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

forces, only one chose to bail out. The rest were so afraid of capture that they chose to die in the crash.

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For airmen, the risks were impossible to shrug off. The dead weren’t numbers on a page. They were their roommates, their drinking buddies, the crew that had been flying off their wing ten seconds ago. Men didn’t go one by one. A quarter of a barracks was lost at once. There were rarely funerals, for there were rarely bodies. Men were just gone, and that was the end of it.

Airmen avoided the subject of death, but privately, many were tormented by fear. One man in Louie’s squadron had chronic, stress-induced nosebleeds. Another had to be relieved because he froze with terror in the air. Pilot Joe Deasy recalled a distraught airman who came to him with a question: If a crewman went mad during a mission, would the crew shoot him? The man was so jittery that he accidentally fired his sidearm into the ground as he spoke.

Some men were certain that they’d be killed; others lived in denial. For Louie and Phil, there was no avoiding the truth. After only two months and one combat mission, five of their friends were already dead, and they had survived several near misses themselves. Their room and icebox, inherited from friends whose bodies were now in the Pacific, were constant reminders.

Before Louie had left the States, he’d been issued an olive-drab Bible. He tried reading it to cope with his anxiety, but it made no sense to him, and he abandoned it. Instead, he soothed himself by listening to classical music on his phonograph. He often left Phil sprawled on his bed, penning letters to Cecy on an upturned box, as he headed out to run off his worries on the mile-long course that he had measured in the sand around the runway. He also tried to prepare for every contingency. He went to the machine shop, cut a thick metal slab, lugged it to Super Man, and plunked it down in the greenhouse in hopes that it would protect him from ground fire. He took classes on island survival and wound care, and found a course in which an elderly Hawaiian offered tips on fending off sharks. (Open eyes wide and bare teeth, make football-style stiff-arm, bop shark in nose.)

And like everyone else, Louie and Phil drank. After a few beers, Louie said, it was possible to briefly forget dead friends. Men were given a ration of four beers a week, but everyone scoured the landscape for alternatives. Alcohol was to Louie what acorns are to squirrels; he consumed what he wanted when he found it and hid the rest. In training, he had stashed his hooch in a shaving cream bottle. Once deployed, he graduated to mayonnaise jars and ketchup bottles. He stowed a bottle of a local rotgut called Five Island Gin—nicknamed Five Ulcer Gin—in radioman Harry Brooks’s gas mask holster. When an MP tapped Brooks’s hip to check for the mask, the bottle broke and left Brooks with a soggy leg. It was probably for the best. Louie noticed that when he drank the stuff, his chest hair spontaneously fell out. He later discovered that Five Island Gin was often used as paint thinner. After that, he stuck to beer.

Phil, like all airmen, had to cope with the possibility of dying, but he had an additional burden. As a pilot, he was keenly conscious that if he made a mistake, eight other men could die. He began carrying two talismans. One was a bracelet Cecy had given him. Believing that it kept him from harm, he wouldn’t go up without it. The other was a silver dollar that jingled endlessly in his pocket. On the day that he finally ran away with Cecy, he said, he’d use it to tip the bellboy. “When I do get home,” he wrote to her, “I’m going to hide with you where no one will find us.”

In the early days of 1943, as men died one after another, every man dealt with the losses in a different way. Somewhere along the way, a ritual sprang up. If a man didn’t return, the others would open his footlocker, take out his liquor, and have a drink in his honor. In a war without funerals, it was the best they could do.

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The military didn’t break down nonbattle deaths by cause, but statistics strongly indicate that accidental crashes accounted for most deaths. First, the nonbattle death figure excludes those who died while interned, captured, or MIA. Disease, too, can be excluded as a major cause of death: given that in the entire army, including infantry fighting in malarial jungles, 15,779 personnel died of disease, disease deaths in the air corps had to be a small percentage of nonbattle deaths. Finally, given that some 15,000 airmen died in accidental crashes stateside, it seems highly likely that the huge number of accidental crashes in the war would have produced similarly high numbers of deaths.

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When Louie and Phil were deployed, a tour was thirty missions. The number was later adjusted upward.

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It was called a Mae West because it gave the wearer a bountiful bust. In the 1970s, service personnel updated the name, calling them Dolly Partons.

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Two published accounts of this incident mistakenly identify Reading as the one who was eaten by the shark. Newspaper reports in which Reading was interviewed confirm that it was Almond.

Nine

Five Hundred and Ninety-four Holes

IN FEBRUARY 1943, DURING A BRIEF VISIT TO THE EQUATORIAL island of Canton, the Super Man crew had its first encounter with exploding sharks. Canton was a seething purgatory in the shape of a pork chop, consisting mostly of coral and scrubby plants huddled close to the ground, as if cringing from the heat. There was only one tree on the entire island. The surrounding waters were tumbling with sharks, which got trapped in the lagoon at low tide. Bored out of their wits, the local servicemen would tie garbage to long sticks and dangle them over the lagoon. When the sharks snapped at the bait, the men would lob hand grenades into their mouths and watch them blow up.

The Super Man crew had been sent to Canton for two missions over Japanese- occupied Makin and Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands. On the first mission, the lead plane made a wrong turn, and the men found themselves over Howland, the island that Amelia Earhart had been aiming for when she had vanished six years earlier. They noticed gouges in the Howland runway, the calling cards of the Japanese. Once they got sorted out and found Makin, Louie couldn’t see his target through the clouds. They made three circles with no luck, so their colonel ordered them to drop the bombs anywhere and get going. Through a gap in the clouds, Louie spotted a row of outhouses and, with giggling glee, walloped them with three thousand pounds of demolition bombs. To a cheer from the crew, the outhouses blew sky-high.

Two days later, the men flew back to the Gilberts to photograph the islands, bringing a six-man camera crew. They buzzed several islands under fire, snapping photos. With Super Man’s nose bloodied from an antiaircraft round, they turned back for Canton. Three hundred miles from home, engineer Douglas made a discovery. Super Man’s eccentric fuel gauges, which had been jiggling around, had settled very low. Douglas announced that at their current rate, they wouldn’t make Canton.