Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini (7 page)

Unfortunately, I developed a severe chronic pain under my right collarbone. At first I dismissed it as a pinched nerve and kept running, but guys I usually beat by forty or fifty yards suddenly followed closely on my heels or passed me. In desperation I ate baby foods and cereals and tried to regain my strength. Winning meant more to me than anything, but nothing worked. At the 1940 NCAA mile, I lost.

Los Angeles sportswriter Braven Dyer had called me “the greatest distance runner the Far West has ever produced.” Now I feared he’d been wrong and there would never be a four-minute mile for Louis Zamperini.

UNWILLING TO GIVE
up, I kept training for the 1940 Olympics coming that September. But one day, while my dad timed me, I collapsed on the track. Then I fell in a race. Cromwell tried to help, but no one really knew what to do. He sent me to a dentist—why?—who diagnosed the problem as an infected wisdom tooth. He pulled it, but my chest still hurt. I saw another doctor, who took out a tonsil. No improvement. A third doctor punctured my sinuses and flushed them out. That didn’t work, either. My times just kept getting worse.

After graduating from USC, several of us went to Lockheed to find work. Even with college degrees we couldn’t get decent jobs. I wanted to work in an office, but they said, “You’ll do manual labor first,
then
apply for an office job.” They hired me as a spot welder, pending a physical. After the exam the doctor surprised me with the straight dope. “Do you realize your whole right lung is full of pus?” he said. “What?”

“You have pleurisy. You’ve had it for months. You’re the runner, right? I don’t know how you finished a race with a lung full of pus. You only used one lung.”
The mystery of my pain solved, I got a shot, took antibiotics, and started working out again. Soon I felt like a tiger, but it was all for nothing. In the meantime, Japan had invaded Manchuria and taken island after island in the Pacific. The 1940 Olympic Games were canceled, and my dreams came crashing down.

I
t didn’t take long for me to move into to the Expediting Department at Lockheed. I got to dress in nice clothes, too. But it was just temporary. With the world at war, I knew America could be drawn in anytime. During lunch, I’d watch one P-38 after another fly in and out of the company airfield. I figured it would be exciting to be up there myself, so I applied to the army air corps.

MY PRIMARY TRAINING
started on March 19, 1941, at the Hancock College of Aeronautics in Santa Maria, just south of San Luis Obispo, in California. They’d named the field after Captain G. Allan Hancock, a big oilman who built the Hancock Library of Biology and Oceanography at USC. He also created Hancock Park in Los Angeles, a famous mid-Wilshire neighborhood, on part of the land left to him by his father, Major Henry Hancock.

I drove north with a couple of buddies. The army took pictures of me in my tracksuit, posing in a racer’s starting-line crouch, on an airplane wing. Because of my track career, I was always good for some free publicity, and I was happy to help. After a few weeks of ground studies they finally put me
in
a training plane. What a shock. I’d flown to New York on commercial planes, but it’s different in a small craft.
Some guys loved it. I didn’t. At first I got a little disoriented, twisting and turning, but when they put me through the “spins,” that was it.

I had a better time on the ground. We got weekends off, and most of us went into town to drink. That was fine as long as you didn’t come back drunk. If you did, the MPs would haul you to the infirmary and forcefully inject a 15 percent Argyrol solution straight up your penis. It burned and you’d scream your head off and not sleep well that night. They said it was for our own good, though. The air corps didn’t want anyone to catch VD from the girls in town. I heard more than one recruit protest, “No, I didn’t have any sex with
any
woman.” But who trusts a drunk?

I didn’t fool around, but one night I came back not walking a straight line, and I knew they wanted to give me the Argyrol. Instead, I jumped the fence and got away with it. The next time, though, I got caught climbing over the fence and was confined to the base for two weekends.

The first weekend Captain Hancock flew his Lockheed Lodestar to our field. Hancock and I had become friends at USC because of my interest in his cello performances, and he was scheduled to play at the base. All military personnel were required to attend, but it was optional for the cadets. I was the only cadet who showed up, and that made us even closer friends.

Later Hancock said, “Louie, I’m flying to Long Beach. You can come and visit your parents in Torrance and I’ll have you back to school by Sunday.” I told him I appreciated the offer but I was confined. “The restriction board at the gate reads,
THESE CADETS ARE NOT TO PASS THROUGH THIS GATE.
And my name’s on it.”

