Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini (15 page)

To get to the rubber itself, I had to cut a cross in the canvas cover with the mirror edge. (No knife, remember?) I’d peel back the canvas to reveal the hole, then rough up the rubber around the puncture. The sandpaper didn’t work; water in the kit had long ago melted off the grit. Emery cloth, waterproof, is a better choice. The idiot who made the raft should have thought of that. I had to use the mirror teeth to scrape the rubber before I applied glue and a patch. Sometimes a whitecap spoiled the glue and I’d have to start over, but when it worked the patch held, even though the rubber bulged through the canvas.

If patching was all we needed, it might have been easy, but everyone had to pump to keep the raft afloat. During my turn I grew so tired that I put the handle on my chest and pulled the pump toward me. We’d take five-minute shifts, going around in a circle; for the first few days we pumped around the clock. It was brutal. Mac could only do it maybe five times; Phil a bit more. I had to do fifty or a hundred pumps to make up for them.

I repaired holes on the top first, and we pumped a little less. Then
I patched the bottom. The dilemma was figuring out how to do it with three men still in the raft. I decided to let the air out of one raft tube while we sat precariously on the other half. Then I’d pull the bottom of the flat half face-up to patch it. Phil would hold up that section, and Mac’s job was to ward off the sharks with the oars to keep them from biting us on the butt.

I also cannibalized the second raft. With pliers, I tore the canvas from the galvanized rubber and used it for protection against the sun during the day and and as a blanket at night.

My kingdom for a knife.

THE SALLY BOMBER
attack had one good result. For twenty-seven days I’d hoped we’d be saved. Hope is incomplete and ongoing. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and is complete. Now I had evidence of land nearby. My hope turned to faith that, if we lived, we’d see this through.

Their bomber, a copy of our B-25, was our reference. It probably had the same airspeed and the same range. The Japanese probably took off for their missions the same time in the morning as we did. Using that knowledge, and the time they’d spent shooting at us, Phil and I did some calculations to figure out how far we were from the Marshall or Gilbert Islands. I knew that unlike some currents that will drive rafts around in a circle, ours was steady and headed west. I could tell by the position of the sun and stars. Allowing that we might drift between the scattered islands at night—a heartbreaking thought—we bet a full-course meal on who could correctly predict landfall.

“We’ll probably land on the forty-sixth day,” said Phil.

I picked the forty-seventh.

A COUPLE OF
mornings later I awoke to dead calm. The water looked like a sheet of glass, slightly iridescent, mesmerizing. Nothing moved. We’d hit the doldrums again. At times it’s probably the most still water in the world. I imagined stepping out of the raft and walking on it.

In the distance, I saw a black line on the horizon. Unlike the water, it moved, growing, undulating, rolling toward us. I thought, My God, it’s a gigantic wave, the roaming hundred-foot wave I’d heard stories about. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

Suddenly I knew it was not a wave but hundreds of porpoises, swimming together, diving in and out of the water, coming right at us. Would we be capsized and torn apart? We lay low and waited. But instead of disaster, the porpoises swam gracefully under us and came up on the other side. When I looked in the water I discovered their purpose: millions of minnows. Food. I wished for a net. I used my hands. No luck.

ONE NIGHT THE
moon was bright and full and huge, and its light sparkled and made the calm sea glow. The sharks, our daily companions, departed, leaving us with a quiet evening “at home.” We bailed in the usual water—our blanket—to warm our bodies as we huddled tightly together.

A few hours later our tranquillity was rudely shattered by a thump on the bottom of the raft so powerful that our bodies winced with pain and we were lifted a few inches off the ocean surface. Stunned and frightened, I looked over the side and followed a huge fin as it circled the raft. When it came alongside again, the monster’s tail flipped sideways, sending a wave of cold water over us. Then I got a good look at our visitor: a huge bluish gray shark maybe twenty feet long. A great white.

I put my hands on Mac and Phil and whispered, “Lay low and don’t move or make a sound.” Again, we were hit from below. Again, his tail inundated us with water. Hardly an accident, the shark’s purpose was to stir whatever he suspected might be alive in the raft and find out if it was edible.

We were petrified but managed to stay quiet and still as the great white repeated his routine for maybe an hour, though it seemed like half the night. Then, as mysteriously as he had appeared, the shark gave up, dove underneath us, and disappeared, never to be seen again. Mac, Phil, and I took deep breaths, and the air in our lungs never felt
better. But the next morning Mac acted strangely different. Quieter. No, resigned. The great white had scared him good, and I think that was the turning point for him. Mac began to fade.

