. There were dozens of men in cells near him, but no one made a sound. Phil was in a cell far down the hall, and for the first time in months, Louie wasn’t near him. In this warren of captive men, he was alone.

——

Each day began at six: a bell clanging, a shouting guard, captives running outside to tenko. Louie would fall into a line of haggard men. Guards stalked them, clubs or baseball bats in their hands and rifles with fixed bayonets over their shoulders, making menacing postures and yelling unintelligibly. The captives were hounded through a frenzied routine: counting off, bowing toward Emperor Hirohito, rushing to the washstand and benjo, then rushing back to the assembly area five minutes later. Then it was back to the barracks, where guards rifled through the men’s things in search of contraband, misfolded blankets, misaligned buttons—anything to justify a beating.

Breakfast came from captives who handed out bowls of watery, fetid slop, which each man ate alone in his cell. Then men were paired off, given clots of wet rope, and forced to bend double, put the rope on the floor, and wash the 150-foot-long barracks aisle floor at a run, or sometimes waddling duck-style, while the guards trotted behind them, swatting them. Then it was back outside, where the guards made the men run circles or perform calisthenics, often until they collapsed. When the exercise was over, the men had to sit outside, regardless of the weather. The only breaks in the silence were the screams coming from the interrogation room.

Punctuating the passage of each day were beatings. Men were beaten for folding their arms, for sitting naked to help heal sores, for cleaning their teeth, for talking in their sleep. Most often, they were beaten for not understanding orders, which were almost always issued in Japanese. Dozens of men were lined up and clubbed in the knees for one man’s alleged infraction. A favorite punishment was to force men to stand, sometimes for hours, in the “Ofuna crouch,” a painful and strenuous position in which men stood with knees bent halfway and arms overhead. Those who fell over or dropped their arms were clubbed and kicked. Captives who tried to assist victims were attacked themselves, usually far more violently, so victims were on their own. Any attempt to protect oneself—ducking, shielding the face—provoked greater violence. “My job,” remembered captive Glenn McConnell, “was to keep my nose on my face and keep from being disassembled.” The beatings, he wrote, “were of such intensity that many of us wondered if we’d ever live to see the end of the war.”

At night, in the cell again, Louie awaited dinner, eaten alone in the dark. Then he just sat there. He wasn’t permitted to speak, whistle, sing, tap, read, or look out his window. There was another inspection outside, another haranguing, and then the uneasy pause of night, the pacing of the guards, before the dawn again brought shouting and running and the thud of clubs.

——

At Ofuna, as at the scores of POW camps scattered throughout Japan and its conquests, the men used for guard duty were the dregs of the Japanese military. Many had washed out of regular soldierly life, too incompetent to perform basic duties. Quite a few were deranged. According to captives, there were two characteristics common to nearly all Ofuna guards. One was marked stupidity. The other was murderous sadism.