Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (14 page)

The risks of combat created grim statistics. In World War I , 52,173 AAF men were kil ed in combat. According to Stay, who would become a squadron commander, airmen trying to fulfil the forty combat missions that made up a Pacific bomber crewman’s tour of duty had a 50 percent chance of being kil ed.*

Along with safe return, injury, and death, airmen faced another possible fate. During the war, thousands of airmen vanished, some during combat missions, some on routine flights. Many had been swal owed by the ocean. Some were alive but lost on the sea or islands. And some had been captured.

Unable to find them, the military declared them missing. If they weren’t found within thirteen months, they were declared dead.

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Most of the time, stricken Pacific bombers came down on water, either by ditching or by crashing. Crewmen who crashed were very unlikely to survive, but ditching offered better odds, depending on the bomber. The B-17 and its soon-to-be-introduced cousin, the gigantic B-29, had wide, low wings that, with the fuselage, formed a relatively flat surface that could surf onto water. Their sturdy bomb bay doors sat flush to the fuselage and tended to hold in a ditching, enabling the plane to float. The first ditched B-29 not only survived, it floated onto an Indian beach, completely intact, the fol owing day. The B-24

was another story. Its wings were narrow and mounted high on the fuselage, and its delicate bomb bay doors protruded slightly from the bottom of the plane. In most B-24 ditchings, the bomb bay doors would catch on the water and tear off and the plane would blow apart. Less than a quarter of ditched B-17s broke up, but a survey of B-24 ditchings found that nearly two-thirds broke up and a quarter of the crewmen died.

For B-24 survivors, quick escape was crucial. Without sealed fuselages, Liberators sank instantly; one airman recal ed watching his ditched B-24 sink so quickly that he could stil see its lights when it was far below the surface. Every airman was given a “Mae West” life vest,* but because some men stole the vests’ carbon dioxide cartridges for use in carbonating drinks, some vests didn’t inflate. Life rafts were deployed manual y: from inside the plane, crewmen could pul a release handle just before ditching or crashing; from outside a floating plane, they could climb on the wings and turn raft-release levers. Once deployed, rafts inflated automatical y.

Survivors had to get to rafts immediately. Airmen would later speak of sharks arriving almost the moment that their planes struck the water. In 1943, navy lieutenant Art Reading, Louie’s USC track teammate, was knocked unconscious as he ditched his two-man plane. As the plane sank, Reading’s navigator, Everett Almond, pul ed Reading out, inflated their Mae Wests, and lashed himself to Reading. As Reading woke, Almond began towing him toward the nearest island, twenty miles away. Sharks soon began circling. One swept in, bit down on Almond’s leg, and dove, dragging both men deep underwater. Then something gave way and the men rose to the surface in a pool of blood. Almond’s leg had apparently been torn off. He gave his Mae West to Reading, then sank away. For the next eighteen hours, Reading floated alone, kicking at the sharks and hacking at them with his binoculars. By the time a search boat found him, his legs were slashed and his jaw broken by the fin of a shark, but thanks to Almond, he was alive. Almond, who had died at twenty-one, was nominated for a posthumous medal for bravery.*

Everyone had heard stories like Reading’s, and everyone had looked from their planes to see sharks roaming below. The fear of sharks was so powerful that most men, faced with the choice of riding a crippled plane to a ditching or bailing out, chose to take their chances in a ditching, even in the B-24. At least that would leave them near the rafts.

The military was dedicated to finding crash and ditching survivors, but in the sprawling Pacific theater, the odds of rescue were extremely daunting.

Many doomed planes sent no distress cal , and often, no one knew a plane was down until it missed its estimated time of arrival, which could be as long as sixteen hours after the crash. If the absence went unnoticed until night, an air search couldn’t be commenced until morning. In the meantime, raft-bound men struggled with injuries and exposure and drifted far from their crash site.

For rescuers, figuring out where to look was tremendously difficult. To keep radio silence, many crews didn’t communicate any position during flights, so al searchers had to go on was the course the plane would have fol owed had everything gone right. But downed planes had often been flying over huge distances, and may have veered hundreds of miles off course. Once a plane was down, currents and wind could carry a raft dozens of miles a day.

Because of this, search areas often extended over thousands of square miles. The longer rafts floated, the farther they drifted, and the worse the odds of rescue became.