I REMEMBER SPEAKING
to a men’s club in San Diego after the war and telling the story of the great white. A marine biologist criticized me. He said great whites were cold-water sharks and would not leave their natural northern feeding waters full of seals and sea lions for the warm southern Pacific. I couldn’t argue with him and from then on referred to the shark simply as a “huge denizen of the deep.” But as of February 2002, almost sixty years later, new research confirmed that great whites are, in fact, world travelers. Tagged, they have been tracked to the ocean off Baja California, Hawaii, and other tropical waters. They spend as much as five months a year in the open ocean and dive as deep as two thousand feet. Warm-blooded, like humans, they enjoy basking in the temperate waters of the Pacific, and I know I was right when I say one visited us on the raft that night long ago.

ON THE THIRTY-SECOND
day I was still patching the raft, stopping to pump only about once every fifteen minutes, when Mac quit moving and sank into a daze. Was he just despondent? Or starved? Or both? He’d had as much food as Phil or I, sometimes more; but now his will to live and perhaps his body’s ability to use nourishment had failed. Each of us probably weighed no more than seventy-five pounds—too light even to make a satisfying snack for the sharks that had relentlessly stalked our raft. Our flesh was almost transparent, our bones plainly visible. But unlike Phil or me, Mac had finally all but shut down.

He asked Phil, “Can I have a drink of your water?”

Phil said no, which is what he should have said. We had about a mouthful apiece. The guy was almost dead, why give him water? Then he asked me, and like an idiot, I gave him a drink. It was a dying man’s request and I did not deny it.

The next afternoon Mac stirred a bit and asked questions about
death, questions for which I had no good answers. Then he asked the only one that really mattered: “Am I going to die?” That was it: ‘ “Am I going to die?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking it would be unkind to promise him further agony. “I believe you’ll die tonight.”

“Yes, sir,” he agreed. “I think you’re right.”

Finally, a few hours after midnight on the thirty-third day, Mac groaned, stiffened, sighed, and died. After a quiet moment I said, “Phil, Mac is gone.” Honestly, I’d expected it sooner. We lay there all tangled up and didn’t move until morning, when I said a brief eulogy.

Francis McNamara had once been an average-looking guy, five-feet-ten, light hair. Now he looked like a overstretched rubber band dried in the sun, a skeleton with skin. We slipped him overboard, a burial at sea, just like in the movies, and as he sank out of sight Phil and I were all the more determined to survive our ordeal.

THE DAYS DRAGGED
by, but I’d wake up each morning almost energetic, thinking, “Oh boy, another day closer to the islands!” I knew we’d get there. I knew my charts. I knew the trade winds and the currents.

But our trials were not over.

We’d braved hunger, thirst, sharks, bullets, and death. Now came a storm. We’d been through others, but none with waves that seemed to tower almost forty-five feet high. One moment the raft rested on a “mountaintop,” the next it was at the bottom of a “canyon.” The ride was more frightening than the sharks or the machine guns. It took all we had just to stay alive. Again.

This much I knew: we had to stay low, our feet tucked securely under the seats. Under no circumstances could we lash ourselves in with the parachute cord. I remembered a rescue mission in Hawaii, after a storm. We found a colonel and two men in their raft, upside down, blue bottom up, tied in. Dead.

I scooped about four inches of water into the raft for extra stability. Then I tied the cord under the seats and looped it around each of us only once, without a knot. If a raft turns over, you can’t untie a knot
in the water. A wet rope is brutal. We held the rope, hands aching. The night passed, filled with terror and rain.

The next morning, the forty-sixth day, the rain was intermittent but the waves still fierce. As one roller lifted us high, I spotted land. At first I wasn’t sure, but when we rose again, I saw more green.

“Phil,” I said. “I’ve just seen an island.”

He popped up and said, “I see it, too.”

The date was July 12, 1943, and I assumed that as we’d hoped and prayed, we had finally reached the Marshall or Gilbert Islands. We were still too far away to be sure, and another stormy night would pass before we could accurately assess the situation. We covered ourselves with the canvas to ward off the cold and tried to get some sleep. Our only fear was drifting between and past the islands in the dark.

