In Texas, Louie was in a theater, on a weekend pass. The theater was thick with servicemen, taking breaks from the endless drilling that was the life of the peacetime soldier. Midway through the showing, the screen went blank, light flooded the theater, and a man hurried onto the stage.
All servicemen must return to their bases immediately, the man said. Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor.
Louie would long remember sitting there with his eyes wide, his mind floundering. America was at war. He grabbed his hat and ran from the building.
B-24 LIBERATOR
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Because indoor tracks are shorter than outdoor ones, forcing runners to make more turns to cover the same distance, indoor records are generally slower. In 1940, the outdoor mile world record was one second faster than the indoor record.
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Hockert’s teammate Lauri Lehtinen, the 1932 5,000-meter Olympic champion, gave his gold medal to another Finnish soldier in Hockert’s honor.
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Many other great runners also enlisted. When Norman Bright tried to sign up, he was rejected because of his alarmingly slow pulse, a consequence of his extreme fitness. He solved the problem by running three miles, straight into another enlistment office. Cunningham tried to join the navy, but recruiters, seeing his grotesquely scarred legs, assumed that he was too crippled to serve. When someone came in and mentioned his name, they realized who he was and signed him in.
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One hundred and eighty-three planes were launched in this first of two waves, but two were lost on takeoff.
The Flying Coffin
AS JAPANESE PLANES DOVE OVER OAHU, MORE THAN TWO thousand miles to the west, a few marines were sitting in a mess tent on Wake Atoll, having breakfast. Extremely small, lacking its own water supply, Wake would have been a useless atoll but for one enormous attribute: It lay far out in the Pacific, making it a strategically ideal spot for an air base. And so it was home to one runway and about five hundred bored American servicemen, mostly marines. Aside from the occasional refueling stopovers of Pan American World Airways planes, nothing interesting ever happened there. But that December morning, just as the marines were starting on their pancakes, an air-raid siren began wailing. By noon, the sky was streaked with Japanese bombers, buildings were exploding, and a few startled men on less than three square miles of coral found themselves on the front in the Second World War.
All over the Pacific that morning, the story was the same. In less than two hours over Pearl Harbor, Japan badly wounded the American navy and killed more than 2,400 people. Almost simultaneously, it attacked Thailand, Shanghai, Malaya, the Philippines, Guam, Midway, and Wake. In one day of breathtaking violence, a new Japanese onslaught had begun.
In America, invasion was expected at any moment. Less than an hour after the Japanese bombed Hawaii, mines were being laid in San Francisco Bay. In Washington, Civil Defense Minister Fiorello La Guardia looped around the city in a police car, sirens blaring, shouting the word “
On the night of December 7–8, there were four air-raid alerts in San Francisco. At Sheppard Field air corps school, in Texas, spooked officers ran through the barracks at four A.M., screaming that Japanese planes were coming and ordering the cadets to sprint outside and throw themselves on the ground. In coming days, trenches were dug along the California coast, and schools in Oakland were closed. From New Jersey to Alaska, reservoirs, bridges, tunnels, factories, and waterfronts were put under guard. In Kearney, Nebraska, citizens were instructed on disabling incendiary bombs with garden hoses. Blackout curtains were hung in windows across America, from solitary farmhouses to the White House. Shocking rumors circulated: Kansas City was about to be attacked. San Francisco was being bombed. The Japanese had captured the Panama Canal.
Japan galloped over the globe. On December 10, it invaded the Philippines and seized Guam. The next day, it invaded Burma; a few days later, British Borneo. Hong Kong fell on Christmas; North Borneo, Rabaul, Manila, and the U.S. base in the Philippines fell in January. The British were driven from Malaya and into surrender in Singapore in seventy days.
There was one snag: Wake, surely expected to be an easy conquest, wouldn’t give in. For three days, the Japanese bombed and strafed the atoll. On December 11, a vast force, including eleven destroyers and light cruisers, launched an invasion attempt. The little group of defenders shoved them back, sinking two destroyers and damaging nine other ships, shooting down two bombers, and forcing the Japanese to abort, their first loss of the war. It wasn’t until December 23 that the Japanese finally seized Wake and captured the men on it. To the Americans’ 52 military deaths, an estimated 1,153 Japanese had been killed.
For several days, the captives were held on the airfield, shivering by night, sweltering by day, singing Christmas carols to cheer themselves. They were initially slated for execution, but after a Japanese officer’s intervention, most were crowded into the holds of ships and sent to Japan and occupied China as some of the first Americans to become POWs under the Japanese. Unbeknownst to America, ninety-eight captives were kept on Wake. The Japanese were going to enslave them.
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Though Louie had been miserable over having to rejoin the air corps, it wasn’t so bad after all. Training at Texas’s Ellington Field, then Midland Army Flying School, he earned superb test scores. The flying was usually straight and level, so airsickness wasn’t a problem. Best of all, women found the flyboy uniform irresistible. While Louie was out walking one afternoon, a convertible fringed in blondes pulled up, and he was scooped into the car and sped off to a party. When it happened a second time, he sensed a positive trend.
Louie was trained in the use of two bombsights. For dive-bombing, he had a $1 handheld sight consisting of an