The most heartbreaking fact was that, if searchers were lucky enough to fly near a raft, chances were good that they wouldn’t see it. Rafts for smal planes were the size of smal bathtubs; those for large planes were the length of a reclining man. Though search planes general y flew at just one thousand feet, even from that height, a raft could easily be mistaken for a whitecap or a glint of light. On days with low clouds, nothing could be seen at al . Many planes used for rescue searches had high stal speeds, so they had to be flown so fast that crewmen barely had a moment to scan each area before it was gone behind them.

In mid-1944, in response to the dismal results of Pacific rescue searches, the AAF implemented a vastly enhanced rescue system. Life rafts were stocked with radios and better provisions, boats were set out along the paths flown by military planes, and searches were handled by designated rescue squadrons equipped with float planes. These advances improved the odds of rescue, but even after their advent, most downed men were never found.

According to reports made by the Far East Air Force air surgeon, fewer than 30 percent of men whose planes went missing between July 1944 and February 1945 were rescued. Even when the plane’s location was known, only 46 percent of men were saved. In some months, the picture was far worse.

In January 1945, only 21 of 167 downed XXI Bomber Command airmen were rescued—just 13 percent.

As bleak as these odds were late in the war, men who went down before mid-1944 faced far worse. Flying before the rescue system was modernized, they faced a situation in which searches were disorganized, life rafts poorly equipped, and procedures ineffective. Everyone on Phil’s crew knew that should they go down, their chances of rescue were very low.

The improbability of rescue, coupled with the soaring rate of accidental crashes, created a terrible equation. Search planes appear to have been more likely to go down themselves than find the men they were looking for. In one time frame, in the Eastern Air Command, half of the Catalina flying boats attempting rescues crashed while trying to land on the ocean. It seems likely that for every man rescued, several would-be rescuers died, especial y in the first years of the war.

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With every day that passed without rescue, the prospects for raft-bound men worsened dramatical y. Raft provisions lasted a few days at most. Hunger, thirst, and exposure to blistering sun by day and chil by night depleted survivors with frightening rapidity. Some men died in days. Others went insane. In September 1942, a B-17 crashed in the Pacific, stranding nine men on a raft. Within a few days, one had died and the rest had gone mad. Two heard music and baying dogs. One was convinced that a navy plane was pushing the raft from behind. Two scuffled over an imaginary case of beer. Another shouted curses at a sky that he believed was ful of bombers. Seeing a delusory boat, he pitched himself overboard and drowned. On day six, when a plane flew by, the remaining men had to confer to be sure that it was real. When they were rescued on day seven, they were too weak to wave their arms.

There were fates even worse than this. In February 1942, a wooden raft was found drifting near Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean. Upon it was the body of a man, lying in a makeshift coffin that appeared to have been built on the raft. The man’s boilersuit had been in the sun for so long that its blue fabric had been bleached white. A shoe that didn’t belong to the man lay beside him. No one ever determined who he was, or where he had come from.

Of al of the horrors facing downed men, the one outcome that they feared most was capture by the Japanese. The roots of the men’s fear lay in an event that occurred in 1937, in the early months of Japan’s invasion of China. The Japanese military surrounded the city of Nanking, stranding more than half a mil ion civilians and 90,000 Chinese soldiers. The soldiers surrendered and, assured of their safety, submitted to being bound. Japanese officers then issued a written order: ALL PRISONERS OF WAR ARE TO BE EXECUTED.

What fol owed was a six-week frenzy of kil ing that defies articulation. Masses of POWs were beheaded, machine-gunned, bayoneted, and burned alive. The Japanese turned on civilians, engaging in kil ing contests, raping tens of thousands of people, mutilating and crucifying them, and provoking dogs to maul them. Japanese soldiers took pictures of themselves posing alongside hacked-up bodies, severed heads, and women strapped down for rape. The Japanese press ran tal ies of the kil ing contests as if they were basebal scores, praising the heroism of the contestants. Historians estimate that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including the 90,000 POWs, in what became known as the Rape of Nanking.