“We’re not going to pass through the gate,” he said with a laugh. “We’re going to fly over it.” I spent my two restricted weekends at my parents’ house, and no one was the wiser.

I WASHED OUT
of flying school, came home, and rented an apartment in Hollywood with two buddies who’d also been let go. We were officially still cadets, waiting for termination papers, but we had nothing to do except go to the beach, the movies, and athletic events.
When the discharge orders arrived, I moved back to Torrance, a civilian again—but eligible for the draft.

My letter to report for a physical came while I was working as a movie extra. I made seven dollars a day, and any extra who stayed through the whole shoot got a twenty-five-dollar bonus. I didn’t want to avoid my duty to my country, but I wanted that additional money. I’d heard that during World War I, men who wanted to postpone or get out of their service would put a chunk of tobacco under their armpits to raise their temperature. Or they’d put a cigar up their anus. When they got to the front of the line, they’d be dizzy and sick. I didn’t want to go that far, so I ate lots of candy to induce a high sugar level. I wasn’t sure it would work, but when they tested my urine and told me I’d have to come back, I was happy. I finished the movie and got my bonus, then went back and took my physical again, and passed.

I joined the army on September 29, 1941, and went to Camp Roberts, near Paso Robles, California, for basic training. The army thought I had certain useful qualities, so they made me an acting corporal in charge of fitness. I also went to the NCO school on the base and came out with top grades.

I was at Camp Roberts—actually, out on a weekend pass—when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. A buddy and I were at a movie in town when they stopped the film and the theater manager made the announcement: “All military personnel are to report to their bases immediately. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.”

On my way out of the theater I ran into a friend from the local air base. I wasn’t in any hurry to get back to Camp Roberts, and he said, “We could use you at our base.” I had military rifle training, and they had a whole barracksful of guns that nobody knew how to use because their air corps guys never had rifle drills. My commander cleared it, and I spent the day there with the air corps pilots and mechanics and so on. I put them through drills and taught gun nomenclature and how to take a firearm apart and put it together again. When I got through they drove me to Camp Roberts.

I DID WELL
in basic training, and the army selected me to go to Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Then a second set of orders came, the result of my having unthinkingly signed a piece of paper after washing out of Hancock College. The orders directed me instead to bombardier school at Ellington Field in Houston. I met with the Camp Roberts CO, a general, and told him I wanted to stay in the infantry. He said he’d try to help, but there was nothing he could do.

At Ellington Field I found another guy who didn’t want to be there, either. We both put in for transfers. Meanwhile, I went about my studies and did some more publicity for the air corps: pictures in the paper of me racing a bomber down the runway, talking about the Nazi flag incident in radio interviews. Apparently, the air corps didn’t want to lose the extra visibility that having me around brought, so my request for a transfer never went through. I kept asking, “What happened to my transfer? They transferred so-and-so last week…”

Frankly, I hated the air corps until one day when two other cadets and I walked down the street in Houston and a big white convertible Cadillac with two beautiful young women pulled up. We were only cadets, but we still wore wings—and they were looking for men with wings.

“You want to go to a plantation party?” they offered. We hopped in. At the party, food and drink were plentiful and free and dancing with the beautiful Texas girls was a bonus. After a few more get-togethers just like it I decided that maybe being in the air corps wasn’t that bad after all. Then I got elected captain of the cadets and was put in charge of a large drum-and-bugle corps. We performed at the stadium, in front of top brass and Washington officials, to honor those who died at Pearl Harbor.

Next I went to Officers Candidate and bombardier school in Midland, Texas. The curriculum was tough and included math and physics; we had to make sure the bombs went straight after we dropped them. The washout rate was high. By keeping my nose buried in my books, I survived.

However, fun was not out of the question. Before a practice night-bombing mission, my pilot, a sergeant, asked if I could drop my bombs quickly so he could keep a rendezvous with his girlfriend. “Where are you going to pick her up?” I asked.
“I’m not meeting her on the ground,” he said. “I promised to fly over the local theater when the movie lets out at nine, and she promised to wave at us.”

We took off with several other AT-11 crews. The sergeant arrived first on the target, and I unloaded my bombs in such a hurry that later my scores were not up to par.

Then he did a wingover and hurried back to Midland. The sergeant buzzed Main Street, barely clearing the power lines. I looked down at the theater and saw people begin to pour out—and look up, puzzled, at our extremely low altitude. By the fourth pass, the sergeant yelled, “Do you see a girl waving a scarf?”

