Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini (11 page)

I prepared to dump all six of my 500-pound bombs when I spotted a “necessary” military installation at one end of Tarawa. Just offshore six thatched-roof outhouses on stilts graced the lagoon. The entire crew was behind me: these structures must be laid to waste. As a master bombardier, I coolly commanded the skills of my trade. I peered through my Norden bombsight, lined up the crosshairs, and let go. The result was a direct hit of memorable and messy proportions.

Flush with victory, we made a beeline for Canton. But the engineer had some bad news: we might not make it back. Howland Island, the destination that Amelia Earhart had failed to reach, was nearby, so we had two choices. Plan A: try for a night water landing just off Howland. Plan B: jettison some heavy gear, move the crew forward, throttle back, and take our chances. B-24s were totally vulnerable and not at all graceful during water landings, even on a smooth sea. If we put down and anyone was injured or died, the blood in the water would attract the sharks.

We opted for plan B and trusted our navigator to find Canton, a mere speck in the sea. When we spotted it through the clouds and landed, sputtering, the last of our fuel spent, everyone had smiles and congratulations for Mitchell, who’d gotten us home.

That evening the P-39 marine pilots based on Canton treated us to beer at the “officers’ club”—a Quonset hut covered with coral. Scrawled on the front door—and in all the toilet stalls—was the signature of a character legendary throughout the Pacific theater:
KILROY WAS HERE
.

Luckily, even in the face of incredible and persistent danger, we were, too.

The only available ship was a “musher” called the
Green Hornet
. A musher flies with her tail down and can’t get off the ground with a bomb load. Our engineers had checked it from nose to stern more than once and promised it was exactly like all our other B-24s: it
should
fly right; it just didn’t. No matter. We’d stripped many of its parts to use on other planes, so we mostly flew the
Green Hornet
on the cabbage run, meaning we’d take it to the main island of Hawaii to pick up lettuce, fresh vegetables, steaks, and stuff like that. Very occasionally it went on search missions.

Our crew of ten, after the Nauru raid injuries, was Russell A. Phillips, Otto Anderson, Leslie Deane, Frank Glassman, Jay Hansen, Francis McNamara, Michael Walsh, C. H. Cupernell, Robert Mitchell, and me. We were joined by an officer who just wanted to go
to Palmyra, where we’d land and refuel after the search. At 18:30 we and another B-24 also on the mission took off.

I figured we’d be back for dinner. Rescue missions were nothing new. We’d recently saved a B-25 crew after they’d sputtered out of gas and ditched in the ocean a couple hundred miles from Oahu. I spotted them with the Zeiss binoculars I’d bought at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. From the sky, bobbing rafts look like mounds of water to the naked eye. I saw not only the rafts but smoke from a flare. We flew closer, radioed in, and circled for an hour until the PBY—a navy flying boat—picked up the crew.

For some reason during the flight out, our copilot, Cupernell, wanted to change seats with Phil, who I’m sure didn’t give it a second thought because sometimes he’d also let me fly the plane so I could log hours and be used as a third pilot in case of emergency, or to cover for him and Cupernell after they’d had a hard night in Honolulu and no sleep. I didn’t party much because I wanted to stay in top shape. A beer or two, that was my style. On the other hand, they’d stagger in after hours and, once aloft, take turns curling up on the radio deck for a nap.

WE ARRIVED IN
the downed plane’s vicinity to find cloud cover at one thousand feet. Phil dipped to eight hundred to get a better look and called me to the cockpit while we circled so I could scan the sea for wreckage or a life raft.

Suddenly the RPMs on our number one (left outboard) motor dropped radically. It shook violently, sputtered, and died. Phil called the engineer forward to feather the props. Blades normally face nearly flat to the wind so they can cut into the air and pull the plane forward. However, when a motor stops, those surfaces are like a wall and everything slows. Feathering means to turn the blades edge-on to the wind. Think of it this way: you’re in a car doing seventy miles per hour. Put your hand out the window, palm forward, and the wind will blow it back. Turn the edge of your hand to the wind, and it slices right through. Feathering is possible because we had variable-pitch propellers, allowing a different blade angle for takeoff, cruising, or when the motor stopped.

After the Nauru raid a new engineer had joined our crew, a green kid just over from the States. He was so eager to help that he rushed into the cockpit and feathered the
left inboard
(or number-two) motor by mistake—and it died. That old musher could barely fly with four motors and no bombs; suddenly we had two motors out,
both on the same side
.

