Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini (9 page)

I also stayed in top shape and ran along Kahuku Beach. With the pleurisy gone I felt better than ever. On the airfield and at an exhibi
tion meet in Honolulu I ran a 4:12 with ease. If I’d lost ten pounds I could have run even faster. In fact, I ran so well in Hawaii that I got invitations from New York promoters to run against Gunder Haag, the top European miler. However, General Hap Arnold refused to grant me permission. The way he explained it, I was in a special bomb unit. Due to our sometimes secret and experimental missions, I couldn’t leave the island.

IN MID-APRIL
1943, at Kahuku Air Base, we learned we were about to make a big raid Down Under; during the war this referred not to Australia and environs but to southern Pacific islands. On the morning of April 18 I got up early and ran a mile on the beach, then did five 50-yard sprints. I reported with my flight crew to the alert room for a briefing and learned that our next assignment would be one of the longest ever.

Our orders were to fly from Oahu southwest to Canton Island, just below the Equator, refuel, then head southwest again to Funafuti, in the Ellice Islands group (now known as Tuvalu) in the south-central Pacific. Takeoff was at 13:00 hours. We checked the ship from A to Z but never got off the ground. Phil taxied too far on the runway and buried our left wheel in the mud. For two hours we struggled to get free, then had to change ships. Our new plane, number 143, had no radar, no belly turret, and no nose turret.

We bounced through two storms on the way but arrived safely at Canton Island, gassed up, ate, and left for Funafuti, an island maybe eight hundred yards wide surrounded by a series of small islets and completely covered with coconut and other tropical trees. Funafuti is where rescuers brought World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker after his plane went down on an important mission from the States to General MacArthur in the Pacific, and he spent twenty-seven days adrift, fighting the elements. That was a long drift and I’d always been amazed that he’d survived.

Funafuti’s natives were primitive Micronesians who lived as they had for almost five hundred years. They spoke no English but managed to say hello in the usual way: “Halowa.” Girls and boys no older
than five smoked cigarettes, reminding me of my youth. Funafuti had a great swimming beach, if you didn’t mind the occasional shark. I was curious to see more and toured the village. My big discovery: girls wore a cloth (a
lawa lawa
) around their bodies—and that’s all. That night the base theater featured
Wives Under Suspicion
with Warren William and Gail Patrick. Then a big storm blew in. We filled our canteens with ice water at the Reef and bunked down for the night in tents with dirt floors.

I ate a fair breakfast, then waited for a briefing at 13:00 hours. Meanwhile our own plane arrived, liberated from the mud, and we traded crews. I supervised loading bombs: three 500-pound demolitions and five fragmentation cluster bombs with six 30-pound frags on each.

At the briefing General Hale announced our target: Nauru Island, home to the world’s greatest concentration of phosphate. The Japanese sorely needed phosphate for fertilizer and explosives. Our orders were to fly west toward Guadalcanal, hang a sharp right, and come in on that heading to confuse the Japanese about our base location. Over Nauru the entire flight of twenty-six bombers would drop their payloads from eight thousand feet, at noon. We’d also maintain radio silence.

Some of us questioned the plan, since Nauru was heavily fortified with antiaircraft guns. We believed the flights should vary in altitude. I turned to Phil and said, “That’s a pretty low bomb run. All the Japs have to do is synchronize on the lead flight and we’ll all get hit.”

“Those are the general’s orders,” he said with a casual smile and a shrug. Phil didn’t fight unnecessary battles, but he had convinced me repeatedly on previous flights that he was one of the best pilots in our group. If Phil seemed relaxed, I wanted to relax, too.

The next morning we were up at 03:00 hours, ready and anxious. At 05:00 we took off, but just barely. Between Funafuti’s limited, 3,500-foot airstrip and our plane’s heavy load, bombs and fuel and a crew of ten, it was tough to get off the ground. We flew low, flicked the lagoon with our landing gear, but managed to climb.

Superman
was the lead ship of E flight, of the 372nd squadron. Our navigator, Lieutenant Mitchell, gave us an ETA and finally announced the island was twenty minutes away, dead ahead. Then he squeezed
into the nose turret, with its twin .50 caliber machine guns, his job now the same as the other gunners’: to ward off enemy fighters and provide the bombardier—me—with an uninterrupted run on the target. With my Norden bombsight wired to the automatic pilot, I assumed control of the plane with each aiming correction. I did my calculations, fed them into the bombsight, and focused on the drop.

