Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (15 page)

* When Louie and Phil were deployed, a tour was thirty missions. The number was later adjusted upward.

* It was cal ed a Mae West because it gave the wearer a bountiful bust. In the 1970s, service personnel updated the name, cal ing them Dol y Partons.

* Two published accounts of this incident mistakenly identify Reading as the one who was eaten by the shark. Newspaper reports in which Reading was interviewed confirm that it was Almond.

Nine

Five Hundred and Ninety-four Holes

IN FEBRUARY 1943, DURING A BRIEF VISIT TO THE EQUATORIAL island of Canton, the Super Man crew had its first encounter with exploding sharks. Canton was a seething purgatory in the shape of a pork chop, consisting mostly of coral and scrubby plants huddled close to the ground, as if cringing from the heat.

There was only one tree on the entire island. The surrounding waters were tumbling with sharks, which got trapped in the lagoon at low tide. Bored out of their wits, the local servicemen would tie garbage to long sticks and dangle them over the lagoon. When the sharks snapped at the bait, the men would lob hand grenades into their mouths and watch them blow up.

The Super Man crew had been sent to Canton for two missions over Japanese-occupied Makin and Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands. On the first mission, the lead plane made a wrong turn, and the men found themselves over Howland, the island that Amelia Earhart had been aiming for when she had vanished six years earlier. They noticed gouges in the Howland runway, the cal ing cards of the Japanese. Once they got sorted out and found Makin, Louie couldn’t see his target through the clouds. They made three circles with no luck, so their colonel ordered them to drop the bombs anywhere and get going. Through a gap in the clouds, Louie spotted a row of outhouses and, with giggling glee, wal oped them with three thousand pounds of demolition bombs. To a cheer from the crew, the outhouses blew sky-high.

Two days later, the men flew back to the Gilberts to photograph the islands, bringing a six-man camera crew. They buzzed several islands under fire, snapping photos. With Super Man’s nose bloodied from an antiaircraft round, they turned back for Canton. Three hundred miles from home, engineer Douglas made a discovery. Super Man’s eccentric fuel gauges, which had been jiggling around, had settled very low. Douglas announced that at their current rate, they wouldn’t make Canton.

Phil slowed the propel ers as far as he dared and “leaned” the fuel mixture so that the least possible fuel was used. The crew shoved out almost everything that wasn’t bolted down, and al fifteen men crowded into the front of the plane, in the belief that it would improve air speed. Knowing that their chances of making Canton were slim, they considered Howland, but then recal ed the pitted runway. They discussed ditching near Howland, but that raised the issue of sharks. In the end, they agreed to try for Canton.

Wedged together in the front of the plane, al the men could do was wait. The sun set. Louie stared into the dark below and thought about what it would feel like to crash. The fuel gauges inched lower, and everyone waited to hear the engines sputtering out. At last, with the fuel gauges at absolute bottom, Phil spotted a searchlight craning around the sky and runway lights dotting the dark below. Realizing that he was way too high, Phil dropped the plane so sharply that Pil sbury bobbed into the air and hung there a moment, weightless, before slapping down.

As Super Man touched down on Canton, its tail settled lower than it had been in the air, causing the last drops of fuel to shift back. A moment later, one engine quit.

Two weeks later, the men saw what would have awaited them had they gone down at sea. A B-25 flying off Oahu radioed that it was low on fuel, then went silent. Super Man was scrambled to hunt for it. After an hour and a half of searching, Louie spotted a curl of gray smoke. Two Catalina flying boats were heading toward it. Super Man fol owed.

When they arrived at the crash site, the men were astonished by what they saw. Two life rafts, holding the entire five-man B-25 crew, floated amid plane debris. Around them, the ocean was churning with hundreds of sharks, some of which looked twenty feet long. Knifing agitated circles in the water, the creatures seemed on the verge of overturning the rafts.

