Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (17 page)

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For a moment, the landing was perfect. The wheels kissed the runway so softly that Louie stayed on his feet. Then came a violent gouging sensation.

What they had feared had happened: The left tire was flat. The plane caught hard, veered left, and careened toward two parked bombers. Cuppernel , surely more out of habit than hope, stomped on the right brake. There was just enough hydraulic fluid left to save them. Super Man spun in a circle and lurched to a stop just clear of the other bombers. Louie was stil in the back, gripping the parachute cords. He had not had to use them.*

Douglas popped open the top hatch, dragged himself onto the roof, raised his injured arm over his head, and crossed it with his other arm, the signal that there were wounded men inside. Louie jumped down from the bomb bay and gave the same signal. There was a stampede across the airfield, and in seconds the plane was swarming with marines. Louie stood back and ran his eyes over the body of his ruined plane. Later, ground crewmen would count the holes in Super Man, marking each one with chalk to be sure that they didn’t count any twice. There were 594 holes. Al of the Nauru bombers had made it back, every one of them shot up, but none so badly as this.

Brooks was laid on a stretcher, placed on a jeep, and driven to a rudimentary, one-room infirmary. He was bleeding inside his skul .

They carried Pil sbury to a barracks to await treatment. He was lying there about an hour later when the doctor came in and asked him if he knew Harry Brooks. Pil sbury said yes.

“He didn’t make it,” the doctor said.

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Technical Sergeant Harold Brooks died one week before his twenty-third birthday. It took more than a week for word to reach his widowed mother, Edna, at 511½ Western Avenue in Clarksvil e, Michigan. Across town on Harley Road, the news reached his fiancée, Jeannette Burtscher. She learned that he was gone nine days before the wedding date that they had set before he left for the war.

Harry Brooks.

* Eight months later, Charlie Pratte became the first pilot to stop a B-24 with parachutes. His bomber, Belle of Texas , had been shot up over the Marshal Islands and had no brakes, leaving Pratte to attempt a landing on a runway far too short for bombers. To make matters worse, Pratte had eaten bad eggs and was vomiting as he flew. Touching down at a scorching 140 miles per hour, Pratte ordered his men to deploy three parachutes.

With the parachutes open behind it, the plane shot off the end of the runway and onto the beach before stopping just short of the ocean. Pratte and his crew were given special commendations.

Ten

The Stinking Six

AS EVENING FELL OVER FUNAFUTI, THE GROUND CREWS nursed the damaged bombers. When the holes were patched and mechanical problems repaired, the planes were fueled up and loaded with six five-hundred-pound bombs each, ready for a strike on Tarawa the next day. Super Man, stil standing where it had spun to a halt, its entire length honeycombed, wouldn’t join them. It would probably never fly again.

Worn out from the mission and hours spent helping at the infirmary, Louie walked to a grove of coconut trees where there were tents that served as barracks. He found his tent and flopped down on a cot, near Phil. The journalists were in a tent next to theirs. At the infirmary, Stanley Pil sbury lay with his bleeding leg hanging off his cot. Nearby, the other wounded Super Man crewmen tried to sleep. Blackout descended, and a hush fel .

At about three in the morning, Louie woke to a forlorn droning, rising and fal ing. It was a smal plane, crossing back and forth overhead. Thinking that it was a crew lost in the clouds, Louie lay there listening, hoping they’d find home. Eventual y, the sound faded away.

Before Louie could fal back asleep, he heard the growl of heavy aircraft engines. Then, from the north end of the atol , came a BOOM! A siren began sounding, and there was distant gunfire. Then a marine ran past the airmen’s tents, screaming, “Air raid! Air raid!” The droning overhead hadn’t been a lost American crew. It had probably been a scout plane, leading Japanese bombers. Funafuti was under attack.

The airmen and journalists, Louie and Phil among them, jammed their feet into their boots, bolted from the tents, and stopped, some shouting, others spinning in panic. They couldn’t see any bomb shelters. From down the atol , the explosions were coming in rapid succession, each one louder and closer. The ground shook.

“I looked around and said, ‘Holy hel ! Where are we going to go?’ ” remembered pilot Joe Deasy. The best shelter he could find was a shal ow pit dug around a coconut sapling, and he plowed into it, along with most of the men near him. Herman Scearce, Deasy’s radioman, leapt into a trench next to an ordnance truck, joining five of his crewmates. Pilot Jesse Stay jumped into another hole nearby. Three men crawled under the ordnance truck; another flung himself into a garbage pit. One man ran right off the end of the atol , splashing into the ocean even though he didn’t know how to swim. Some men, finding nowhere to go, dropped to their knees to claw foxholes in the sand with their helmets. As he dug in the dark with the bombs coming, one man noisily cursed the sonofabitch generals who had left the atol without shelters.

Dozens of natives crowded into a large missionary church that stood in a clearing. Realizing that the white church would stand out bril iantly on the dark atol , a marine named Fonnie Black Ladd ran in and yel ed at the natives to get out. When they wouldn’t move, he drew his sidearm. They scattered.

In the infirmary, Stanley Pil sbury lay in startled confusion. One moment he’d been sleeping, and the next, the atol was rocking with explosions, a siren was howling, and people were sprinting by, dragging patients onto stretchers and rushing them out. Then the room was empty, and Pil sbury was alone.

He had apparently been forgotten. He sat up, frantic. He couldn’t stand.