Suddenly we entered a cloud of flak and antiaircraft fire. General Hale had, as I’d anticipated, made a mistake by having us all fly in at the same altitude. Puffs of black smoke dotted the sky around us—a dangerous situation. With bombs armed and ready, one hit in a vital spot would blow us to smithereens.

An explosion rocked the plane as antiaircraft fire shattered our right vertical stabilizer. Then below us the fragments of another antiaircraft burst hit the fuselage like hailstones on a tin roof and penetrated the underside. The ship yawed but I got my crosshairs back on target. I managed to drop my payload on the planes, structures, and antiaircraft batteries along the runway. I also had a free-choice target. Spotting a small building at the end of the runway that looked like a radio shack, I dropped my bomb, and much to my surprise and delight I hit the island’s fuel-supply depot. A cloud of smoke and fire billowed skyward. A photo of this was in
Life
magazine.

I looked out the greenhouse nose window and counted nine Zeroes in the air. Seven were nearby at ten o’clock. Three peeled off and headed our way. The first came dead ahead at one o’clock. He opened fire and Mitchell returned it, simultaneously. I heard a loud crack as a cannon shell from the Zero severed our turret power cables and whizzed past me, missing my face by inches. It continued through the Plexiglas window and lodged into the port wing between the number-one and number-two motors. Fortunately it failed to explode, saving the ship and crew from disintegrating into flaming fragments drifting lazily down into the sea.

But there was no time to speculate about miracles. Mitchell had scored a deadly hit just before the turret power went dead. Luckily, the Japanese pilot slumped forward against the stick and the plane dived beneath us and spun crazily to earth, sprouting a fiery crimson
tail. Meanwhile, with no power to the turret, I had to physically extricate Mitchell.

I felt another explosion as
Superman
shook again. Over the intercom someone called for help. I crawled back to the flight deck and found our radioman, Sergeant Brooks, hanging from the narrow catwalk, over the open bomb-bay doors, with eight thousand feet between him and the ocean. The catwalk is seventeen feet long and only ten inches wide; traversing it in a moving airplane in good conditions is itself a high-wire act. It wasn’t meant to be a trapeze.

I will never forget Brooks’s pleading and bewildered eyes as he stared up at me. I grabbed him by the wrists, and thanks to my weight training and a burst of adrenaline, I soon had him on the flight deck just below the upper turret.

The bomb bay was covered with thick reddish purple oil, meaning that cannon fire had penetrated the area on the starboard side and knocked out our hydraulic system. That’s why the doors wouldn’t shut. I realized then that we wouldn’t be able to raise or lower our flaps or landing gear, either, except by hand. And our brakes wouldn’t work.

I manually shut the bomb-bay doors and attended to Brooks, who babbled incoherently. When I looked at his back I knew why. Shrapnel had penetrated his sheepskin jacket and his head, leaving him bloody to the waist. I gave him a shot of morphine, put an oxygen mask on his face, set it for ten thousand feet, and did what I could to stop the bleeding.

Another crash above me sounded like cannon fire hitting the radio compartment. Then I felt something wet and warm trickle down my neck. I looked up at Sergeant Pillsbury in the upper turret; the shells had crushed his foot and peppered his leg with shrapnel. Twelve inches lower, and the metal fragments would have caught me in the head, had I not been kneeling over Brooks. What was left of Pillsbury’s toes dangled through his shoe. Blood spurted and dripped down on me. But Pillsbury didn’t cry out in pain. Instead, he screamed angrily and swung his gun toward the Zero as it made another pass, then madly triggered his twin .50s. Flames spurted from the Nip’s cowling, and he slumped back. I followed his plunge until he hit the drink.

The Zero pilots were almost like kamikazes, coming in so close. They couldn’t miss us and we couldn’t miss them.

I grabbed a medical kit, gave Pillsbury a shot of morphine in the leg, put a sulfa drug on his foot, and bandaged him. Then another round of fire shook us severely and Phil almost lost control. It took all the strength and expertise he and his and copilot, Lieutenant C.H. Cupernell, had to keep us airborne as shells ripped into the B-24’s waist.