The Catalinas reached the men before the sharks could, and the B-25 men treated their rescuers to drinks that night. But the Super Man crew now understood the feelings of the grenade throwers on Canton. On a later flight, when they saw several sharks harassing six whales, they dove low over the water and shot at the sharks. Later, they felt guilty. On future flights, when they saw sharks, they let them be.

——

Nauru was a little afterthought of land, eight square miles of sand sitting alone in the Pacific, about twenty-five hundred miles southwest of Hawaii. It was the kind of place that the world might have left alone, were it not for the fifty thousand tons of high-grade phosphate that lay under the feet of the grass-skirted natives. A central ingredient in fertilizer and munitions, the phosphate had been discovered in 1900, and since then the island had been home to a community of European businessmen and Chinese workers who mined the land. When the war began, Nauru became a priceless prize.

Japan seized Nauru in August 1942, imprisoning the Europeans who had not fled and forcing the natives and the Chinese to mine phosphate and build a runway. They enforced their authority with the sword, beheading people for infractions as trivial as the theft of a pumpkin. When the runway was complete, Japan had a rich source of phosphate and an ideal base for air strikes.

On April 17, upon returning from a run, Louie was cal ed to a briefing. America was going after Nauru in a big way, sending Super Man and twenty-two other B-24s to hit the phosphate works. No one in the squadron saw a bed that night. They left just before midnight, refueled on Canton, and flew to Funafuti, the tiny atol from which they would launch their attack. They found it jostling with journalists brought in by the military to cover the raid.

At a briefing, the crews were told to approach Nauru at eight thousand feet. The altitude gave Louie and the others pause. That week, they had made practice runs from eight to ten thousand feet, and the potential for antiaircraft fire to butcher them at that altitude had alarmed the whole crew. “We only hope,” Louie had written in his diary two days earlier, “we don’t bomb that low in actual combat.” Pil sbury couldn’t stop thinking about something else that the briefing officer had said. There would be ten to twelve Zeros waiting for them. He’d seen a distant Zero at Wake, but had never been engaged by one.

The idea of a single Zero was daunting. The prospect of twelve scared him to death.

Before dawn the next day, the men walked together to Super Man. With them was a lieutenant named Donald Nelson. He wasn’t on the crew, but asked if he could tag along so he could see combat. At five A.M., Super Man was airborne.

——

Doglegging to the west to hide their point of origin, the planes took six and a half hours to reach Nauru. No one spoke. Super Man led the mass of bombers, flying with a plane on each wing. The sun rose, and the planes flew into a clear morning. The Japanese would see them coming.

At about twenty past eleven, navigator Mitchel broke the silence: They’d be over the island in fifteen minutes. In the greenhouse, Louie could just make out an apostrophe of land, flat to the horizon. Below, there was a black shadow in the water. It was an American submarine, ready to pick up survivors if bombers were shot down. Super Man passed over it and slid over Nauru. Louie shivered.

It was eerily silent. The first nine planes, Super Man out front, crossed the island unopposed. The air was very stil , and the plane glided along without a ripple. Phil relinquished control to the Norden bombsight. Super Man’s first target, a knot of planes and structures beside a runway, came into view. Louie

lined up on the gleaming backs of the planes.

And then, shattering. The sky became a fury of color, sound, and motion. Flak hissed up, trailing streamers of smoke over the planes, then burst into black puffs, sparkling with shrapnel. Metal flew everywhere, streaking up from below and raining down from above. With the bombsight in control, Phil could do nothing.

Something struck the bomber on Super Man’s left wing, piloted by Lieutenant John Jacobs. The plane sank as if drowning. At almost the same moment, the plane to Super Man’s right was hit. Just a few feet away, Pil sbury watched the bomber falter, drop, and disappear under Super Man’s wing.

Pil sbury could see the men inside, and his mind briefly registered that al of them were about to die. Super Man was alone.

Louie kept his focus below, trying to aim for the parked planes. As he worked, there was a tremendous bang! and a terrific shudder. Much of Super Man’s right rudder, a chunk the size of a dinner table, blew off. Louie lost the target. As he tried to find it again, a shel bit a wide hole in the bomb bay, and the plane rocked again.

