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

all that lay ahead for her, Louise would pin the wings to her dress. Every night, before she went to bed, she’d take them off her dress and pin them to her nightgown.
    ——

    On November 2, 1942, Phil’s crew climbed aboard
Super Man
and readied to go to war. They were heading into a desperate fight. North to south, Japan’s new empire stretched five thousand miles, from the snowbound Aleutians to Java, hundreds of miles south of the equator. West to east, the empire sprawled over more than six thousand miles, from the border of India to the Gilbert and Marshall islands in the central Pacific. In the Pacific, virtually everything above Australia and west of the international date line had been taken by Japan. Only a few eastward islands had been spared, among them the Hawaiian Islands, Midway, Canton, Funafuti, and a tiny paradise called Palmyra. It was from these outposts that the men of the AAF were trying to win the Pacific, as the saying went, “one damned island after another.”
    That day,
Super Man
banked over the Pacific for the first time. The crew was bound for Oahu’s Hickam Field, where the war had begun for America eleven months before, and where it would soon begin for them. The rim of California slid away, and then there was nothing but ocean. From this day forward, until victory or defeat, transfer, discharge, capture, or death took them from it, the vast Pacific would be beneath and around them. Its bottom was already littered with downed warplanes and the ghosts of lost airmen. Every day of this long and ferocious war, more would join them.
    * In June 1941, the air corps became a subordinate arm of the Army Air Forces. It remained in existence as a combat branch of the army until 1947.

Seven
“This Is It, Boys”

    O AHU WAS STILL RINGING FROM THE JAPANESE ATTACK . The enemy had left so many holes in the roads that the authorities hadn’t been able to fill them all yet, leaving the local drivers swerving around craters. There were still a few gouges in the roof of the Hickam Fieldbarracks, making for soggy airmen when it rained. The island was on constant alert for air raids or invasion, and was so heavily camouflaged, a ground crewman wrote in his diary, that “one sees only about ⅓ of what is actually there.” Each night, the island disappeared; every window was fitted with lightproof curtains, every car with covered headlights, and blackout patrols enforced rules so strict that a man wasn’t even permitted to strike a match. Servicemen were under orders to carry gas masks in hip holsters at all times. To reach their beloved waves, local surfers had to worm their way under the barbed wire that ran the length of Waikiki Beach.
    The 372nd squadron was sent to Kahuku, a beachside base at the foot of a blade of mountains on the north shore. Louie and Phil, who would soon be promoted to first lieutenant, were assigned to a barracks with Mitchell, Moznette, twelve other young officers, and hordes of mosquitoes. “You kill one,” Phil wrote, “and ten more come to the funeral.” Outside, the building was picturesque; inside, Phil wrote, itlooked “like a dozen dirty Missouri pigs have been wallowing on it.” The nonstop revelry didn’t help matters. After one four A.M . knock-down, drag-outwater fight involving all sixteen officers, Phil woke up with floor burns on his elbows and knees. On another night, as Louie and Phil wrestled over a beer, they crashed into the flimsy partition separating their room from the next. The partition keeled over, and Phil and Louie kept staggering forward, toppling two more partitions before they stopped. When Colonel William Matheny, the 307th Bomb Group commander, saw the wreckage, he grumbled something about how Zamperini must have been involved.
    There was one perk to life in the barracks. The bathroom was plastered in girlie pinups, a Sistine Chapel ofpornography. Phil gaped at it, marveling at the distillation of frustrated flyboy libido that had inspired it. Here in the pornographic palace, he was a long way from his minister father’s house in Indiana.
    ——

    Everyone was eager to take a crack at the enemy, but there was no combat to be had. In its place were endless lectures, endless training, and, when Moznette was transferred to another crew, the breaking in of a series of temporary copilots. Eventually, Long Beach, California,native Charleton Hugh Cuppernell joined the crew as Moznette’s replacement. A smart, jovial ex–football