More cries for help arose after the burst that had hit Pillsbury also shot-locked the flight-deck door. I gave it a couple of mule kicks, and it gave way. I hurried down the catwalk, then stepped into the waist section again. I thought I’d seen the worst of our situation, but no. The carnage was stunning. Four airmen—Douglas, Lambert, Glassman, and third pilot Nelsen, were all torn flesh and exposed innards, a blood-spattered scene. Douglas and Glassman, though critically wounded, still manned their guns as a resolute Zero pilot made a very close return pass over the starboard side. Glassman caught him coming in, and Douglas nailed his aft end as he passed over. The Zero went into a long spiral and then straight down as he entered Davy Jones’s locker. Thank God this was the last Zero. One more hit and we’d have joined them.

It seemed to me then that our battle with the three Zeroes had taken an hour, but in reality it probably took less than ten minutes. It was a fast-running game of staying focused on staying alive.

Staying alive…I had too many wounded men to take care of myself. I called Phil on the intercom and said, “This is more than I can handle. I need help.”

“I need Cup here to keep the plane from stalling,” he replied.

“This is important,” I shouted, and described the situation. Phil said he’d use his knees as well as his hands on the yoke to stabilize the plane, and Cupernell came aft. His eyes widened with disbelief as he took in the blood and guts, but he immediately tended to a lieutenant lying on the deck with his stomach ripped open. He was our extra passenger who had asked to come along to “see the fun.”

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“Not yet,” said Cupernell. He worked on Douglas’s leg while I treated Nelsen’s ripped stomach. We stripped clothes off the other
wounded and gave morphine and sulfanilamide. Seeing my buddies like that was a shock, but I was well trained. I buried my feelings.

AT THE BRIEFING
prior to takeoff, the S-2 officer said that if it looked like we might not make it back, to remember the submarine
Drum
would be twenty miles from Nauru on our return heading in case we had to ditch. But we were already well beyond the 20-mile mark, with 730 to go. Phil and Cup finally had the plane under control, erratically, but with the Pratt & Whitney motors still humming we decided to make straight for home.

I assessed the damage. The right vertical fin was shattered. The hydraulic system, radio, and nose turret were out. My immediate concern was a hit that severed all but one strand of rudder and elevator control wires on the right side of the plane. Thanks to my limited sailing experience, with the arming wire from the bomb rack I was able to splice the strands together. It was crude, but it did the job.

Mitchell focused solely on getting us back to Funafuti and was oblivious to our situation until he confirmed our ETA. Later, he felt bad about not being able to contribute during our medical emergency.

Witnessing the men who suffered the worst of it, I have never seen such courage. I can’t remember the wounded screaming with pain—and not because the noise of battle was so fierce. They stuck to their guns and simply accepted their bloody wounds. It was as if they were saying, “You can hit me, but you can’t make me cry.” I liked that sentiment; it had always been my own. I believe they took comfort in knowing that our counteroffensive had cost the Zeroes dearly. Looking at each of their sober faces, I said, “You guys got all three Japs, and I confirmed the kills.” They managed satisfied grins.

EVEN IF WE
made it back to Funafuti, I didn’t know how we could land. The flaps, wheels, and brakes depended on the now destroyed hydraulic system. As a backup, we were able to hand-crank the flaps
and put the wheels down. But the brakes were another matter. It seemed obvious to me that given such a short and narrow runway—less than a mile long—we’d plunge off the strip and into the ocean. This was a serious situation, the six critically injured men aboard notwithstanding.

I pumped the wheels down by hand, hoping they locked, and left the flaps for last because if I cranked them down first, I couldn’t see whether the wheels were locked in place. I also opened the bomb-bay door, hoping the drag might slow us a bit more.

Next I turned my attention to the problem of stopping. For brakes, I rigged up two parachutes, one at each waist window. As we touched down I planned to pull both rip cords together and pray that my jury-rigged air brakes would do the job. I also worked it out so that I could stand in the middle and turn the plane by controlling the left and right chutes. It was makeshift and crazy.

Mitchell gave us twenty minutes to Funafuti. Phil worried aloud about the ship porpoising on a normal descent to touchdown and crashing, so he decided to come in low and flat. Even with extra speed I was sure my parachute brakes would work.