Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (33 page)

At night, when the lights were out and she was alone in her childhood bed, Sylvia often broke down again. When sleep came, it was fitful and haunted. Because she knew nothing of what had happened to her brother, her mind latched onto the image she had seen in the newspaper after Nauru: Louie peering through a hole in the side of Super Man. The image had fixed in her mind the idea of Louie being shot, and this was the point around which her nightmares circled: never a crash, never water, only bul ets bloodying Louie as he sat in his plane. Sylvia was always trying to get to Louie, but she was never able. As bad as the nightmares were, in them, Louie was never kil ed. Even Sylvia’s imagination didn’t al ow for her brother’s death.

In December 1943, the family prepared to celebrate their first Christmas without Louie. The mailman knocked at the door each day to deliver a harvest of cards and letters, most of them offering sympathy. The holiday tree was strung with popcorn and cranberries, and beneath it sat a col ection of gifts for Louie. The gifts would be tucked away in the belief that one day, Louie would come home to open them himself.

Louise bought a little Christmas card depicting a cherub in a red dress blowing a horn as she stood surrounded by lambs. Inside, she wrote a message.

Dear Louis. Where ever you are, I know you want us to think of you as well and safe. May God be with you, + guide you. Love from all. Mother Dad Pete Sylvia and Virginia. Christmas 25-43 .

——

Two months later, after a campaign of saturation bombing, America seized Kwajalein. The island’s dense jungle had been bombed away; in its place were massive craters, burned tree stumps, and churned earth. “The entire island looked as if it had been picked up twenty thousand feet and then dropped,” said one serviceman. In what was left of an administrative building, someone found a stack of documents.

Outside, a serviceman, climbing through the remains of a wooden structure, saw something in the wreckage and dug it out. It was a long splinter of wood. Etched along the slat, in capital letters, was the name LOUIS ZAMPERINI.

On Oahu, Joe Deasy was summoned to Hickam Field. When he arrived, he was handed translations of some of the Japanese documents that had been taken from Kwajalein. He began to read. Two American airmen, the documents said, had been fished from a life raft and brought to Kwajalein. Their names weren’t given, but they were described as a pilot and a bombardier. They’d been in a plane crash—the date was apparently provided—and three men had survived, but one had died on the raft. The other two had drifted for forty-seven days. Included among the papers were interrogation reports and drawings of B-24s made by the captives. The report stated that the men had been beaten, then sent to Japan by boat.

The moment that Deasy read the report, he knew who the men were. Deasy had been long at war, and the experience had ground away his emotions, but this revelation broke through: Phil ips and Zamperini had survived their crash. Deasy’s elation was tailed by a sinking sense of guilt: In their painstaking search of the ocean, they had missed seeing the lost men, but the enemy had not.

“I was happy to have found them,” Deasy recal ed, “but the next thing is, where the hel are they?” If the report of their transport to Japan was correct, it stil didn’t mean they had gotten there alive, or that they had survived whatever lay in store for them there.

The military now knew with a fair amount of certainty that everyone who had gone up on Green Hornet, with the exception of Zamperini and Phil ips, was dead. Apparently because of the sketchiness of the reports and the fact that Louie’s and Phil’s fates were stil unknown, the families of the dead and the two stil missing weren’t notified.

Like the Zamperinis, the Phil ips family had been largely in the dark since Al en had disappeared. Al en’s father was at Camp Pickett in Virginia; his mother, Kelsey, rattled around in her empty house in Princeton, Indiana. After the telegram informing them that Al en was missing, they received a letter from an adjutant from the 42nd squadron, giving details on how Al en had disappeared. The adjutant wrote with a tone of finality, speaking of “your hour of grief,” noting that Al en “wil always be revered by the members of this organization” and offering to “extend myself to you to ease your sorrow.” The next month, a package came to Al en’s father at Camp Pickett. In it were two bronze oak-leaf clusters, awarded to Al en for his valor in the missions of Makin, Tarawa, and Nauru. “Pending final determination of your son’s status,” the cover letter read, “the Oak Leaf Clusters are being sent to you for safe-keeping.” Though the Phil ipses didn’t know it, the medals arrived the same week Al en was captured.

Chaplain Phil ips wanted to send the oak-leaf clusters to his wife but feared losing them in the mail, so he kept them with him in Virginia. He took a picture of them, along with Al en’s service ribbons, wings, insignia, and Air Medal, attached the picture to a maroon piece of felt he’d cut from a lady’s hat, and glued the felt to a walnut plaque. When he got back to Indiana, he planned to attach the actual medals and ribbons to the felt and stand the plaque on the bookcase, under Al en’s picture. “It certainly is swel ,” he wrote to his daughter.

In the absence of information, al the Phil ipses could do was ponder what little they knew. They, like the Zamperinis, refused to conclude that their boy was dead. “I think I have thought of every conceivable angle to what Al en did and I have not dismissed any of them from my mind yet,” Chaplain Phil ips wrote to his daughter in August. “So many things could be true about it al that they build up for me a feeling of confidence that wil not be shaken. Some day we are al going to have that reunion we are hoping and waiting for.”

For Cecy Perry, the news that her fiancé was missing was fol owed by a letter from her old friend Smitty, one of the pilots who had searched for Green Hornet. In his letter, Smitty told Cecy everything that was known about Al en’s disappearance and how dedicated the searchers were to finding him. He didn’t tel her that he had seen what had probably been the provisions box for the lost plane, floating by itself on the ocean. He wrote about having sat with Al en on the night before he disappeared, and how Al en had been thinking of her and hoping to get leave to see her.