The next morning the big blow was gone and we found ourselves in an atoll lagoon. I counted sixteen tiny islands, all apparently deserted. I could see old huts, bananas, breadfruit, and coconuts—but no people. I couldn’t wait to get ashore. One island was as big as a bedroom, with a single tree on it like you see in a comic strip. We broke out the oars and rowed. It seemed almost too good to be true.

It was. I heard airplane engines and looked up to see two Zeroes, probably at ten thousand feet, in combat practice. I knew they couldn’t see us.

I kept rowing, pitifully weak after forty-seven days adrift, trying to make land before anyone discovered us. Then I saw a new island. I said, “Hey, there was no island there.”

“Whaddaya mean?” said Phil.

“There’s an island right over there, with one tree on it.”

Phil looked and said, “Yeah, I see it—but there’re two trees.”

“You’re crazy. There’s only one tree.” I looked again, and this time there were two trees. “What’s happening here?”

It wasn’t an island at all but a boat with two masts, and it was heading straight for us.

T
he two-masted boat was a Japanese patrol ship. At first we lay low in the raft, but then I realized we had to get ashore quickly and hide. I rowed like mad for the nearest patch of green, but I was in no shape to make much headway. Before long they spotted us.

That was it.

The ship made a slow pass, about thirty feet distant. I could see the crew on deck, holding swords and rifles. One man trained a machine gun in our direction. Phil and I raised our hands weakly above our heads, and suddenly the thought of being alone on the ocean seemed more inviting than ever. Someone shouted in Japanese, but we didn’t understand. A crewman threw a rope at us but missed. Rifles were raised and a couple of men opened their shirts and motioned for us to do the same. Oh, God, I thought, they want to shoot us in the chest. I undid my shirt, closed my eyes, and waited. Nothing. I opened my eyes to see the same men waving. We waved back. Turned out they just wanted to see if we had hidden guns and now realized they had nothing to worry about from two hopeless and helpless skeletons. It was almost humorous and perhaps frustrating to soldiers who would have liked to capture bigger game.

On the second pass the boat got close enough to land the rope and haul us in. Then they reached down, grabbed us, and lifted us aboard.
I tried to push myself up from the first hard surface I’d felt in almost two months, but I couldn’t stand. I could barely crawl.

A crewman salvaged our raft from the sea and threw it on the deck. What a mess. The yellow rubber had turned to gum and was ready to pop. Phil and I might have lasted another two weeks; the raft maybe two days.

Although the Japanese clearly had nothing to fear from us, they tied us to the mast, and a big fellow who wanted to prove his authority or vent his anger hit Phil across the face with a pistol. I knew I was next, but my mind was sharp and I had a trick up my sleeve: I kept my head forward. When he swung the pistol, I threw my head back. The gun missed me, but I nearly knocked myself almost unconscious when I smashed the mast with the back of my head. That seemed enough to satisfy our captors, and they acted more civilized. Someone gave us water and a few hard biscuits. Despite intense hunger, I ate slowly and maintained my self-control in front of the enemy.

TWO HOURS LATER
the boat dropped anchor at Wotje, an island in—just as I’d predicted—the Marshall group. The idea that we’d actually drifted about two thousand miles and survived was mind-boggling.

We were taken ashore, blindfolded, in a barge. I knew we’d landed when I felt coral scrape the metal bottom. A soldier threw me over his shoulder. Another carried Phil. They dumped us in a truck and drove to their outpost. There they put us on a scale. Thirty kilos didn’t mean much to me, but I later learned it meant that I weighed about sixty-seven pounds—and that I’d lost a third more than that, nearly one hundred pounds.

On Wotje Phil and I were treated well by a kindly Japanese doctor, and got food and water, which we managed to keep down by eating carefully. A few of the Japanese officers spoke English. They quizzed us about what had happened.

“We were on a rescue mission in friendly waters,” I said. “We had motor trouble and crashed at sea.” Soon the conversation turned to other topics, including where I’d gone to college and my running
career. Our rescuers/captors were most intrigued that we were still alive. They listened to our tale, clearly sorry for us, not at all like enemies. Our sharpness also astounded the Japanese; perhaps they’d expected two delirious, mushy-headed dummies who’d lost their brains, but only our bodies had wasted away, not our minds.

After taking our wallets and putting them into a container, one soldier counted forty-eight bullet holes in the raft. Everybody came by to inspect the damage and wonder about all those holes in the rubber and none in us. I told them, “On the twenty-seventh day one of your pilots strafed us. It was a Sally bomber.”

