Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (20 page)

Phil’s mind was woozy. He knew that he’d crashed, that someone had pul ed him from the water, that he was in a raft, and that Louie was with him. He felt frightened, though not panicked. As the pilot, he was official y in command, but he grasped his situation wel enough to know that he was in no condition to make decisions. He could see that Louie had a nasty cut on his finger, near his USC ring, but was otherwise unhurt and lucid. He asked Louie to take command, and Louie agreed.

“I’m glad it was you, Zamp,” Phil said softly. Then he fel quiet.

From somewhere nearby, there was a smal sound, a moan trailing off into a gargle, a mouth trying to form a word, a throat fil ing with water—then silence. Louie grabbed an oar and circled around as rapidly as he could, searching for the drowning man. Maybe it was Cuppernel , who hadn’t been seen since he was deep underwater. They would never know. Whoever had made the sound had slipped under. He didn’t come up again.

——

With Phil relatively stable, Louie turned his attention to the rafts. Made of two layers of canvas coated in rubber and divided into two air pockets bisected by a bulkhead, each was in good condition. The critical question regarded provisions. The provisions box, which Mac had been holding as the plane went down, was gone, either ripped from his hands during the crash or lost in his escape from the wreckage. In their pockets, the men had only wal ets and a few coins. Their watches were stil on their wrists, but the hands had stopped when the plane had hit the water. Probably for the first time since Phil had arrived in Oahu, Cecy’s lucky bracelet wasn’t on his wrist, and the silver dol ar he’d been keeping for his reunion with her wasn’t in his pocket. Maybe in the hurry to dress for the flight, he had forgotten them, or maybe they’d been lost in the crash.

Pockets in the rafts contained some survival provisions. Whatever was in them was al that they’d have. Louie untied the pocket flaps and looked inside. He found several thick chocolate bars—probably the Hershey Company’s military-issue Ration D bars—divided into segments and packaged in wax-dipped containers to resist gas attack. Designed to be unpalatably bitter so soldiers would eat them only in dire circumstances, they were formulated to be highly caloric and melt-resistant. The package instructions said that each man was to be given two segments a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, to be held on the tongue and al owed to dissolve over thirty minutes.

With the chocolate, Louie found several half-pint tins of water, a brass mirror, a flare gun, sea dye, a set of fishhooks, a spool of fishing line, and two air pumps in canvas cases. There was also a set of pliers with a screwdriver built into the handle. Louie pondered it for a long while, trying to come up with a reason why someone would need a screwdriver or pliers on a raft. Each raft also had a patch kit, to be used if the raft leaked. That was al there was.

The provisions were grossly inadequate. One year later, each B-24 raft would be equipped with a sun tarpaulin for shade, blue on one side, yel ow on the other. For camouflage in enemy waters, the tarpaulin could be spread blue side up; for signaling, the yel ow side could be waved. Each standard 1944

raft would also be equipped with a bailing bucket, a mast and sail, a sea anchor, sun ointment, a first aid kit, puncture plugs, a flashlight, fishing tackle, a jackknife, scissors, a whistle, a compass, and religious pamphlets. None of these items, not even a knife, was in Green Hornet’s rafts. The rafts also had no “Gibson Girl,” a radio transmitter that could send signals over some two hundred miles. Newer planes had been carrying them for nearly a year, and in two months, al planes would be equipped, but Green Hornet hadn’t been furnished with one. And they had no navigation instruments. It had been Mitchel ’s job to strap them to his body, but if he had done so, the instruments had gone to the bottom with him.

Most worrisome was the water situation. A few half-pints wouldn’t last them long. The men were surrounded by water, but they couldn’t drink it. The salt content in seawater is so high that it is considered a poison. When a person drinks seawater, the kidneys must generate urine to flush the salt away, but to do so, they need more water than is contained in the seawater itself, so the body pul s water from its cel s. Bereft of water, the cel s begin to fail.

Paradoxical y, a drink of seawater causes potential y fatal dehydration.

Adrift near the equator with little water and no shelter, Phil, Louie, and Mac would soon be in dire trouble. The rafts hadn’t been equipped with water desalinizing or distil ing materials, nor did they have containers in which to catch rain. Five months earlier, General Hap Arnold had ordered that al life rafts be equipped with the Delano Sunstil , a device that could generate smal amounts of drinking water indefinitely. Delivery had been delayed.