Louie and Phil ran through the coconut grove, searching for anything that might serve as shelter. The bombs were overtaking them, making a sound that one man likened to the footfal s of a giant: Boom … boom … BOOM … BOOM! At last, Louie and Phil spotted a native hut built on flood stilts. They dove under it, landing in a heap of more than two dozen men. The bombs were now so close that the men could hear them spinning in the air; Deasy remembered the sound as a whirr, Scearce as a piercing whistle.

An instant later, everything was scalding whiteness and splintering noise. The ground heaved, and the air whooshed around, carrying an acrid smel .

Trees blew apart. A bomb struck the tent in which Louie and Phil had been sleeping a minute before. Another burst beside a pile of men in a ditch, and something speared into the back of the man on top. He said, “This feels like it, boys,” and passed out. A bomb hit the ordnance truck, sending it into the air in thousands of pieces. The remains of the truck and the men under it skimmed past Jesse Stay’s head. A nose gunner heard a singing sound as the parts of the truck flew by him. It was apparently this truck that landed on one of the tents, where two airmen were stil on their cots. Another bomb tumbled into Scearce’s trench, plopping right on top of a tail gunner. It didn’t go off, but sat there hissing. The gunner shouted, “Jesus!” It took them a moment to realize that what they’d thought was a bomb was actual y a fire extinguisher. Yards away, Louie and Phil huddled. The hut shook, but stil stood.

The bombs moved down the atol . Each report sounded farther away, and then the explosions stopped. A few men climbed from their shelters to help the wounded and douse fires. Louie and the others stayed where they were, knowing that the bombers would be back. Matches were struck and cigarettes were pinched in trembling fingers. If we’re hit, one man grumbled, there’l be nothing left of us but gravy. Far away, the bombers turned. The booming began again.

Someone running by the infirmary saw Pil sbury, hurried in, threw him on a stretcher, and dragged him into a tiny cement building where the other wounded had been taken. The building was so crowded that men had been laid on shelves. It was pitch-dark, and doctors were shuffling around, peering at their patients by flashlight. Pil sbury lay panting in the darkness, listening to the bombs coming, feeling claustrophobic, his mind flashing with images of bombs entombing them. With men stacked everywhere and no one speaking, he thought of a morgue. His leg hurt. He began groaning, and the doctor felt his way to him and gave him morphine. The booming was louder, louder, and then it was over them again, tremendous crashing. The ceiling shuddered, and cement dust sifted down.

Outside, it was hel on earth. Men moaned and screamed, one cal ing for his mother. A pilot thought the voices sounded “like animals crying.” Men’s eardrums burst. A man died of a heart attack. Another man’s arm was severed. Others sobbed, prayed, and lost control of their bowels. “I wasn’t only scared, I was terrified,” one airman would write to his parents. “I thought I was scared in the air, but I wasn’t. [It was] the first time in my life I saw how close death could come.” Phil felt the same; never, even during the fight over Nauru, had he known such terror. Louie crouched beside him. As he had run through the coconut grove, he had moved only on instinct and roaring adrenaline, feeling no emotion. Now, as explosions went off around him, fear seized him.

Staff Sergeant Frank Rosynek huddled in a coral trench, wearing nothing but a helmet, untied shoes, and boxer shorts. The tonnage coming down, he later wrote, “seemed like a railroad carload. The bombs sounded like someone pushing a piano down a long ramp before they hit and exploded. Big palm trees were shattered and splintered al around us; the ground would rise up in the air when a bomb exploded and there was this terrific flash of super bright light that it made. The concussion blew pieces of coral into our hole and we blindly groped for them and tossed them out as quick as we could find them. At intervals between a bomb fal ing it sounded like church: voices from nearby slit trenches al chanting the Lord’s prayer together—over and over again. Louder when the bombs hit closer. I thought I even heard some guys crying. You were afraid to look up because you felt your face might be seen from above.”

Two more soldiers were kil ed on the third pass. On the fourth pass, the Japanese hit the jackpot. Two bombs bul ’s-eyed the gassed-up, loaded B-24s parked by the runway. The first went up in a huge explosion, sending bomber parts showering al over the island. Another burst into flames. The fires set off machine gun bul ets, which whizzed in al directions, their tracers drawing ribbons in the air. Then the five-hundred-pound bombs on the planes started going off.

Final y, the atol fel silent. A few of the men, shaking, stood up. As they walked among the wreckage, another B-24 blew up, the explosion accelerated

by its 2,300 gal ons of fuel, 3,000 pounds of bombs, and cache of .50-caliber ammunition. A copilot wrote that it sounded “like the whole island was blowing up.” With that, it was over.

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When dawn broke, men began creeping from their hiding places. The man who had run into the ocean waded ashore, having clung to a rock for three hours as the tide rose. With the morning light, the man who had cursed his generals as he had dug his foxhole discovered that those generals had been digging right next to him. Louie and Phil crawled out from beneath the hut. Phil was unscathed; Louie had only a cut on his arm. They joined a procession of exhausted, stunned men.

Funafuti, the morning after. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Funafuti was wrecked. A bomb had struck the church roof, sending the building down onto itself, but thanks to Corporal Ladd, there had been no one inside. There was a crater where Louie and Phil’s tent had been. Another tent lay col apsed, a bomb standing on its nose in the middle of it. Someone tied the bomb to a truck, dragged it to the beach, and turned sharply, sending the bomb skidding into the ocean. Rosynek walked up the runway and found six Japanese bombs lying in a neat row. The bombs were armed by spinning as they fel , but whoever had dropped them had come in too low, not leaving the bombs enough drop space to arm themselves. The men dragged them into the ocean too.