back and forth overhead. Thinking that it was a crew lost in the clouds, Louie lay there listening, hoping they’d find home. Eventually, the sound faded away.
Before Louie could fall back asleep, he heard the growl of heavy aircraft engines. Then, from the north end of the atoll, came a
The airmen and journalists, Louie and Phil among them, jammed their feet into their boots, bolted from the tents, and stopped, some shouting, others spinning in panic. They couldn’t see any bomb shelters. From down the atoll, the explosions were coming in rapid succession, each one louder and closer. The ground shook.
“I looked around and said, ‘Holy hell! Where are we going to go?’ ” remembered pilot Joe Deasy. The best shelter he could find was a shallow pit dug around a coconut sapling, and he plowed into it, along with most of the men near him. Herman Scearce, Deasy’s radioman, leapt into a trench next to an ordnance truck, joining five of his crewmates. Pilot Jesse Stay jumped into another hole nearby. Three men crawled under the ordnance truck; another flung himself into a garbage pit. One man ran right off the end of the atoll, splashing into the ocean even though he didn’t know how to swim. Some men, finding nowhere to go, dropped to their knees to claw foxholes in the sand with their helmets. As he dug in the dark with the bombs coming, one man noisily cursed the sonofabitch generals who had left the atoll without shelters.
Dozens of natives crowded into a large missionary church that stood in a clearing. Realizing that the white church would stand out brilliantly on the dark atoll, a marine named Fonnie Black Ladd ran in and yelled at the natives to get out. When they wouldn’t move, he drew his sidearm. They scattered.
In the infirmary, Stanley Pillsbury lay in startled confusion. One moment he’d been sleeping, and the next, the atoll was rocking with explosions, a siren was howling, and people were sprinting by, dragging patients onto stretchers and rushing them out. Then the room was empty, and Pillsbury was alone. He had apparently been forgotten. He sat up, frantic. He couldn’t stand.
Louie and Phil ran through the coconut grove, searching for anything that might serve as shelter. The bombs were overtaking them, making a sound that one man likened to the footfalls of a giant:
An instant later, everything was scalding whiteness and splintering noise. The ground heaved, and the air whooshed around, carrying an acrid smell. Trees blew apart. A bomb struck the tent in which Louie and Phil had been sleeping a minute before. Another burst beside a pile of men in a ditch, and something speared into the back of the man on top. He said, “This feels like it, boys,” and passed out. A bomb hit the ordnance truck, sending it into the air in thousands of pieces. The remains of the truck and the men under it skimmed past Jesse Stay’s head. A nose gunner heard a singing sound as the parts of the truck flew by him. It was apparently this truck that landed on one of the tents, where two airmen were still on their cots. Another bomb tumbled into Scearce’s trench, plopping right on top of a tail gunner. It didn’t go off, but sat there hissing. The gunner shouted, “Jesus!” It took them a moment to realize that what they’d thought was a bomb was actually a fire extinguisher. Yards away, Louie and Phil huddled. The hut shook, but still stood.
The bombs moved down the atoll. Each report sounded farther away, and then the explosions stopped. A few men climbed from their shelters to help the wounded and douse fires. Louie and the others stayed where they were, knowing that the bombers would be back. Matches were struck and cigarettes were pinched in trembling fingers. If we’re hit, one man grumbled, there’ll be nothing left of us but gravy. Far away, the bombers turned. The booming began again.
Someone running by the infirmary saw Pillsbury, hurried in, threw him on a stretcher, and dragged him into a tiny cement building where the other wounded had been taken. The building was so crowded that men had been laid on shelves. It was pitch-dark, and doctors were shuffling around, peering at their patients by flashlight. Pillsbury lay panting in the darkness, listening to the bombs coming, feeling claustrophobic, his mind flashing with images of bombs entombing them. With men stacked everywhere and no one speaking, he thought of a morgue. His leg hurt. He began groaning, and the doctor felt his way to him and gave him morphine. The booming was louder, louder, and then it was over them again, tremendous crashing. The ceiling shuddered, and cement dust sifted down.
Outside, it was hell on earth. Men moaned and screamed, one calling for his mother. A pilot thought the voices sounded “like animals crying.” Men’s eardrums burst. A man died of a heart attack. Another man’s arm was severed. Others sobbed, prayed, and lost control of their bowels. “I wasn’t only scared, I was terrified,” one airman would write to his parents. “I thought I was scared in the air, but I wasn’t. [It was] the first time in my life I saw how close death could come.” Phil felt the same; never, even during the fight over Nauru, had he known such terror. Louie crouched beside him. As he had run through the coconut grove, he had moved only on instinct and roaring adrenaline, feeling no emotion. Now, as explosions went off around him, fear seized him.
Staff Sergeant Frank Rosynek huddled in a coral trench, wearing nothing but a helmet, untied shoes, and boxer shorts. The tonnage coming down, he later wrote, “seemed like a railroad carload. The bombs sounded like someone pushing a piano down a long ramp before they hit and exploded. Big palm trees were shattered and splintered all around us; the ground would rise up in the air when a bomb exploded and there was this terrific flash of super bright light that it made. The concussion blew pieces of coral into our hole and we blindly groped for them and tossed them out as quick as we could find them. At intervals between a bomb falling it sounded like church: voices from nearby slit trenches all chanting the Lord’s prayer together—over and over again. Louder when the bombs hit closer. I thought I even heard some guys crying. You were afraid to look up because you felt your face might be seen from above.”
Two more soldiers were killed on the third pass. On the fourth pass, the Japanese hit the jackpot. Two bombs bull’s-eyed the gassed-up, loaded B-24s parked by the runway. The first went up in a huge explosion, sending bomber parts showering all over the island. Another burst into flames. The fires set off machine gun bullets, which whizzed in all directions, their tracers drawing ribbons in the air. Then the five-hundred-pound bombs on the planes started going off.
Finally, the atoll fell silent. A few of the men, shaking, stood up. As they walked among the wreckage, another B-24 blew up, the explosion accelerated by its 2,300 gallons of fuel, 3,000 pounds of bombs, and cache of .50- caliber ammunition. A copilot wrote that it sounded “like the whole island was blowing up.” With that, it was over.
——
When dawn broke, men began creeping from their hiding places. The man who had run into the ocean waded ashore, having clung to a rock for three hours as the tide rose. With the morning light, the man who had cursed his generals as he had dug his foxhole discovered that those generals had been digging right next to him. Louie and Phil crawled out from beneath the hut. Phil was unscathed; Louie had only a cut on his arm. They joined a procession of exhausted, stunned men.