At first we seemed to glide, then the plane shuddered and we dropped like a rock. Remember that we were at eight hundred feet, flying beneath the clouds. Even at one thousand feet you don’t have much chance to do anything in an emergency, particularly restart a motor. Before you know it you hit the ground—or in our case the water—and all that’s left is an oil-slick fire and debris. Still, I would gladly have taken the extra two hundred feet and a few more seconds to try and save ourselves.

We had neither.

When props go out, most pilots immediately compensate by increasing the power to the engines that still work. All our power was on the right wing, and to boost thrust would force the plane sharply to the left and push it in a circle, causing the dead side to drop while the live side climbed. Flyers in similar situations had been killing themselves like that for years until a test pilot named Tony Lavier figured out that if you lose power completely on one side, you had to
decrease
power to the good engines. Then you level out. It seems unnatural, but it works.

Phil could throttle back to keep the plane from yawing to the left, but the
Green Hornet
itself was in such miserable shape that the maneuver would simply make us drop faster because we had no lift.

Caught between two bad options, Phil had no right choice.

He increased power hoping that if we stayed aloft even a little longer he might regain control, restart the motor, or attempt a water landing. It was no use. The
Green Hornet
angled to the left and keeled over.

THE MOST FRIGHTENING
experience in life is going down in a plane. Those moments when you fall through the air, waiting for the inevitable impact, are like riding a roller coaster—with one important
difference. On a roller coaster you close your eyes, hold on despite the sheer horror, and come through. In a plummeting plane there’s only sheer horror, and the idea of your very imminent death is incomprehensible. Of course, only if you’ve lived through a crash can you tell anyone about the abject terror. You think, This is it. It’s over. I’m going to die. You know with 100 percent of your being that the end is unavoidable. Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It’s not so strange. Where there’s still life, there’s still hope.

What happens is up to God.

Phil looked at me. I knew without his uttering a sound that we were probably dead. Still, his lips moved. Maybe he shouted, maybe he whispered, but I heard him loud and clear. I’ll never forget his words: “Get to your stations and prepare to crash.”

I RUSHED TO
my position in the waist section, at the right window, next to the machine-gun tripod. I already wore my life jacket; I knew the drill because we’d practiced it again and again on the ground.

In every water emergency a lot depends on how you land—if you land. A B-17 can make a smooth touchdown; if you dump the fuel beforehand, it will float for about thirty minutes, enough time to get all the life rafts and supplies off the plane. B-25s can also handle the water, but B-24s usually fell apart no matter how good the landing. The retractable bomb-bay doors were about a quarter inch from being flush with the fuselage. Hit the drink at two hundred miles an hour, catch the edge, and water rushes in, tearing the plane to bits—and that’s if you come in easy.

In our case, none of that mattered.

All B-24s pack two life rafts in fuselage compartments above the wings, mounted against spring-loaded plates. The outside covers latch with a pin, with a weight on the end. When the plane hits water, the impact dislodges the pin, the doors burst open, and the spring plate throws the rafts out about a hundred feet, over each wing, into the ocean. That pulls a trigger mechanism and the rafts inflate while still
attached to the plane by parachute cord. When the plane sinks below a certain depth, the cords pull free of the plane.

A third life raft was packed in the bomb bay next to my position. My job was to get it out of the plane after a water landing. A big, waterproofed metal box of rations sat nearby, with enough fortified chocolate, cans of water, and other food supplies to last ten guys for two weeks. The engineer or tail gunner’s job was to grab the survival box.

My stomach tightened and lurched as we tumbled and turned. I crouched low and braced myself against the soft round raft. In fact, I’m sure I hugged it.

The nose and the left wing hit the water simultaneously. We did half a cartwheel.

I expected my life to flash before my eyes. It didn’t.

Then the plane blew apart.

FROM PHIL’S WARNING
to impact took less than two minutes, then the world was on fire. Had I been in a boat nearby, watching the
Green Hornet
explode into a ball of flame, it might have sounded like melting, twisting metal and fireworks trying to harmonize. Surrounded by chaos, I heard nothing but my fear.

The crewman to my left died instantly. The ration box flew by my head and disappeared. The crash tossed me forward and down, forcing me under the tripod, which was bolted to the deck plates. The raft jammed beneath my body and wedged me in. The double tail snapped off, and the wires connecting the elevators and trim tabs to the cockpit controls sheared and whipped around the tripod like tightly coiled springs, further caging me. It took only seconds, enough time to realize that I was still alive, trapped, and the plane was sinking.