——

From the moment that he had come out of the water, Mac hadn’t said a word. He had somehow escaped the crash without injury. He had done everything that Louie had asked of him, but his face had never lost its glazed, startled expression.

Louie was bent over the raft when Mac suddenly began wailing, “We’re going to die!” Louie reassured him that the squadron would come for them, that they were likely to be found that night, at the latest the next day. Mac continued to shout. Louie, exasperated, threatened to report Mac when they returned.

It had no effect. At his wits’ end, Louie whacked Mac across the cheek with the back of his hand. Mac thumped back and fel silent.

Louie came up with ground rules. Each man would eat one square of chocolate in the morning, one in the evening. Louie al otted one water tin per man, with each man al owed two or three sips a day. Eating and drinking at this rate, they could stretch their supplies for a few days.

With inventory taken and rules established, there was nothing to do but wait. Louie made a deliberate effort to avoid thinking about the men who had died, and had to push away the memory of the gurgling voice in the water. Considering the crash, he was amazed that three men had survived. Al three had been on the plane’s right side; the fact that the plane had struck on its left had probably saved them. What mystified Louie was his escape from the wreckage. If he had passed out from the pressure, and the plane had continued to sink and the pressure to build, why had he woken again? And how had he been loosed from the wires while unconscious?

The men watched the sky. Louie kept his hand on Phil’s head, stanching the bleeding. The last trace of Green Hornet, the shimmer of gas, hydraulic fluid, and oil that had wreathed the rafts since the crash, faded away. In its place, rising from below, came dark blue shapes, gliding in lithe arcs. A neat, sharp form, flat and shining, cut the surface and began tracing circles around the rafts. Another one joined it. The sharks had found them. Fluttering close to their sides were pilot fish, striped black and white.

The sharks, which Louie thought were of the mako and reef species, were so close that the men would only have to extend their hands to touch them.

The smal est were about six feet long; some were double that size, twice the length of the rafts. They bent around the rafts, testing the fabric, dragging their fins along them, but not trying to get at the men on top. They seemed to be waiting for the men to come to them.

The sun sank, and it became sharply cold. The men used their hands to bail a few inches of water into each raft. Once their bodies warmed the water, they felt less chil ed. Though exhausted, they fought the urge to sleep, afraid that a ship or submarine would pass and they’d miss it. Phil’s lower body, under the water, was warm enough, but his upper body was so cold that he shook.

It was absolutely dark and absolutely silent, save for the chattering of Phil’s teeth. The ocean was a flat calm. A rough, rasping tremor ran through the men. The sharks were rubbing their backs along the raft bottoms.

Louie’s arm was stil draped over the side of his raft, his hand resting on Phil’s forehead. Under Louie’s hand, Phil drifted to sleep, attended by the sensation of sharks scraping down the length of his back. In the next raft, Louie, too, fel asleep.

Mac was alone in his wakefulness, his mind spinning with fear. Grasping at an addled resolution, he began to stir.

Thirteen

Missing at Sea

DAISY MAE TOUCHED DOWN ON PALMYRA LATE THAT AFTERNOON. The crew had searched for Corpening’s plane al day but had seen no trace of it. Deasy had dinner, then went to the base theater. He was watching the film when someone told him to report to the base commander immediately. When he got there, he was told that Green Hornet had never come in. “Holy smoke!” he said. He knew that there were two possibilities. One was that Phil ips’s crew had turned back to Hawaii; the other was that they were, as Deasy phrased it, “in the drink.” Someone went to check with Hawaii. Knowing that if Green Hornet was indeed down, they’d stil have to wait until morning to search, Deasy went to bed.

At around midnight, a sailor woke Deasy’s radioman, Herman Scearce, and told him that Phil’s plane was missing. The navy wanted to check Scearce’s radio log to see when the last contact with the plane was. Scearce asked the sailor to wake Deasy, and he, Deasy, and navy officials reviewed the log at the base office. It yielded little information.

At four-thirty A.M., Green Hornet was declared missing. Two planes were now down—Corpening’s and Phil ips’s—taking twenty-one men with them.