Phil’s fiancée, Cecy Perry. Courtesy of Karen Loomis

After Smitty’s letter, no news came. Cecy, desperate for information, felt isolated in Indiana. One of her friends was living in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and Cecy thought that in the capital, she could find out more about Al en. She gave up teaching, traveled east, and moved into her friend’s apartment, which she decorated with pictures of Al en. She got a job with TWA, thinking that through the airline, she might learn something. She spent much of her time asking questions, but learned nothing.

Cecy was a sensible, educated woman, but in her anguish, she did something completely out of character. She went to a fortune-tel er and asked about Al en.

The fortune-tel er told her that Al en wasn’t dead. He was injured but alive. He would be found, she said, before Christmas. Cecy latched onto those words and believed them.

——

By the spring of 1944, the mothers of the Green Hornet crewmen, as wel as other family members, had begun to correspond. In dozens of letters that crisscrossed America, they shared their emotions and bolstered each other’s hopes about “our boys.” Kelsey would later say that she came to love al of them through those letters.

“This year sure has been an awful long year just waiting of some word from them,” wrote Delia Robinson, the sister of Green Hornet gunner Otto Anderson, that June. “We just have to keep on hoping.”

The waiting had taken its tol on crewman Leslie Dean’s mother, Mable—her failing health had sent her to Wichita for weeks of treatment—but she, like the others, had not given up. “We thought surely we would have heard something when the year was up,” she wrote to Louise. “So it seems they are not sure the crew were kil ed, or they would have notified us long before this. So I feel that we can stil have hope of them being alive somewhere.”

Mable Dean wrote those words on June 27, 1944. On that very day, exactly thirteen months after Green Hornet had gone down, messages were typed up at the War Department and sent to the families of the plane’s crewmen. When Louise Zamperini’s message reached her door, she opened it and burst into tears. The military had official y declared Louie, and al the other crewmen, dead.

Kelsey Phil ips was not persuaded. She either learned or guessed that the La Porte Herald-Argus, the newspaper of their former hometown, would publish the news. She contacted the paper and asked them not to print the death notice; her son, she told them, was not gone. The editors honored her request. Russel Al en Phil ips had official y been declared dead, but no obituary appeared.

The feeling in the Zamperini home was the same as in the Phil ipses’. When the initial shock from the death notice faded, al of the Zamperinis realized that it changed nothing. The notice had been generated as a bureaucratic matter of course, a designation made for al missing servicemen after thirteen months had passed. Louie’s official death date was listed as May 28, 1944, a year and a day after his plane had vanished. The notice was just a piece of paper. “None of us believed it. None of us,” Sylvia would say. “Never once. Not underneath, even.”

Inside themselves, the Zamperinis stil felt that persistent little echo of Louie, the sense that he was stil in the world somewhere. Until it was gone, they would go on believing that he was alive.

During family dinners, Pete and his father began drawing up plans to hunt for Louie. When the war was over, they’d rent a boat and sail from island to island until they found him. They’d go on for as long as it took.

Twenty-two

Plots Afoot

THE PLOT BEGAN WITH A QUESTION. IT WAS THE SUMMER of 1944, and Louie and Frank Tinker were walking together in the Ofuna compound. Louie could hear smal planes coming and going from an airstrip somewhere in the distance, and the sound started him thinking. If we could get out of here, he asked Tinker, could you fly a Japanese plane?

“If it has wings,” Tinker replied.

From that brief exchange, an idea took root. Louie, Tinker, and Harris were going to escape.

——

They’d been driven to this point by a long, desperate spring and summer. Every day, the men were slapped, kicked, beaten, humiliated, and driven through forced exercises. There were sudden explosions of violence that left captives spil ed over the ground, hoping they wouldn’t be kil ed. And that spring, the central authorities had cut rations to al prisoners dramatical y. With only about half of the official ration ending up in the captives’ bowls, the men were wasting away. When the Japanese weighed the captives, Bil Harris, over six feet tal , tipped the scale at 120 pounds. He had developed beriberi.

Louie was driven to ever more reckless efforts to find food. He stole an onion and secretly cooked it under a water heater, but divided between several men, it didn’t amount to much. He stole a package of miso paste and, when the guards weren’t looking, shoveled it into his mouth and swal owed it in one gulp, not knowing that miso paste is extremely concentrated, meant to be diluted in water. He was soon doubled over behind the barracks, heaving his guts out. He was so mad for food that he snuck from his cel late at night, broke into the kitchen, and crammed his mouth ful of chestnuts that were to be served to the guards. When he looked up, Shithead was there, watching him. Louie backed away, then sprinted back to his cel . Shithead didn’t beat him for it, but the guard’s appearance was enough to scare Louie out of another go at the kitchen. The best he could do was volunteer to starch the guards’

shirts. The starch was made from rice water pressed through cloth; after Louie pressed the rice, he spent the rest of his time picking flecks of it off the cloth and eating them.

Final y, opportunity knocked. Camp officials asked for a volunteer to work as barber for the guards, offering payment of one rice bal per job. The idea of working around the guards was intimidating, but Louie had to eat. When he came forward, he was given not just electric clippers but a straight razor.

He’d never used one before, and he knew what the guards would do to him if they were nicked. He took the razor to his cel and practiced on himself until he could shave without drawing blood. When he walked out to do his first job, the guard bal ed up his fist at him, then made a demand that, to an American, seemed bizarre. He wanted his forehead shaved, a standard barbering practice in Japan. Al of the guards expected Louie to do this. Louie managed not to cut anyone, and the rice bal s kept him alive.

A notoriously cruel guard cal ed the Weasel began coming to Louie for shaves, but every time, he left without paying. Louie knew what he would risk in evening the score, but he couldn’t resist. While shaving the Weasel’s forehead, he let the blade stray a little low. By the time he was done, al that was left of the Weasel’s bushy eyebrows was a coquettish line. The Weasel stood, left without paying, and entered the guardhouse. A moment later, Louie heard a shout.