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

with Phil and Louie.
    Moznette, Mitchell, Phil, and Louie were officers; the others were enlisted. All were bachelors, but Harry Brooks, like Phil, had a steady girl back home. Her name was Jeannette, and before the war, she and Harry had set their wedding date for May 8, 1943.
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    The men were issued heavy sheepskin jackets and wool clothing, assembled, and photographed. They would make up crew No. 8 in the nine-crew 372nd Bomb Squadron of the 307th Bomb Group, Seventh Air Force. All they needed was a plane.
    Louie was hoping to be assigned to a B-17 Flying Fortress. It was the kind of plane that men wanted to be seen in: handsome, masculine, nimble, fiercely armed, reliable, long-winded, and practically indestructible. The plane that no one wanted was a new bomber, Consolidated Aircraft’s B-24 Liberator. On paper, it was generally comparable to the B-17, but for one major advantage. Thanks to auxiliary fuel tanks and slender, ultraefficient Davis wings, it could fly literally all day, a decisive asset in the sprawling World War II theaters.
    Flat-faced, rectangular, and brooding, the B-24 had looks only a myopic mother could love. Crewmen gave it a host of nicknames, among them “the Flying Brick,” “the Flying Boxcar,” and “the Constipated Lumberer,” a play on Consolidated Liberator. The cockpit was oppressively cramped, forcing pilot and copilot to live cheek by jowl for missions as long as sixteen hours. Craning over the mountainous control panel, the pilot had a panoramic view of his plane’s snout and not much else. Navigating the nine-inch-wide bomb bay catwalk could be difficult, especially in turbulence; one slip and you’d tumble into the bay, which was fitted with fragile aluminum doors that would tear away with the weight of a falling man.
    Taxiing was an adventure. The B-24’s wheels had no steering, so the pilot had to cajole the bomber along by feeding power to one side’s engines, then the other, and working back and forth on the left and right brakes, one of which was usually much more sensitive than the other. This made the taxiways a pageant of lurching planes, all of which, sooner or later, ended up veering into places nowhere near where their pilots intended them to go, and from which they often had to be extricated with shovels.
    A pilot once wrote that the first time he got into a B-24 cockpit, “it was like sitting on the front porch and flying the house.” The sentiment was common. The Liberator was one of the heaviest planes in the world; the D model then in production weighed 71,200 pounds loaded. Flying it was like wrestling a bear, leaving pilots weary and sore. Because pilots usually manned the yoke with their left hands while their right hands worked the other controls, B-24 pilots were instantly recognizablewhen shirtless, because the muscles on their left arms dwarfed those on their right arms. The plane was so clumsy that it was difficult to fly in the tight formations that were critical to fending off attack. A squiggle of turbulence, or a crewman walking inside the fuselage, would tip the plane off its axis.
    The B-24 was plagued with mechanical difficulties. If one of the four engines quit, staying airborne was challenging; the failure of two engines was often an emergency. Shortly after the plane was introduced, there were several incidents in which B-24 tails dropped off in midair. And though the war was young, the plane was winning a reputation for being delicate, especially in the skinny wings, which could snap off if struck in combat. Some of the men at Ephrata thought of the B-24 as a death trap.
    After a long wait, the 372nd squadron’s planes flew into Ephrata. Phil’s crew walked out and squinted at the horizon. Even from a distance, there was no mistaking the silhouettes. As the men grumbled, Louie heard one voice pipe up.
    “It’s the Flying Coffin.”
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    They were assigned to a B-24D that looked like all the others. For the next three months—in Ephrata in August and September and Sioux City in October—they practically lived in it. They flew in formation, fired at targets pulled by tow planes, simulated combat runs, and dive-bombed. One day they buzzed so low over Iowa that the propellers kicked up a storm of sand, skinning the paint off the plane’s belly and scouring the legs of Pillsbury, who was sitting by the open hatch in the tail, trying to photograph their dummy bombs as they fell into target nets. Throughout it all,