“Oh, no,” they said. “Japanese don’t do that.”

I pointed at the raft. “There are the holes.”

They still didn’t believe me.

Two days later Phil and I were put aboard a merchant vessel. The detachment commander said, “You will be taken to an island called Kwajalein. But,” he added, ominously, “I cannot guarantee your life after you leave the ship.”

The trip due west took almost twenty-four hours, and again we were well treated. The captain came to visit more than once. In almost perfect English he explained that he’d been to Seattle often. He talked about how he’d enjoyed his former life as a merchant marine, hauling international goods. He also tried to justify why Japan was at war. The country, he said, was poor, with too many people; since we were all part of the same world system, they were entitled to more land for their citizens.

As we neared Kwajalein, they brought generous portions of rice, soup, and daikon. My appetite had returned, but it backfired. I got sick as a dog and wanted to die. Two of the crew took me on deck to throw up and held me because there was no railing. Vomiting, I looked straight down about thirty or forty feet to the ocean, hoping they’d let me go.

ON KWAJALEIN I
was blindfolded again and transported to shore like a sack of wheat. There four soldiers carried Phil and me to the beach, tossed us into the back of a truck, and drove to a building
where they dumped us into separate cells. I skidded on my bottom until my back hit the wall. When I took off my blindfold my brain and my eyes fluttered with the unreality of it all. After nearly two months floating under vast open skies and infinite seas, I found myself locked in a cubicle the size of a dog kennel. The instant claustrophobia made me want to scream, but I was too weak. Instead, I lay down and looked at my body. Just six weeks before I’d been a vigorous athlete who could run a mile in just over four minutes. Now I was fleshless, skeletal. All my life I had kept my emotions tightly in check when it came to my own troubles, but I could no longer help myself.

I broke down and cried.

THE DETENTION BUILDING
housed six wooden cells, three to a side. Each was six feet long, six feet high, and thirty inches wide. A ventilation slit on the rear wall was thickly coated with flies. Most tropical buildings stood a couple feet off the ground on stilts to avoid flooding during a monsoon, and the crawl space provided a slight breeze. But with no window, the heat was almost unbearable. Mosquitoes buzzed everywhere. A six-inch-diameter hole cut in the floor and a tin can underneath functioned as my toilet. I looked down and saw the can half full with maggots. Worse, they made me sleep with my head next to the hole and my feet near the door.

The guards shoved food through an eight-inch slot in the cell’s solid wood door. Appetizing it was not. I got whatever was leftover from the men’s mess—fish heads, boiled daikon—not otherwise fed to the pigs. Sometimes they’d reach into the slop bucket, squeeze together a gob of rice the size of a golf ball, and throw it at me. That usually meant an hour or two spent crawling around in the half-light, on the dirty floor, trying to find every grain while the guards howled with delight. Even then I’d have to spit out sand.

The rations were so horrible that I had constant diarrhea and dripped mucus from my rear end. Flies got into the mucus and laid their eggs. Some nights it was so bad that I had to curl up in the back of the cell with my naked butt hanging over the hole, leaking. I’d
think I had it under control, then five minutes later it would start again, making sleep impossible.

Most people never understand how bad life can be for prisoners of war because no survivor talks frankly and in detail about these horrible experiences from the banquet dais.

I could tell from his groans that Phil suffered similarly two cells away, but the guards did not allow us to talk. Any attempt meant suffering a swift kick or a poke with a sharp stick. They also beat us regularly.

My new life was no new life at all. Better to starve me, or send me out to sea again on the raft. At least dying that way would allow me some dignity.

I FOUND A
crude message carved into my cell wall. 9
MARINES MAROONED ON MAKIN ISLAND—AUGUST 18, 1942.
Each name was listed. I knew the date and story well.

Two American submarines had approached Makin at midnight, carrying the Marine Carlson Raiders. Second in charge was James Roosevelt. They went secretly ashore in life rafts, crossing a dangerous reef, sank one ship in the harbor, and killed almost every Japanese soldier on the island. The idea wasn’t to take Makin but to dent Japan’s confidence and boost American morale. In retrospect it might have been a mistake because the Japanese refortified the island ten times over, making it more difficult for the next guys to land there.

During the battle, sixteen marines died. When Carlson left, he said to the native chief, “Here’s fifty dollars. Will you bury the marines?”

