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

renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac’s resignation seemed to paralyze him, and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who faded the most. Louie and Phil’s optimism, and Mac’s hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling.

——

Two weeks had passed. The men’s skin was burned, swollen, and cracked. Mysterious white lines striped their fingernails and toenails, and salt sores were marching up their legs, buttocks, and backs. The rafts were decomposing in the sun and salt water, bleeding vivid yellow dye onto the men’s clothing and skin and making everything sticky.

The men’s bodies slowly winnowed. Each day, Louie noticed incremental differences in his weight, and the weight of his raftmates, from the day before: the pants looser, the faces narrower. As they passed the fortnight mark, they began to look grotesque. Their flesh had evaporated. Their cheeks, now bearded, had sunken into concavity. Their bodies were digesting themselves.

They were reaching a stage of their ordeal that for other castaways had been a gruesome turning point. In 1820, after the whaling ship Essex was sunk by an enraged whale, the lifeboat-bound survivors, on the brink of death, resorted to cannibalism. Some sixty years later, after nineteen days adrift, starving survivors of the sunken yacht Mignonette killed and ate a teenaged crewman. Stories of cannibalism among castaways were so common that the British gave a name to the practice of choosing a victim, dubbing it the “custom of the sea.” To well-fed men on land, the idea of cannibalism has always inspired revulsion. To many sailors who have stood on the threshold of death, lost in the agony and mind-altering effects of starvation, it has seemed a reasonable, even inescapable solution.

For Louie, the idea of consuming a human being was revolting and unthinkable. To eat a human being, even if the person had died naturally, would be abhorrent for him. All three men held the same conviction. Cannibalism wouldn’t be considered, then or ever.

The two-week mark was a different kind of turning point for Louie. He began to pray aloud. He had no idea how to speak to God, so he recited snippets of prayers that he’d heard in movies. Phil bowed his head as Louie spoke, offering “Amen” at the end. Mac only listened.

The rafts slid on the current, their tethers snaking behind them. It seemed that they were still drifting west, but without any points of reference, the men weren’t sure. At least they were going somewhere.

——

The second albatross fluttered onto Louie’s head sometime around the fourteenth day. Again Louie slowly raised his hand, snatched it, and killed it. The men sat there looking at it, remembering the stench of the first albatross. When Louie opened it up, they were happily surprised to find that it didn’t smell that bad. Still, no one wanted to eat it. Louie portioned the meat and insisted that everyone eat. All three men forced the meat down. Because Mac seemed to need food the most, they gave him all of the blood.

In the bird’s stomach they found several small fish, which they decided to use as bait, and with them, Louie caught one more fish. He saved some of the bird meat for bait and set the bones out to dry in hopes that they might be useful as fishhooks.

——

Time spun out endlessly. Louie caught a few fish, once parlaying a tiny one, thrown into the raft by a whitecap, into bait that yielded a comparatively fat pilot fish. Rains came intermittently, leaving the men sucking up every drop that fell into their rain catchers. Louie and Phil took turns leading prayers each night. Mac remained in his own world.

The men grew thinner. Phil was gradually regaining his strength after his initial state of concussed exhaustion; Mac’s body grew weaker, following his broken spirit. Then the rains stopped and the water tins dried up. They reached day twenty-one. They caught a fish and had a little celebration for passing what they thought was Rickenbacker’s mark.

For some time, Louie had noticed a stomach-turning reek wafting to and fro over them. It was coming from Phil’s head. The blood on his T-shirt bandage was rotting, and cakes of it were chipping off and falling into the raft. Phil couldn’t smell it, but Louie couldn’t bear it. Louie untied the T-shirt and gently unwrapped it. Beneath a thick cake of dried blood, the wounds had knit neatly. The bleeding didn’t resume. The T-shirt could go.

A few days later, Louie saw something bizarre. The edge of the sea, flush to the horizon, was peeling upward. A vast black rim formed, rose up, and began speeding toward them with a tumbling motion. Louie shouted a warning and the other two men wheeled around toward it. They dropped down, getting their weight as low as possible so they wouldn’t be flipped over. As the wave closed in, they braced themselves.

Just as the wave reached them, they realized it wasn’t a wave at all. It was a giant school of dolphins, swimming with astonishing speed. The dolphins rushed at the rafts and were soon muscling all around them. Looking into the water, Phil saw small fish, thousands of them, seeming to fill the ocean. The dolphins were chasing them. The men thrust their arms into the water and tried to grab some, but the fish slipped through their fingers. If they had had a net, they could have whisked it through the water and filled the rafts. But with only their fingers, they couldn’t snare even one.

Louie was out of bait. Other than the sharks, the only fish that ventured near the rafts were pilot fish, which hugged the sides of the sharks as they circled. They were within easy reach, only when Louie tried to grab them, they squirted away. The sharks had stolen every hook small enough to fit in the mouths of pilot fish, so Louie tried albatross bones, but the fish spat them out.

Looking at the fish line that he had left, he got an idea. He cut off small portions of line, tied them to the large fishhooks, and then tied three hooks to the fingers of one hand, one on his pinkie, one on his middle finger, one on his thumb, orienting them as if they were claws. He held his hand over the water’s surface and waited.

A shark, attended by a pilot fish, swam by. Once its head had passed, Louie sank his hand into the water. When the unsuspecting pilot fish moved under his hand, he snapped his fingers shut around its back. The hooks dug in. Louie yanked the fish out of the water, jubilant.

Sometime that week, a small tern landed on the wall of the raft, right between the men. It was closest to Phil, and without speaking, the men indicated to each other that he’d catch it. Phil clapped down on the bird. It was tiny, and offered little meat, but not long after, another tern settled on the raft. This time, Mac caught it. Louie was so famished that he went at it with his teeth, ripping the feathers loose and spitting them out in whuffs. Almost immediately, he felt a crawling sensation on his chin. The tern had been covered in lice, which were now hopping over his face.

Something about the tickle of lice on his skin rattled Louie more than anything he had yet encountered. He began scratching and rubbing at his face, but he couldn’t get at the lice, which had burrowed into his beard and