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

Funafuti, the morning after. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Funafuti was wrecked. A bomb had struck the church roof, sending the building down onto itself, but thanks to Corporal Ladd, there had been no one inside. There was a crater where Louie and Phil’s tent had been. Another tent lay collapsed, a bomb standing on its nose in the middle of it. Someone tied the bomb to a truck, dragged it to the beach, and turned sharply, sending the bomb skidding into the ocean. Rosynek walked up the runway and found six Japanese bombs lying in a neat row. The bombs were armed by spinning as they fell, but whoever had dropped them had come in too low, not leaving the bombs enough drop space to arm themselves. The men dragged them into the ocean too.

Where the struck B-24s had been, there were deep holes ringed by decapitated coconut trees. One crater, Louie noted in his diary, was thirty-five feet deep and sixty feet across. Bits of bomber were sprinkled everywhere. Landing gear and seats that had seen the sunset from one side of Funafuti greeted the sunrise from the other. All that was left of one bomber was a tail, two wingtips, and two propellers, connected by a black smudge. There was a 1,200-horsepower Pratt and Whitney engine sitting by itself on the runway; the plane that it belonged to was nowhere to be found. Louie came upon a reporter staring into a crater, in tears. Louie walked to him, bracing to see a dead body. Instead, he saw a typewriter, flattened.

The wounded and dead were everywhere. Two mechanics who’d been caught in the open were bruised all over from the concussive force of the explosions. They were so traumatized that they couldn’t talk, and were using their hands to communicate. Men stood in a solemn circle around a couple of seats and twisted metal, all that was left of the ordnance truck. The three men who had sought shelter under it were beyond recognition. A radioman was found dead, a bomb shard in his head. Louie came upon the body of a native, dressed in a loincloth, lying on his back. Half of his head was missing.

A radio operator would say that there had been about fourteen Japanese bombers, but thinking that there had been two sets of three, someone dubbed them “the Stinking Six.” Everyone expected them to return. Phil and Louie joined a group of men digging foxholes with shovels and helmets. When they had a moment, they walked to the beach and sat together for an hour, trying to collect their thoughts.

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Sometime that day, Louie went to the infirmary to help out. Pillsbury was back in his cot. His leg was burning terribly, and he lay with it dangling in the air, dripping blood into a puddle on the floor. Cuppernell sat with him, thanking him for shooting down that Zero.

The doctor was concerned that Pillsbury’s foot wouldn’t stop bleeding. Surgery was necessary, but there was no anesthetic, so Pillsbury was just going to have to do without. With Pillsbury gripping the bed with both hands and Louie lying over his legs, the doctor used pliers to tear tissue from Pillsbury’s foot, then pulled a long strip of hanging skin over his bone stump and sewed it up.

Super Man sat by the airstrip, listing left on its peg-legged landing gear, the shredded tire hanging partway off. The air raid had missed the plane, but it didn’t look like it. Its 594 holes were spread over every part of it: swarms of bullet holes, slashes from shrapnel, four cannon-fire gashes at least as large as a man’s head, the gaping punch hole beside Pillsbury’s turret, and the hole in the rudder, as big as a doorway. The plane looked as if it had flown through barbed wire, its paint scoured off the leading edge of the engines and sides. Journalists and airmen circled it, amazed that it had stayed airborne for five hours with so much damage. Phil was hailed as a miracle worker, and everyone had cause to reassess the supposedly fainthearted B-24. A photographer climbed inside the plane and snapped a picture. Taken in daylight in the dark of the plane’s interior, the image showed shafts of light streaming through the holes, a shower of stars against a black sky.

Louie, looking as battered as his plane, walked to Super Man. He leaned his head into one of the cannon holes and saw the severed right rudder cables, still spliced together as he had left them. He ran his fingers along the tears in Super Man’s skin. The plane had saved him and all but one of his crew. He would think of it as a dear friend.

Louie at Super Man on the day after Nauru. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Louie boarded another plane and began his journey back to Hawaii with Phil, Cuppernell, Mitchell, and the bandaged Glassman. Pillsbury, Lambert, and Douglas were too badly wounded to rejoin the crew. In a few days, they’d be sent to Samoa, where a doctor would take one look at Pillsbury’s leg and announce that it had been “hamburgered.” Lambert would be hospitalized for five months.^* When a general presented him with a Purple Heart, Lambert apparently couldn’t sit up, so the general pinned the medal to his sheet. Douglas’s war was done. Brooks was lying in a grave in Funafuti’s Marine Corps cemetery.

The crew was broken up forever. They would never see Super Man again.

——

An oppressive weight settled on Louie as he flew away from Funafuti. He and the remains of the crew stopped at Canton, then flew on to Palmyra Atoll, where Louie took a hot shower and watched They Died with Their Boots On at the base theater. It was the movie he’d been working on as an extra when the war had begun, a lifetime ago.

Back on Hawaii, he sank into a cold torpor. He was irritable and withdrawn. Phil, too, was off-kilter, drinking a few too many, seeming not himself. With a gutted crew and no plane, the men weren’t called for assignments, so they killed time in Honolulu. When a drunken hothead tried to pick a fight, Phil stared back indifferently, but Louie obliged. The two stomped outside to have it out, and the hothead backed out. Later, drinking beer with friends, Louie couldn’t bring himself to be sociable. He holed up in his room, listening to music. His only other solace was running, slogging through the sand around the Kahuku runway, thinking of the 1944 Olympics, trying to forget Harry Brooks’s plaintive face.

On May 24, Louie, Phil, and the other Super Man veterans were transferred to the 42nd squadron of the 11th Bomb Group. The 42nd would be stationed on the eastern edge of Oahu, on the gorgeous beach at Kualoa. Six new men were brought in to replace the lost Super Man crewmen. Flying with unfamiliar men worried Louie and Phil. “Don’t like the idea a bit,” Louie once wrote in his diary. “Every time they mix up a crew, they have a crack up.” Among the Super Man veterans, the only thing that seemed noteworthy about the new men was that their tail gunner, a sergeant from Cleveland named Francis McNamara, had such an affinity for sweets that he ate practically nothing but dessert. The men called him “Mac.”

For the moment, they had no plane. Liberators destined for the 11th Bomb Group were being flown in from other combat areas, and the first five, peppered with bullet holes, had just arrived. One of them, Green Hornet, looked haggard, its sides splattered with something black, the paint worn off the engines.