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

the plane, yelling for someone to get a toilet bag ready. On his last run, Cuppernell discovered that all the bags had been used. With nowhere else to go, he dropped his pants and hung his rear end out the waist window while four crewmen clung to him to prevent him from falling out. When the ground crew saw the results all over Super Man’s tail, they were furious. “It was like an abstract painting,” Louie said later.

Phil’s remedy for boredom was hotdogging. After each day of sea search, he and another pilot synchronized their returns to Oahu. The one in front would buzz the island with wheels up, seeing how low he could get without skinning the plane’s underside, then goad the other into going lower. Phil hummed Super Man so close to the ground that he could look straight into the first-floor windows of buildings. It was, he said in his strolling cadence, “kind of daring.”

——

For each day in the air, the crew got a day off. They played poker, divvied up Cecy’s care packages, and went to the movies. Louie ran laps around the runway, keeping his body in Olympic condition. On the beach at Kahuku, he and Phil inflated their mattress covers, made a go at the waves, and nearly drowned themselves. Tooling around the island in borrowed cars, they came upon several airfields, but when they drew closer, they realized that all of the planes and equipment were fake, made of plywood, an elaborate ruse designed to fool Japanese reconnaissance planes. And in Honolulu, they found their Everest. It was the House of P. Y. Chong steakhouse, where for $2.50 they could get a steak nearly as fat as a man’s arm and as broad as his head. Louie never saw a Chong diner finish his meal.

For the officer half of the crew, paradise was Honolulu’s North Shore officers’ club, where there were tennis courts, pretty girls with ten-thirty curfews, and boilermakers. When the crew got the best gunnery scores in the squadron, Louie rewarded the enlisted men by pinning his insignia to their uniforms and sneaking them into the club. Just after Louie got up to dance with a girl, Colonel Matheny sat down in his place and began talking to the terrified Clarence Douglas, who was pretending to be a second lieutenant. When Louie finally got free and ran to Douglas’s rescue, the unsuspecting colonel stood up and told him what a damn fine man Douglas was.

Waiting to fly. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

One day on the club’s dance floor, Louie spotted the lieutenant who had ordered them to fly on three engines. He scrounged up a bag of flour, recruited a girl, and began dancing in circles near the lieutenant, dropping a pinch of flour down the officer’s collar each time he swung past. After an hour of this, the whole club was watching. Finally, Louie snagged a glass of water, danced up behind his victim, dumped the water down his shirt, and took off. The lieutenant spun around, his back running with dough. Unable to find the culprit, he stormed out, and Louie was the toast of the club. “We had one more girl for us,” he said.

November became December, and the crew still hadn’t seen any Japanese. There was hard fighting down on Guadalcanal, and the men felt excluded, frustrated, and intensely curious about combat. Every time a B-17 was brought up from the fighting, Louie and his friends went to the airfield to gawk at it. At first, all the planes looked the same. Then an airman showed them a lone bullet hole. “My golly!” Louie said later. “Our hair stood on end.”

——

Three days before Christmas, the crew’s hour finally came. They and twenty-five other crews were told to pack three days’ worth of clothes and report to their planes. Walking out to Super Man, Louie found the bomb bay fitted with two auxiliary fuel tanks and six five-hundred-pound bombs. Judging by the auxiliary tanks, Louie wrote in his diary, their destination was likely “a long hop somewhere.” Instead of the Norden bombsight, Louie was given the handheld sight, which probably meant that they’d be dive-bombing. The crew was handed a packet of orders and told not to open them until airborne.

Five minutes after Super Man lifted off, the crewmen tore open the orders and learned that they were to make a heading for Midway. When they landed there eight hours later, they were greeted with a case of Budweiser and very big news: The Japanese had built a base on Wake Atoll. In the biggest raid yet staged in the Pacific war, the AAF was going to burn the base down.

The next afternoon, the crew was called to the briefing room, which was actually the base theater, strung with limp Christmas tinsel and streamers. They were going to hit Wake that night, with dive-bombing. The mission would take sixteen hours, nonstop, the longest combat flight the war had yet seen. This would push the B-24s as far as they could go. Even with auxiliary fuel tanks, they would be cutting it extremely close.

Before the flight, Louie walked to the airfield. The ground crewmen were preparing the planes, stripping out every ounce of excess weight and rolling black paint on the bellies and wings to make them harder to see against a night sky. Coming to Super Man, Louie climbed into the bomb bay, where the bombs sat ready. In honor of his college buddy Payton Jordan, who had just married his high school sweetheart, Louie scrawled Marge and Payton Jordan on a bomb.

At 4:00 P.M. on December 23, 1942, twenty-six B-24s, laden with some 73,000 gallons of fuel and 75,000 pounds of bombs, rose up from Midway. Super Man slipped toward the rear of the procession. All afternoon and into the evening, the planes flew toward Wake. The sun set, and the bombers pressed on under the timid glow of moon and stars.

At eleven P.M., when his plane was about 150 miles from Wake, Phil switched off the outside lights. Clouds closed in. The bombers were supposed to approach the atoll in formation, but with clouds around and the lights off, the pilots couldn’t find their flightmates. They couldn’t risk breaking radio silence, so each plane went on alone. The pilots craned into the dark, swerving away from the faint shadows of others, trying to avoid collisions. Wake was very close now, but they couldn’t see it. Sitting in the top turret of Super Man, Stanley Pillsbury wondered if he’d make it back alive. In the greenhouse below, Louie felt a buzzing inside himself, the same sensation that he had felt before races. Ahead, Wake slept.

——

At exactly midnight, Colonel Matheny, piloting the lead plane, Dumbo the Avenger, broke radio silence.

“This is it, boys.”

Matheny dropped Dumbo’s nose and sent the bomber plunging out of the clouds. There beneath him was Wake, three slender islands joining hands around a lagoon. As his copilot called out speed and altitude figures, Matheny pushed his plane toward a string of buildings on Peacock Point, the atoll’s southern tip. On either side of Matheny’s plane, B-24s followed him down. When he reached his bombing altitude, Matheny hauled the plane’s nose up and yelled to the bombardier.

“When are you going to turn loose those incendiaries?”