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

The boxes had not come from Green Hornet. They were too close to Oahu to have traveled that far, especially as the currents wouldn’t have carried them in that direction. But Corpening’s plane had probably gone down somewhere along the north-south flight lane, the lane over which Smitty was searching. The boxes may well have been the last remains of Corpening’s plane, and the men aboard it.

The boxes weren’t the only sighting that Smitty had that day. In the same region where Green Hornet had crashed, he spotted a shock-yellow object bobbing in the water. He swung his bomber down toward it. It appeared to be a provisions box, like the ones carried on B-24s, but he wasn’t sure. Smitty flew loops around the box for fifteen minutes. There was nothing anywhere near it: no debris, no rafts, no men. Smitty probably believed that he was looking at a piece of Phil’s plane, and if he did, he was probably right. He flew back to Oahu, thinking of his friend Cecy and all the pain she would feel when she learned that her fiance was missing.

On Oahu, the men of the 42nd squadron were losing hope. “Cuppernell, Phillips, Zamperini (the Olympic miler), and Mitchell, lost, on their way to Palmyra,” a ground crewman wrote in his diary. “I find it hard to get used to such a thing. Just the other day I drove them all to Kahuku and around—kidded around with them but now they’re probably dead! The other pilots act as though nothing has happened and speak of sending the other fellow’s clothes home as though it were an everyday occurrence. That’s the way it has to be played because that’s the way it is— it’s an everyday occurrence!”

——

The castaways’ bodies were declining. Other than Mac’s feast on the chocolate bars, none of them had eaten since their early morning breakfast before their last flight. They were intensely thirsty and hungry. After the B-24 sighting, they spent another frigid night, then a long fourth day. There were no planes, no ships, no submarines. Each man drank the last drops of his water.

Sometime on the fifth day, Mac snapped. After having said almost nothing for days, he suddenly began screaming that they were going to die. Wild-eyed and raving, he couldn’t stop shouting. Louie slapped him across the face. Mac abruptly went silent and lay down, appearing strangely contented. Maybe he was comforted by Louie’s assertion of control, protected thereby from the awful possibilities that his imagination hung before him.

Mac had good reason to lose faith. Their water was gone. After the B-24 had passed over, no more planes had come, and the current was carrying them far from the paths trafficked by friendly aircraft. If the search for them hadn’t been called off, the men knew, it soon would be.

That night, before he tried to sleep, Louie prayed. He had prayed only once before in his life, in childhood, when his mother was sick and he had been filled with a rushing fear that he would lose her. That night on the raft, in words composed in his head, never passing his lips, he pleaded for help.

——

As the lost men drifted farther and farther out of reach, their last letters reached their families and friends, who did not yet know that they were missing. It was apparently military policy to wait for initial searches to be conducted before informing loved ones.

On the day after the crash, Phil’s final letter to his father arrived in Virginia. Reverend Phillips—who called his son by his middle name, Allen—had joined the army and was now Chaplain Phillips at Camp Pickett. The last news of Allen had reached him weeks earlier, in newspaper stories about Super Man’s saga over Nauru. Chaplain Phillips had carried clippings about the raid to the offices of a local newspaper, which had run a story on Allen’s heroism. As proud as he was, Chaplain Phillips was also frightened. “I sure hope that is the closest call he ever has,” he wrote to his daughter.

It was probably this fear that had led Chaplain Phillips to write to Allen to ask about the fate of the raft-bound men his crew had found, encircled by sharks, that spring. In his last letter to his father, Allen was reassuring: The men were all safe. As for himself, Allen wrote, “I’m still in the same place I have been … I’ll write again soon. So long for now. —Al.”

On the weekend after the crash, Pete, Virginia, and Louise Zamperini made an impromptu visit to the home of Cuppernell’s parents, who lived in Long Beach. It was a merry meeting, and they all talked of their boys. After the visit, Pete wrote to Louie, asking him to tell Cuppernell that his parents were doing great. Before sealing the envelope, he tucked in a photo of himself, smiling. On the back, he had scribbled an inscription: “Don’t let ’em clip your wings.”

In Saranap, California, Payton Jordan opened the letter that Louie had tossed out the window of Green Hornet as the plane taxied for its last takeoff. “Dear Payton and Marge,” it read. “I am still alive and kickin around, why I don’t know.”

That little turkey’d better take care of himself, Jordan thought.

Phil’s last letter to Cecy reached her in Princeton, Indiana, where she was finishing her first year as a high school teacher. In his letter, Phil had written of the moon over Hawaii and how it reminded him of the last time he was with her. “I never will forget that time I spent there with you. There are a lot of things which I’ll never forget while I was with you, sweet—I’m waiting for the day when we can begin doing things together again as we used to do.” He had closed this letter as he had so many others: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

No more messages would come from the lost men. Pete’s letter to Louie made its way to the postmaster in San Francisco, where the 11th Bomb Group’s mail was sorted. Someone wrote Missing at sea on the outside and dropped it back in the mail to Pete.

——

A week had passed since Green Hornet had vanished. Intensive searching had yielded nothing. Every man on Phil’s crew was officially declared missing, and in Washington, the process of informing family members was set in motion. The men from Daisy Mae were told to return the plane from Palmyra to Oahu. The search had been abandoned. The crew was dejected—they wanted to go on looking. As they flew back to Oahu, they talked of the lost men.

At Kualoa, a second lieutenant named Jack Krey walked into the cottage to perform the grim duty of cataloging the men’s things and sending them to their families. Louie’s room was mostly as it had been when Louie had walked out that Thursday morning: clothes, a footlocker, a diary that ended with a few words about a rescue mission, a pinup of actress Esther Williams on the wall. The note that Louie had left on the locker was gone, as was the liquor. Among Louie’s things, Krey found photographs that Louie had taken inside his plane. In some of them, Louie had forgotten to aim the camera away from the Norden bombsight, so Krey had to confiscate those. The rest of Louie’s belongings were packed into his footlocker and readied to be sent to Torrance.

——

On the evening of Friday, June 4, 1943, Phil’s mother, Kelsey, was in Princeton, Indiana. In the absence of her