Every American airman knew about Nanking, and since then, Japan had only reinforced the precedent. Among the men of Louie’s squadron, there was a rumor circulating about the atol of Kwajalein, in the Marshal Islands, a Japanese territory. On Kwajalein, the rumor said, POWs were murdered. The men cal ed it “Execution Island.” It is testament to the reputation of the Japanese that of al the men in one fatal y damaged B-24 fal ing over Japanese forces, only one chose to bail out. The rest were so afraid of capture that they chose to die in the crash.

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For airmen, the risks were impossible to shrug off. The dead weren’t numbers on a page. They were their roommates, their drinking buddies, the crew that had been flying off their wing ten seconds ago. Men didn’t go one by one. A quarter of a barracks was lost at once. There were rarely funerals, for there were rarely bodies. Men were just gone, and that was the end of it.

Airmen avoided the subject of death, but privately, many were tormented by fear. One man in Louie’s squadron had chronic, stress-induced nosebleeds. Another had to be relieved because he froze with terror in the air. Pilot Joe Deasy recal ed a distraught airman who came to him with a question: If a crewman went mad during a mission, would the crew shoot him? The man was so jittery that he accidental y fired his sidearm into the ground as he spoke.

Some men were certain that they’d be kil ed; others lived in denial. For Louie and Phil, there was no avoiding the truth. After only two months and one combat mission, five of their friends were already dead, and they had survived several near misses themselves. Their room and icebox, inherited from friends whose bodies were now in the Pacific, were constant reminders.

Before Louie had left the States, he’d been issued an olive-drab Bible. He tried reading it to cope with his anxiety, but it made no sense to him, and he abandoned it. Instead, he soothed himself by listening to classical music on his phonograph. He often left Phil sprawled on his bed, penning letters to Cecy on an upturned box, as he headed out to run off his worries on the mile-long course that he had measured in the sand around the runway. He also tried to prepare for every contingency. He went to the machine shop, cut a thick metal slab, lugged it to Super Man, and plunked it down in the greenhouse in hopes that it would protect him from ground fire. He took classes on island survival and wound care, and found a course in which an elderly Hawaiian offered tips on fending off sharks. (Open eyes wide and bare teeth, make footbal -style stiff-arm, bop shark in nose.) And like everyone else, Louie and Phil drank. After a few beers, Louie said, it was possible to briefly forget dead friends. Men were given a ration of four beers a week, but everyone scoured the landscape for alternatives. Alcohol was to Louie what acorns are to squirrels; he consumed what he wanted when he found it and hid the rest. In training, he had stashed his hooch in a shaving cream bottle. Once deployed, he graduated to mayonnaise jars and ketchup bottles. He stowed a bottle of a local rotgut cal ed Five Island Gin—nicknamed Five Ulcer Gin—in radioman Harry Brooks’s gas mask holster.

When an MP tapped Brooks’s hip to check for the mask, the bottle broke and left Brooks with a soggy leg. It was probably for the best. Louie noticed that when he drank the stuff, his chest hair spontaneously fel out. He later discovered that Five Island Gin was often used as paint thinner. After that, he stuck to beer.

Phil, like al airmen, had to cope with the possibility of dying, but he had an additional burden. As a pilot, he was keenly conscious that if he made a mistake, eight other men could die. He began carrying two talismans. One was a bracelet Cecy had given him. Believing that it kept him from harm, he wouldn’t go up without it. The other was a silver dol ar that jingled endlessly in his pocket. On the day that he final y ran away with Cecy, he said, he’d use it to tip the bel boy. “When I do get home,” he wrote to her, “I’m going to hide with you where no one wil find us.”

In the early days of 1943, as men died one after another, every man dealt with the losses in a different way. Somewhere along the way, a ritual sprang up. If a man didn’t return, the others would open his footlocker, take out his liquor, and have a drink in his honor. In a war without funerals, it was the best they could do.

* The military didn’t break down nonbattle deaths by cause, but statistics strongly indicate that accidental crashes accounted for most deaths. First, the nonbattle death figure excludes those who died while interned, captured, or MIA. Disease, too, can be excluded as a major cause of death: given that in the entire army, including infantry fighting in malarial jungles, 15,779 personnel died of disease, disease deaths in the air corps had to be a smal percentage of nonbattle deaths. Final y, given that some 15,000 airmen died in accidental crashes stateside, it seems highly likely that the huge number of accidental crashes in the war would have produced similarly high numbers of deaths.