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

the base down.
    The next afternoon, the crew was called to the briefing room, which was actually the base theater, strung with limp Christmas tinsel and streamers. They were going to hit Wake that night, with dive-bombing. The mission would take sixteen hours, nonstop, the longest combat flight the war had yet seen. This would push the B-24s as far as they could go. Even with auxiliary fuel tanks, they would be cutting it extremely close.
    Before the flight, Louie walked to the airfield. The ground crewmenwere preparing the planes, stripping out every ounce of excess weight and rolling black paint on the bellies and wings to make them harder to see against a night sky. Coming to
Super Man
, Louie climbed into the bomb bay, where the bombs sat ready. In honor of his college buddy Payton Jordan, who had just married his high school sweetheart, Louie scrawled
Marge and Payton Jordan
on a bomb.
    At 4:00 P.M . on December 23, 1942, twenty-six B-24s, laden with some 73,000 gallons of fuel and 75,000 pounds of bombs, rose up from Midway.
Super Man
slipped toward the rear of the procession. All afternoon and into the evening, the planes flew toward Wake. The sun set, and the bombers pressed on under the timid glow of moon and stars.
    At eleven P.M. , when his plane was about 150 miles from Wake, Phil switched off the outside lights. Clouds closed in. The bombers were supposed to approach the atoll in formation, but with clouds around and the lights off, the pilots couldn’t find their flightmates. They couldn’t risk breaking radio silence, so each plane went on alone. The pilots craned into the dark, swerving away from the faint shadows of others, trying to avoid collisions. Wake was very close now, but they couldn’t see it. Sitting in the top turret of
Super Man
, Stanley Pillsbury wondered if he’d make it back alive. In the greenhouse below, Louie felt a buzzing inside himself, the same sensation that he had felt before races. Ahead, Wake slept.
    ——

    At exactly midnight, Colonel Matheny, piloting the lead plane,
Dumbo the Avenger
, broke radio silence.
    “This is it, boys.”
    Matheny dropped
Dumbo
’s nose and sent the bomber plunging out of the clouds. There beneath him was Wake, three slender islands joining hands around a lagoon. As his copilot called out speed and altitude figures, Matheny pushed his plane toward a string of buildings on Peacock Point, the atoll’s southern tip. On either side of Matheny’s plane, B-24s followed him down. When he reached his bombing altitude, Matheny hauled the plane’s nose up and yelled to the bombardier.
    “When are you going to turn loose those incendiaries?”
    “Gone, sir!”
    At that instant, the buildings on Peacock Point exploded. It was forty-five seconds past midnight.
    Matheny tipped his bomber and looked down. Peacock Point, struckby
Dumbo’s
bombs and those of its flanking planes, was engulfed in fire. Matheny knew he’d been lucky; the Japanese had been caught sleeping, and no one had yet manned the antiaircraft guns. As Matheny turned back toward Midway, wave after wave of B-24s dove at Wake. The Japanese ran for their guns.
    Up in
Super Man
, well behind and above Matheny’s plane, Louie saw broad, quick throbs of light in the clouds. He hit the bomb bay door control valve, and the doors rumbled open. He set his bomb rack on the “select” position, flipped on his bomb switches, and fixed the settings. Phil’s orders were to dive to 4,000 feet before dropping the bombs, but when he reached that altitude, he was still lost in clouds. Louie’s target was the airstrip, but he couldn’t see it. Phil pushed the plane still lower, moving at terrific speed. Suddenly, at 2,500 feet,
Super Man
speared through the clouds and Wake stretched out, sudden and brilliant, beneath it.
    Pillsbury would never shake the memory of what he saw. “It looked like a star storm,” he remembered. The islands, sealed in blackness a moment before, were a blaze of garish light. Several large infernos, spewing black smoke, were consuming the atoll’s oil tanks. Everywhere, bombs were striking targets, sending up mushrooms of fire. Searchlights swung about, their beams reflecting off the clouds and back onto the ground, illuminating scores of Japanese, wearing only
fundoshi
undergarments, sprinting around in confusion. What neither Pillsbury nor any of the other airmen knew was that among the men under their bombers that night were the ninety-eight Americans who had