Evidently, nine
other
marines didn’t get back to their beachhead on schedule and make it safely to the submarines, which took off right on time, perhaps believing their comrades were also killed.

Those marines were captured by the Japanese and imprisoned on Kwajalein. At least one of them had lived in the cell I occupied and carved his legend on the wall so those who followed would never forget.

I carved my name underneath theirs, and the date of my arrival.

SOMETIME DURING THE
first day, a Kwajalein native had poked his nose through the hole in my cell door and said in surprisingly good English, “Are you Louis Zamperini, the USC track star?”

“What?” I couldn’t believe my ears.

“Are you Lou Zamperini, the runner, the Olympian, from USC?”

“Yeah,” I answered, confused. There I was, way out in the middle of nowhere, and people still knew me. I shouldn’t have been surprised. In those days, between radio, newspaper, and newsreel coverage, international sports figures were as popular as movie stars.

The man—I never got his name—worked for the Japanese, probably as a laborer. He said he was a Trojan fan and began to tell me about my track records. “I follow all USC sports.” He knew every football player. Every score. We discussed the Rose Bowl, even the Olympics. He knew more than I did. Then he said, “My time is up. I am glad to meet you.”

“Before you leave,” I said, “tell me about the nine marines.”

“They were all executed,” he said, shrugging. “Decapitated with the samurai sword.” He fell silent for a moment, watching for my reaction. Then he spat out the rest. “This is what happens to all who come to Kwajalein.”

Later I learned that the marines whose names were listed in my cell had been awaiting transport to a mainland POW camp in October 1942, when the former Kwajalein commander, Captain Yoshio Obara, claimed he was directed by Vice Admiral Koso Abe, commander of all bases in the Marshall Islands, to execute the men. Abe said that he had received orders for this action via a dispatch from Truk Island, originating with the central authorities in Japan—but his claim was never proved. Abe also said that Commander Okada, from Central Command, who was on Kwajalein in 1942, had made the following statement to him: “From now on it will not be necessary to transport prisoners to Japan. They will be disposed of locally.”

I felt so rotten at the news of my eventual execution that my first thought was, Well, so what?

THE GUARDS DAILY
taunted me and Phil. They jabbed us with sticks, spit on us, tossed hot tea in our faces. Sometimes they made us sing and dance—as if we could—for their amusement. Worst of all, they took great delight in drawing their thumbs across their throats, or slicing their flattened hands across their Adam’s apple and making a sound to remind us of our inevitable fate.

I wanted to live and I hoped I’d live, but the kind of faith I’d had on the raft had disappeared. I believed my date with death was set. Each morning I’d wake up and think, Is this the day? Where will they put my bones? What could I do? I just had to wait until they decided.

ON THE SECOND
day, guards led me to the interrogation building. I hadn’t yet been fed, the better to make me vulnerable. On the way I passed two somber young girls, very out of place in a combat zone. They shuffled and stared at the ground.

I was shoved into a large room to face six dignified-looking Japanese officers, big shots dressed in white uniforms with gold braid and combat medals. They sat at a white table as if they were kings of the earth. A guard told me to sit facing the officers but far enough away that my filthy appearance and smell did not offend them. Biscuits, pastries, and beverages covered the table. Nonchalantly, each man lit a cigarette and blew smoke in my direction. Clearly their tactics were designed to tempt me to answer their questions.

I braced myself, not knowing know what to expect. I could never have predicted the first question: “Lieutenant Zamperini. How many girls do you have on your islands to satisfy your military personnel?”

What? Their icebreaker question was about sex? Was that really what these arrogant pipsqueaks wanted to know? I decided to contain my disgust and play along.

“We don’t have them,” I said.

“How do the men get satisfied?”

“They use their willpower and wait until they get home.”

My questioner chuckled and I’m sure he thought I was either a liar or a fool. Smugly, he continued. “Japan provides girls on every island to keep our men happy.”

The two girls I’d seen, obviously conscripted against their will, now made sense. The informalities over, the panel got down to business.

“What model B-24 you fly in?” one asked brusquely. I knew they had more than one of our crashed bombers, so it was no big deal to say, “B-24D.” The
Green Hornet
was borrowed; our regular plane was a B-24F model.

They produced a picture of a B-24E. “Where is radar on the plane? Draw a picture.” Again, a pointless question; they had the plane. They already knew. What they really wanted came next. “How do you operate the radar?”