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

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