No matter how I struggled, I just couldn’t get loose from the tripod and the sharp, springy wires that wound around me like metal spaghetti. I looked out the waist window and saw two mangled bodies drift by. I sucked in a huge lungful of air and kept my eyes open as we went under. No way I’d give up. I’d done free diving in Hawaii, and because I ran I could hold my breath longer than most people—over three minutes. I used to practice by sitting on the bottom of a public
pool, hanging on to the drain grate, until my friends thought I’d drowned and dove in to save me.

When my ears popped I knew I was about twenty feet beneath the surface. As I sank deeper I felt a pain in my forehead like I’d never experienced, much less ever imagined, as if someone had hit me with a huge sledgehammer. My sinuses seemed about to burst; the headache was unbearable. This is hopeless, I thought. What can I do? Nothing. I can’t budge the wires. I’m sinking. My air is about gone. I have to accept it.

I’m going to die.

I lost consciousness and everything faded to black.

AND THEN FOR
some unexplained reason my eyes opened.

Was I dreaming? Maybe I’m dead, I thought. Maybe this is the afterlife.

I figured out pretty quickly that the afterlife—at least the one I’d counted on—was probably not a wet, cold, and gloomy place in which my lungs screamed for air. I was still underwater, some seventy feet down, but I found myself completely free of my death trap and floating upward. My arms reached out blindly, hands searching, and then I felt a tug. My USC ring had snagged on the right waist window. I immediately grabbed the frame with my left hand, and although I thought my lungs would burst, I arched my back and squeezed through the opening, scraping the skin off my back.

I knew I had to inflate my Mae West—my life jacket. I could do it either of two ways. In the plane we blew them up by mouth. I couldn’t do that underwater with no air. The other way was the CO
₂
cartridge packed into each vest. Sounds easy enough except that most vests didn’t have cartridges because the men always swiped them—sometimes even from other airplanes—so they could make soda water to go with their Scotch.

Luckily I still had a functioning cartridge and the jacket inflated. Then I rose toward the light for what seemed like forever, swallowing seawater mixed with gasoline, oil, hydraulic fluid, blood. When I broke the surface I gasped for air and threw up. The whole thing had taken maybe fifteen seconds; I had operated on pure instinct.
All I could see was fire on the water. As I caught my breath it hit me that I was alone, floating in the vast Pacific, hundreds of miles from land, the ocean floor far below and my despair perhaps even deeper.

SUDDENLY I HEARD
a cry for help. Through a break in the smoke to my left I saw an auxiliary gas tank float by, twenty feet away, with Phil and Francis P. McNamara, the tail gunner, clinging to the side. Their eyes were wild and strange. Blood gushed from a deep triangular gash on Phil’s head.

I looked around for any of the remaining eight crewmen but saw no one. We three were alone with the bobbing debris and our knowledge that with blood in the water the sharks would soon arrive en masse. That scared the heck out of me, especially when I saw two life rafts that had been automatically ejected from the plane drifting away from the wreckage on the current.

I wanted to help Phil and Mac, but to lose our only means of survival would be crazy. The guys could wait. I made for the nearest raft, but with clothes and shoes on I couldn’t keep up. It was a pointless chase; the rafts were moving farther away. I’d just about given up when I spotted the last three feet of the hundred-foot nylon parachute cord attached to the raft. I managed to grab the rope and reel in our new home.

I climbed in, unhooked the oars, and rowed back to the bomb-bay tank hoping Phil hadn’t passed out or bled to death. I helped him and Mac into the raft and immediately put pressure on Phil’s carotid artery. From my survival training I knew about the little dip in our jawbones and how to find the artery there. The bleeding slowed.

“Mac, take off your T-shirt and soak it in the water,” I ordered. “Now hold it on Phil’s head and press.” I took my hand off the artery, removed my T-shirt, tore it into a long strip, and wrapped it around Mac’s now bloody T-shirt and Phil’s head, to hold the compress tightly in place.

“Boy, Zamp, I’m glad it was you,” Phil said softly. That sent an immediate and affirming message. Phil still believed I had most of the answers.
The whole time I’d kept my eye on the second raft. We needed it not only for the emergency supplies and tools but as a place Phil could lie quietly. I shoved the oars into the ocean and gave chase. Rowing was painful, an absurd struggle with three men aboard. Fortunately we were going with the current and I finally got close enough to grab the parachute cord.