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

Far below, Louie was still ensnared in the plane, writhing in the wires. He looked up and saw a body, drifting passively. The plane coursed down, and the world fled away above. Louie felt his ears pop, and vaguely recollected that at the swimming pool at Redondo Beach, his ears would pop at twenty feet. Darkness enfolded him, and the water pressure bore in with greater and greater intensity. He struggled uselessly. He thought: Hopeless.

He felt a sudden, excruciating bolt of pain in his forehead. There was an oncoming stupor, a fading, as he tore at the wires and clenched his throat against the need to breathe. He had the soft realization that this was the last of everything. He passed out.

He woke in total darkness. He thought: This is death. Then he felt the water still on him, the heavy dropping weight of the plane around him. Inexplicably, the wires were gone, as was the raft. He was floating inside the fuselage, which was bearing him toward the ocean floor, some seventeen hundred feet down. He could see nothing. His Mae West was uninflated, but its buoyancy was pulling him into the ceiling of the plane. The air was gone from his lungs, and he was now gulping reflexively, swallowing salt water. He tasted blood, gasoline, and oil. He was drowning.

Louie flung out his arms, trying to find a way out. His right hand struck something, and his USC ring snagged on it. His hand was caught. He reached toward it with his left hand and felt a long, smooth length of metal. The sensation oriented him: He was at the open right waist window. He swam into the window, put his feet on the frame, and pushed off, wrenching his right hand free and cutting his finger. His back struck the top of the window, and the skin under his shirt scraped off. He kicked clear. The plane sank away.

Louie fumbled for the cords on his Mae West, hoping that no one had poached the carbon dioxide canisters. Luck was with him: The chambers ballooned. He was suddenly light, the vest pulling him urgently upward in a stream of debris.

He burst into dazzling daylight. He gasped in a breath and immediately vomited up the salt water and fuel he had swallowed. He had survived.

Twelve

Downed

THE OCEAN WAS A JUMBLE OF BOMBER REMAINS. THE LIFE-BLOOD of the plane—oil, hydraulic fluid, and some one thousand gallons of fuel—slopped about on the surface. Curling among the bits of plane were threads of blood.

Louie heard a voice. He turned toward it and saw Phil, a few dozen feet away, clinging to what looked like a fuel tank. With him was the tail gunner, Mac. Neither man had a Mae West on. Blood spouted in rhythmic arcs from Phil’s head and washed in sheets down his face. His eyes lolled about in dazed bewilderment. Phil looked at the head bobbing across the debris field and registered that it was Louie. None of the other men had surfaced.

Louie saw one of the life rafts bobbing on the water. It was possible that the raft had been thrown loose by the disintegrating plane, but it was much more likely that the engineer, in the last act of his life, had yanked the raft- release handle just before the crash. The raft had inflated itself and was drifting away rapidly.

Louie knew that he had to get Phil’s bleeding stopped, but if he went to him, the raft would be lost and all of them would perish. He swam for the raft. His clothing and shoes weighed him down, and the current and wind carried the raft away faster than he could swim. As it slipped farther and farther from reach, Louie gave up. He looked back at Phil and Mac, sharing the recognition that their chance was lost. Then he saw a long cord trailing off the raft, snaking not two feet from his face. He snatched the cord, reeled the raft to him, and climbed aboard. A second raft was sliding away. Louie pulled out his raft’s oars, rowed as hard as he could, and just managed to catch the cord and pull the raft to him. He fed the cords through grommets in the rafts and tied them together.

He rowed to Phil and Mac. Realizing that the jagged hunk that he was clinging to might perforate the rafts, Phil pushed it away. Louie pulled Phil aboard, and Mac climbed up under his own power. Both men, like Louie, were filmy with fuel and oil. With all three of them in one raft, it was cramped; the raft was only about six feet long and a little more than two feet wide.

There were two gashes on the left side of Phil’s forehead, by the hairline. Blood was spurting from the wounds and, mixed with seawater, sloshing in the bottom of the raft. Remembering what he had learned in Boy Scouts and his Honolulu first aid course, Louie ran his fingers down Phil’s throat until he felt a pulse, the carotid artery. He showed Mac the spot and told him to press down. He pulled off his muslin top shirt and T-shirt and pulled Phil’s shirts off as well. He asked Mac to do the same. Setting aside the top shirts, Louie dipped Phil’s T-shirt in the water, folded it into a compress, and pressed it to the wounds. He took the other T-shirts and tied them tightly around Phil’s head, then slid Phil into the second raft.

Phil’s mind was woozy. He knew that he’d crashed, that someone had pulled him from the water, that he was in a raft, and that Louie was with him. He felt frightened, though not panicked. As the pilot, he was officially in command, but he grasped his situation well enough to know that he was in no condition to make decisions. He could see that Louie had a nasty cut on his finger, near his USC ring, but was otherwise unhurt and lucid. He asked Louie to take command, and Louie agreed.

“I’m glad it was you, Zamp,” Phil said softly. Then he fell quiet.

From somewhere nearby, there was a small sound, a moan trailing off into a gargle, a mouth trying to form a word, a throat filling with water—then silence. Louie grabbed an oar and circled around as rapidly as he could, searching for the drowning man. Maybe it was Cuppernell, who hadn’t been seen since he was deep underwater. They would never know. Whoever had made the sound had slipped under. He didn’t come up again.

——

With Phil relatively stable, Louie turned his attention to the rafts. Made of two layers of canvas coated in rubber and divided into two air pockets bisected by a bulkhead, each was in good condition. The critical question regarded provisions. The provisions box, which Mac had been holding as the plane went down, was gone, either ripped from his hands during the crash or lost in his escape from the wreckage. In their pockets, the men had only wallets and a few coins. Their watches were still on their wrists, but the hands had stopped when the plane had hit the water. Probably for the first time since Phil had arrived in Oahu, Cecy’s lucky bracelet wasn’t on his wrist, and the silver dollar he’d been keeping for his reunion with her wasn’t in his pocket. Maybe in the hurry to dress for the flight, he had forgotten them, or maybe they’d been lost in the crash.

Pockets in the rafts contained some survival provisions. Whatever was in them was all that they’d have. Louie untied the pocket flaps and looked inside. He found several thick chocolate bars—probably the Hershey Company’s military-issue Ration D bars—divided into segments and packaged in wax-dipped containers to resist gas attack. Designed to be unpalatably bitter so soldiers would eat them only in dire circumstances, they were formulated to be highly caloric and melt-resistant. The package instructions said that each man was to be given two segments a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, to be held on the tongue and allowed to dissolve over thirty minutes.

With the chocolate, Louie found several half-pint tins of water, a brass mirror, a flare gun, sea dye, a set of