Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

him Allen; in the air corps, they called him Phillips.
    The first thing people tended to notice about Phillips was that they hadn’t noticed him earlier. He was so recessive that he could be in a room for a long time before anyone realized that he was there. He was smallish, short-legged. Some of the men called himSandblaster because, said one pilot, “his fanny was so close to the ground.” For unknownreasons, he wore one pant leg markedly shorter than the other. He had a tidy, pleasant, boyish face that tended to blend with the scenery. This probably contributed to his invisibility, but what really did it was his silence. Phillips was an amiable man and was, judging by his letters, highly articulate, but he preferred not to speak. You could park him in a crowd of chattering partygoers and he’d emerge at evening’s end having never said a word. People had long conversations with him, only to realize later that he hadn’t spoken.

    Russell Allen Phillips.
Courtesy of Karen Loomis

    If he had a boiling point, he never reached it. He rolled along with every inexplicable order from his superiors, every foolish act of his inferiors, and every abrasive personality that military life could throw at an officer. He dealt with every manner of adversity with calm, adaptive acceptance. In a crisis, Louie would learn, Phillips’s veins ran icewater.
    Phillips had one consuming passion. When he had entered college, his father had taken a new pastorship in Terre Haute. There, Phillips’s sister had introduced him to a girl from the church choir, a college student named Cecile Perry, known as Cecy. She had blond hair, a curvy figure, a buoyant disposition, a quick mind, and a family cat named Chopper. She was studying to be a teacher. At a prom in Terre Haute, Allen kissed Cecy. He was a goner, and so was she.
    On a Saturday night in November 1941, when he left for the air corps, Phillips spent five last minutes with Cecy at the Indianapolis train station. When the fighting was over, he promised, he’d make her his bride. He kept her photo on his footlocker and wrote her love letters several times a week. When she turned twenty-one, he sent her his pay and asked her to find an engagement ring. Allen’s ring was soon on Cecy’s finger.
    In June 1942, just after her graduation, Cecy traveled to Phoenix to see Allen get his wings. Crazy in love, the two talked about running off to get hitched right then, but reconsidered, deciding to marry at his next training venue and live together there until he was deployed. That venue was Ephrata, and when Phillips saw it, he kicked himself. “I’ve wished 100 times that we had gotten married when we were at Phoenix,” he wrote to her, “but I wouldn’t ask you now to come out here + live in a dump like Ephrata.” Again, they postponed their wedding. In the fall, Allen’s training would be finished. Then, they hoped, they’d have one more chance to see each other before he went to war.
    In Ephrata, Louie and Phillips fell in together. Phillips floated along contentedly in Louie’s chatty bonhomie; Louie liked Phillips’s quiet steadiness, and thought him the kindest person he’d ever met. They never had a single argument and were almost never apart. Phillips called Louie “Zamp”; Louie called Phillips “Phil.”

    Phil’s crew. Left to right: Phillips, temporary copilot Gross, Zamperini, Mitchell, Douglas, Pillsbury, and Glassman. Moznette, Lambert, and Brooks are not pictured.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

    The rest ofPhil’s bomber crew assembled. Serving as engineer and top turret gunner would be twenty-two-year-old Stanley Pillsbury, who’d been running his family’s Maine farm before joining up. The other engineer was Virginia native Clarence Douglas, who would operate one of the two side-directed waist guns, behind the wings. The navigator and nose gunner would be Robert Mitchell, a professor’s son from Illinois. Tiny Frank Glassman, with his tightly curled hair, was a dead ringer for Harpo Marx. He would be their radioman and, later, their belly gunner. Because Frank hailed from Chicago, the men called him Gangster. Ray Lambert of Maryland would man the tail gun. The crew’s girl magnet was Harry Brooks, a good-looking, ebullient radioman and waist gunner from Michigan. The copilot would be George Moznette, Jr. Because copilots were rotated from plane to plane as they qualified to be pilots, Moznette wouldn’t stay with the crew, but he became fast friends