“Yes,” I hollered back. “She’s in the middle of the street with everybody else, wondering what the heck we’re doing!”

He made two more low passes, rocked the wings, revved the motors, and switched the landing lights on and off. His girlfriend continued to wave the scarf. Satisfied, the sergeant headed back to the Midland airfield. Before we arrived, frantic citizens and the police had already flooded the base with calls, all reporting an unidentified aircraft over the city.

Some were certain the enemy had invaded Midland.

They weren’t completely crazy. Only months before, at about 7
P.M
. on February 23, 1942, while most people listened to President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat, a Japanese submarine surfaced twelve miles west of Santa Barbara, California, near the rich oil field on Ellwood Beach. According to one newspaper, “They lobbed sixteen shells into the tidewater field and [the residents] heard strange explosions…but [the Japs’] marksmanship was poor.” Tokyo claimed the raid was a “great military success,” though in reality the damage was no more than five hundred dollars. Nonetheless, this was the first attack on our mainland since the War of 1812—and the last before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.

Back at the Midland airfield the commanding officer ordered all crews to report immediately to headquarters. “Okay,” he barked. “Who was the damn fool who scared the hell out of the good people of Midland?”
Knowing the other crews weren’t aware of his revised flight plan, the sergeant kept his mouth shut. So did I. The CO was furious, but since no one else took credit for our asinine adventure, he assumed a crew from another base had caused the mischief.

Mission accomplished, we celebrated.

ON AUGUST 13,
1942, I graduated in the top fifteen of my class. On October 25 the air corps sent me to Hickam Field, on Oahu—which had also been struck in the Pearl Harbor raid—as a second lieutenant with the B-24 bombing unit of the Forty-second Squadron, of the Eleventh Bombardment Group, of the Seventh Air Force. The Eleventh eventually ran more than six thousand sorties to avenge the Pearl Harbor massacre.

My assignment also included working out of Kahuku Air Base on Oahu’s north shore. There I continued my training, learned to speak a little Hawaiian, and ran practice bombing missions at eight thousand feet until my margin of error was about fifty feet. In other words, a virtual bull’s-eye. My reward was a master bombardier classification and the knowledge that, in the words of Major General Eugene Eubanks, “The greatest bombing planes in the world take him [the bombardier] into battle through every opposition, and in thirty seconds over the target he must vindicate the greatest responsibility ever placed on an individual soldier in the line of duty.”

I FLEW IN
a B-24 Liberator. Here are its stats:

My baptismal raid took place just past midnight on Christmas Eve, 1942. Two days earlier we’d fitted our B-24 with bomb-bay fuel tanks, which meant a long hop, but no one knew to where. They just told us to take enough clothes for three days. I got a simple one-dollar bombsight for low altitude work, instead of the expensive model made by Norden. At 10
A.M
., twenty-six ships took off from Kahuku. Five minutes later we opened our secret orders. Our mission was first to fly to Midway Island, 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu. It took eight hours to get there. Each ship received a case of cold Budweiser when we landed. The marines there seemed to know exactly where we were headed next. One guy said he’d expected us for a few weeks. All I expected was a shower, quickly, even if all they had was hot and cold running salt water. I got one.

Afterward there wasn’t much time to see the sights, which was no big disappointment, since Midway’s only natural attraction was the albatross, also known as a gooney bird. Thick-billed with white chest feathers fading into chestnut, they take off into the wind, gathering speed like a plane. If they come in for a landing too high or low, they crack up in the bushes. Sometimes they fly into poles and wires, not seeing them in time to change course. Again, just like a plane. In fact, that’s what they nicknamed the C-47 Skytrain, the military version of the DC-3 cargo ship: Gooney Birds.

At a briefing we learned about the rest of our mission: be the first to bomb Wake Island since the Japanese had occupied it a year earlier.

I was pleased even though I realized the mission would be like running a marathon. All Pacific runs were. In Europe, in most cases, pilots flew only several hundred miles to drop their bombs; some planes
could make two or three sorties in one day, loading up in between. Our journey to Wake was five thousand miles, one way. Fully loaded, we could fly almost three thousand miles without refueling; to make it to Wake required modifications, hence the bomb-bay fuel tanks and only six 500-pound bombs—half a load. That day workmen also coated the underside of our wings with lamp black—early stealth technology—so we couldn’t be seen at night.