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

Phil slowed the propellers as far as he dared and “leaned” the fuel mixture so that the least possible fuel was used. The crew shoved out almost everything that wasn’t bolted down, and all fifteen men crowded into the front of the plane, in the belief that it would improve air speed. Knowing that their chances of making Canton were slim, they considered Howland, but then recalled the pitted runway. They discussed ditching near Howland, but that raised the issue of sharks. In the end, they agreed to try for Canton.

Wedged together in the front of the plane, all the men could do was wait. The sun set. Louie stared into the dark below and thought about what it would feel like to crash. The fuel gauges inched lower, and everyone waited to hear the engines sputtering out. At last, with the fuel gauges at absolute bottom, Phil spotted a searchlight craning around the sky and runway lights dotting the dark below. Realizing that he was way too high, Phil dropped the plane so sharply that Pillsbury bobbed into the air and hung there a moment, weightless, before slapping down.

As Super Man touched down on Canton, its tail settled lower than it had been in the air, causing the last drops of fuel to shift back. A moment later, one engine quit.

Two weeks later, the men saw what would have awaited them had they gone down at sea. A B-25 flying off Oahu radioed that it was low on fuel, then went silent. Super Man was scrambled to hunt for it. After an hour and a half of searching, Louie spotted a curl of gray smoke. Two Catalina flying boats were heading toward it. Super Man followed.

When they arrived at the crash site, the men were astonished by what they saw. Two life rafts, holding the entire five-man B-25 crew, floated amid plane debris. Around them, the ocean was churning with hundreds of sharks, some of which looked twenty feet long. Knifing agitated circles in the water, the creatures seemed on the verge of overturning the rafts.

The Catalinas reached the men before the sharks could, and the B-25 men treated their rescuers to drinks that night. But the Super Man crew now understood the feelings of the grenade throwers on Canton. On a later flight, when they saw several sharks harassing six whales, they dove low over the water and shot at the sharks. Later, they felt guilty. On future flights, when they saw sharks, they let them be.

——

Nauru was a little afterthought of land, eight square miles of sand sitting alone in the Pacific, about twenty-five hundred miles southwest of Hawaii. It was the kind of place that the world might have left alone, were it not for the fifty thousand tons of high-grade phosphate that lay under the feet of the grass-skirted natives. A central ingredient in fertilizer and munitions, the phosphate had been discovered in 1900, and since then the island had been home to a community of European businessmen and Chinese workers who mined the land. When the war began, Nauru became a priceless prize.

Japan seized Nauru in August 1942, imprisoning the Europeans who had not fled and forcing the natives and the Chinese to mine phosphate and build a runway. They enforced their authority with the sword, beheading people for infractions as trivial as the theft of a pumpkin. When the runway was complete, Japan had a rich source of phosphate and an ideal base for air strikes.

On April 17, upon returning from a run, Louie was called to a briefing. America was going after Nauru in a big way, sending Super Man and twenty-two other B-24s to hit the phosphate works. No one in the squadron saw a bed that night. They left just before midnight, refueled on Canton, and flew to Funafuti, the tiny atoll from which they would launch their attack. They found it jostling with journalists brought in by the military to cover the raid.

At a briefing, the crews were told to approach Nauru at eight thousand feet. The altitude gave Louie and the others pause. That week, they had made practice runs from eight to ten thousand feet, and the potential for antiaircraft fire to butcher them at that altitude had alarmed the whole crew. “We only hope,” Louie had written in his diary two days earlier, “we don’t bomb that low in actual combat.” Pillsbury couldn’t stop thinking about something else that the briefing officer had said. There would be ten to twelve Zeros waiting for them. He’d seen a distant Zero at Wake, but had never been engaged by one. The idea of a single Zero was daunting. The prospect of twelve scared him to death.

Before dawn the next day, the men walked together to Super Man. With them was a lieutenant named Donald Nelson. He wasn’t on the crew, but asked if he could tag along so he could see combat. At five A.M., Super Man was airborne.

——

Doglegging to the west to hide their point of origin, the planes took six and a half hours to reach Nauru. No one spoke. Super Man led the mass of bombers, flying with a plane on each wing. The sun rose, and the planes flew into a clear morning. The Japanese would see them coming.

At about twenty past eleven, navigator Mitchell broke the silence: They’d be over the island in fifteen minutes. In the greenhouse, Louie could just make out an apostrophe of land, flat to the horizon. Below, there was a black shadow in the water. It was an American submarine, ready to pick up survivors if bombers were shot down. Super Man passed over it and slid over Nauru. Louie shivered.

It was eerily silent. The first nine planes, Super Man out front, crossed the island unopposed. The air was very still, and the plane glided along without a ripple. Phil relinquished control to the Norden bombsight. Super Man’s first target, a knot of planes and structures beside a runway, came into view. Louie lined up on the gleaming backs of the planes.

And then, shattering. The sky became a fury of color, sound, and motion. Flak hissed up, trailing streamers of smoke over the planes, then burst into black puffs, sparkling with shrapnel. Metal flew everywhere, streaking up from below and raining down from above. With the bombsight in control, Phil could do nothing.

Something struck the bomber on Super Man’s left wing, piloted by Lieutenant John Jacobs. The plane sank as if drowning. At almost the same moment, the plane to Super Man’s right was hit. Just a few feet away, Pillsbury watched the bomber falter, drop, and disappear under Super Man’s wing. Pillsbury could see the men inside, and his mind briefly registered that all of them were about to die. Super Man was alone.

Louie kept his focus below, trying to aim for the parked planes. As he worked, there was a tremendous bang! and a terrific shudder. Much of Super Man’s right rudder, a chunk the size of a dinner table, blew off. Louie lost the target. As he tried to find it again, a shell bit a wide hole in the bomb bay, and the plane rocked again.

At last, Louie had his aim, and the first bombs dropped, spun down, and struck their targets. Then Super Man passed over a set of red-roofed barracks and an antiaircraft battery, Louie’s second and third targets. Louie lined up and watched the bombs crunch into the buildings and battery. He had one bomb left for a target of opportunity. North of the airfield, he saw a shack and took aim. The bomb fell clear, and