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

player and prelaw student, built like a side of beef, Cuppernell got along with everyone, dispensing wisecracks through teeth clenched around a gnawed-up cigar.

    Louie, ready for the chill of high altitude.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

    When they first went up over Hawaii, the men were surprised to learn that their arctic gear hadn’t been issued in error. At ten thousand feet, even in the tropics, it could be sharply cold, and occasionally the bombardier’sgreenhouse windows froze. Only the flight deck up front was heated, so the men in the rear tramped around in fleece jackets, fur-lined boots, and, sometimes, electrically heated suits. The ground crewmen used the bombers as flying iceboxes, hiding soda bottles in them and retrieving them, ice-cold, after missions.
    Training mostly over Kauai, the men discovered their talent. Though they had a few mishaps—Phil once taxied
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straight into a telephone pole—in aerial gunning, they nailed targets at a rate more than three times the squadron average. Louie’s bombing scores were outstanding. In one dive-bombing exercise, he hit the target dead center seven of nine times. The biggest chore of training was coping with the nitpicking, rank-pulling, much-loathed lieutenant who oversaw their flights. Once, when one of
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’s engines quit during a routine flight, Phil turned the plane back and landed at Kahuku, only to be accosted by the furious lieutenant in a speeding jeep, ordering them back up. When Louie offered to fly on three engines so long as the lieutenant joined them, the lieutenant abruptly changed his mind.
    When the men weren’t training, they were onsea search, spending ten hours a day patrolling a wedge of ocean, looking for the enemy. It was intensely dull work. Louie killed time by sleeping on Mitchell’s navigator table and taking flying lessons from Phil. On some flights, he sprawled behind the cockpit, reading Ellery Queen novels and taxing the nerves of Douglas, who eventually got so annoyed at having to step over Louie’s long legs that he attacked him with a fire extinguisher. Once, the gunners got so bored that they fired at a pod of whales. Phil yelled at them to knock it off, and the whales swam on, unharmed. The bullets, it turned out, carried lethal speed for only a few feet after entering the water. One day, this would be very useful knowledge.
    One morning on sea search, Phil’s crew passed over an American submarine sitting placidly on the surface, crewmen ambling over the deck. Louie flashed the identification code three times, but the sub crew ignored him. Louie and Phil decided to “scare the hell out of them.” AsLouie rolled open the bomb bay doors, Phil sent the plane screaming down over the submarine. “The retreat from the deck was so hasty, it looked like they were sucked into the sub,” Louie wrote in his diary. “I gave the skipper an F for identification, but an A+ for a quick dive.”
    The tedium of sea search made practical joking irresistible. When a loudmouth ground officer griped about the higher pay allotted to airmen, the crew invited him to fly the plane himself. During the flight, they sat him in the copilot’s seat while Louie hid under the navigator’s table, next to the chains that linked the plane’s yokes to the control surfaces. When the officer took the yoke, Louie began tugging the chains, making the plane swoop up and down. The officer panicked, Louie smothered his laughter, and Phil kept a perfect poker face. The officer never again complained about airmen’s pay.

    Copilot Charleton Hugh Cuppernell.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

    Louie’s two proudest moments as a prankster both involved chewing gum. After Cuppernell and Phil swiped Louie’s beer, Louie retaliated by sneaking out to
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and jamming gum into the cockpit “piss pipe”—the urine relief tube. During that day’s flight, the call of nature was followed by an inexplicably brimming piss pipe, turbulence, and at least one wet airman. Louie hid in Honolulu for two daysto escape retribution. On another day, to get even with Cuppernell and Phil for regularly stealing his chewing gum, Louie replaced his ordinary gum with a laxative variety. Just before a long day of sea search, Cuppernell and Phil each stole three pieces, triple the standard dose. As
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flew over the Pacific that morning, Louie watched with delight as pilot and copilot, in great distress, made alternating dashes to the back of the plane,