The navy assumed command of the rescue effort. Once the sun was up, Daisy Mae would be sent out, along with at least two navy flying boats and at least one other AAF plane. Because Daisy Mae and Green Hornet had flown side by side early in the journey, the searchers knew that Green Hornet had not crashed during the first two hundred miles of the trip. It had apparently gone down somewhere between the point at which Daisy Mae had left it and Palmyra, a stretch of eight hundred miles. The trick was figuring out the direction in which any survivors would be drifting. The ocean around Palmyra was a whorl of currents, lying at the meeting point of the westward-carrying north equatorial current and the eastward-carrying equatorial countercurrent. A few miles of difference in latitude could mean a 180-degree difference in current direction, and no one knew where the plane had hit. The search area would have to be enormous.

Each crew was given search coordinates. From Palmyra, Daisy Mae would fly north. From Oahu, several planes would fly south. Not long after sunup, the planes took off. Everyone knew that the odds of finding the crew were very long, but, said Scearce, “we kept hoping, hoping, hoping …”

——

Louie woke with the sun. Mac was beside him, lying back. Phil lay in his raft, his mind stil fumbling. Louie sat up and ran his eyes over the sky and ocean in search of rescuers. Only the sharks stirred.

Louie decided to divvy up breakfast, a single square of chocolate. He untied the raft pocket and looked in. Al of the chocolate was gone. He looked around the rafts. No chocolate, no wrappers. His gaze paused on Mac. The sergeant looked back at him with wide, guilty eyes.

The realization that Mac had eaten al of the chocolate rol ed hard over Louie. In the brief time that Louie had known Mac, the tail gunner had struck him as a decent, friendly guy, although a bit of a reveler, confident to the point of flippancy. The crash had undone him. Louie knew that they couldn’t survive for long without food, but he quel ed the thought. A rescue search was surely under way. They’d be on Palmyra later today, maybe tomorrow, and the loss of the chocolate wouldn’t matter. Curbing his irritation, Louie told Mac that he was disappointed in him. Understanding that Mac had acted in panic, he reassured him that they’d soon be rescued. Mac said nothing.

The chil of the night gave way to a sweltering day. Louie watched the sky. Phil, weak from blood loss, slept. Mac, a shade short of being a redhead, burned in the sun. He remained in a dreamy, distant place. Al three men were hungry, but they could do nothing about it. The fishhooks and line were useless. There was no bait.

As the men lay in silence, a purring sound began drifting gently between their thoughts. Then al three realized that they were hearing a plane. Searching the sky, they saw a B-25, high up and wel to the east. Flying much too high to be a search plane, it was probably on its way to Palmyra.

Louie lunged for the raft pocket, retrieved the flare gun, and loaded a flare cartridge. He couldn’t stand in the soft-bottomed raft, so he tipped up onto his knees and raised the gun. He squeezed the trigger, the gun bucked in his hand, and the flare, roaring red, streaked up. As it shot overhead, Louie dug out a dye pack and shook it hurriedly into the water, and a pool of vivid greenish yel ow bloomed over the ocean.

With the flare arcing over them, Louie, Phil, and Mac watched the bomber, wil ing the men aboard to see them. Slowly, the flare sputtered out. The bomber kept going, and then it was gone. The circle of color around the rafts faded away.

The sighting left the castaways with one important piece of information. They had known that they were drifting, but without points of reference, they hadn’t known in which direction, or how fast. Since planes on the north-south passage from Hawaii fol owed a flight lane that ran close to Green Hornet’s crash site, the appearance of a B-25 far to the east almost certainly meant that the rafts were drifting west, away from the view of friendly planes. Their chances of rescue were already dimming.

That evening, the search planes turned back for their bases. No one had seen anything. They would be back in the air at first light.

Over the rafts, the daylight died. The men took sips of water, bailed seawater around themselves, and lay down. The sharks came to the rafts again to rub their backs on the undersides.

——

Phil slept for most of the next day. Louie sipped water and thought about food. Mac continued to hunker down, speaking little. For another day, rescue did not come.

It was sometime early the next morning, May 30, when Louie, Mac, and Phil heard a broad, deep rumble of B-24 engines, the sound of home. Then there it was, low and right overhead, a blunt-faced whale of a plane, heading southeast, plowing through the clouds, disappearing and reappearing. It was a search plane. It was so near the rafts that Louie thought he recognized the insignia of their squadron, the 42nd, on the plane’s tail.