At last, Louie had his aim, and the first bombs dropped, spun down, and struck their targets. Then Super Man passed over a set of red-roofed barracks and an antiaircraft battery, Louie’s second and third targets. Louie lined up and watched the bombs crunch into the buildings and battery. He had one bomb left for a target of opportunity. North of the airfield, he saw a shack and took aim. The bomb fel clear, and Louie yel ed “Bombs away!” and turned the valve to close the bomb bay doors. In the cockpit, the bomb-release light flicked on, and Phil took control of the plane. As he did, behind and below the plane, there was a pulse of white light and an orb of fire. Louie had made a lucky guess and a perfect drop. The shack was a fuel depot, and he had struck it dead center. In the top turret, Pil sbury pivoted backward and watched a vast cloud of smoke bil ow upward.

The air battle over Nauru.

There was no time for celebration: Zeros were suddenly al around. Louie counted nine of them, slashing around the bombers, machine guns blazing.

The boldness and skil of the Japanese pilots astounded the bomber crews. The Zeros flew at the bombers head-on, cannons firing, slicing between planes that were just feet apart. They passed so close that Louie could see the faces of the pilots. Firing furiously, the bomber gunners tried to take out the Zeros. The shooting was al point-blank, and bul ets were flying everywhere. One bomber sustained seventeen hits from friendly planes, or possibly from its own waist guns.

Stricken bombers began slipping behind, and the Zeros pounced. One bomber was hounded by four Zeros and a biplane. Its gunners shot down one Zero before their pilot found a cloud to hide in, scattering his pursuers. Below, Lieutenant Jacobs, Phil’s lost wingman, was stil airborne, his plane laboring along on three engines and no right rudder in a circle of Zeros. His gunners sent one Zero down. Thor Hamrin, pilot of the B-24 Jab in the Ass, saw Jacobs struggling. Circling back and speeding down, he opened up on the Zeros with al of his guns. The Zeros backed off, and Jacobs flew on with Hamrin on his wing.

The first bombers, pursued by Zeros, headed out to sea. With its fighters gone and many of its guns destroyed, the Japanese base was left exposed.

The trailing B-24s swept in, crossing through rivers of smoke to rain bombs on the phosphate plant. In the last plane over the island, a reporter raised his binoculars. He saw “a volcano-like mass of smoke and fire,” a burning Japanese bomber, a few bursts of antiaircraft fire, and not a single moving person.

——

Phil and Cuppernel pushed Super Man ful -throttle for home. The plane was gravely wounded, trying to fly up and over onto its back. It wanted to stal and wouldn’t turn, and the pilots needed al their strength to hold it level. Three Zeros orbited it, spewing streams of bul ets and cannon shel s. The gunners, engulfed in scalding-hot spent cartridges, fired back: Mitchel in the nose, Pil sbury in the top turret, Glassman in the bel y, Lambert in the tail, and Brooks and Douglas standing exposed at the broad, open waist windows. Louie, stil in the greenhouse, saw rounds ripping through the Zeros’ fuselages and wings, but the planes were relentless. Bul ets streaked through Super Man from every direction. In every part of the plane, the sea and sky were visible through gashes in the bomber’s skin. Every moment, the holes multiplied.

Just as Louie turned to leave the greenhouse, he saw a Zero dive straight for Super Man’s nose. Mitchel and the Zero pilot fired simultaneously. Louie and Mitchel felt bul ets cutting the air around them, one passing near Mitchel ’s arm, the other just missing Louie’s face. One round sizzled past and struck the turret’s power line, and the turret went dead. At the same instant, Louie saw the Zero pilot jerk. Mitchel had hit him. For a moment, the Zero continued to speed directly at the nose of Super Man. Then the weight of the stricken pilot on the yoke forced the Zero down, ducking under the bomber. The fighter powered down and splashed into the ocean just short of the beach.