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

the planes behind him to land at the same time. So many planes shot off the end of Funafuti’s runway and into the ocean that the ground crews kept a bulldozer equipped with a towing cable parked by the water.
    For loaded B-24s, which needed well over four thousand feet for takeoff, the cropped island runways, often abutted by towering palm trees, were a challenge. “The takeoff proved exciting,” wrote Staff Sergeant Frank Rosynek of one overloaded departure. “Six of us had to stand on the narrow beam between the bomb bay doors with our arms spread out on each side over the tops of the twin auxiliary fuel tanks. The smell of the high-octane aviation fuel was almost intoxicating. The plane lumbered down the runway for an eternity and we could see the hard packed coral through the cracks where the bomb bay doors came up against the beam we were standing on, one foot in front of the other. There was a SWOOSH and pieces of palm fronds suddenly appeared jammed in the cracks, on both sides!… Only the laundry knew how scared I was.”
    And then there was human error. Pilots flew or drove their planes into each other. In B-24s notorious for fuel leaks, airmen lit cigarettes and blew up their planes. On one flight, when
Super Man
’s No. 3 engine died, Pillsbury found the temporary copilot, oblivious, sitting with his boot resting against the engine’s ignition switch, pushing it into the “off” position. Louie was once asked to join a crew whose bombardier had gotten sick. Louie, too, was feeling ill, so the crew found anotherman. During the flight, the tower warned the pilot that he was heading toward a mountain. The pilot replied that he saw it, then flew right into it. The strangest incident occurred when a bomber made a sharp pull-up on a training run. A man inside, trying to avoid falling, inadvertently grabbed the life raft–release handle. The raft sprang from the roof and wrapped around the plane’s horizontal stabilizer. Barely able to control the plane, the pilot ordered his men to bail out. He and his copilot somehow landed safely, and everyone survived.
    Finally, there was the formidable difficulty of navigation. Making extraordinarily complex spherical trigonometry calculations based on figures taken from a crowd of instruments, navigators groped over thousands of miles of featureless ocean toward targets or destination islands that were blacked out at night, often only yards wide, and flat to the horizon. Even with all the instruments, the procedures could be comically primitive. “Each time I made a sextant calibration,” wrote navigator John Weller, “I would open the escape hatch on the flight deck and stand on my navigation desk and the radio operator’s desk while [the radioman] held on to my legs so I would not be sucked out of the plane.” At night, navigators sometimes resorted to following the stars, guiding their crews over the Pacific by means not so different from those used by ancient Polynesian mariners. In a storm or clouds, even that was impossible.
    Given that a plane had to be only a tick off course to miss an island, it’s amazing that any crews found their destinations. Many didn’t. Martin Cohn, an ordnance officer on Oahu, was once in a radar shack as a lost plane, unequipped with radar, tried to find the island. “We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back,” he said. “I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.”
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    The risks of flying were compounded exponentially in combat. From the sky came Japanese fighters, chief among them the swift, agile Zero, which dominated the sky in the first half of the war. Zero pilots pummeled bombers with machine gun fire and massively destructive 20mm cannon shells, which rammed gaping holes in their targets. When these failed, some Zero pilots rammed their planes into bombers, kamikaze-style; one B-24 returned to base with half of a Zero hanging from his wing. From the ground came antiaircraft fire, including flak, which burst into razor-sharp metal shards that sliced planes open. To surviveAA fire and enemy aircraft, bomber pilots needed to change their altitude and direction constantly. But on approach, the Norden bombsight, not the pilot, flew the plane, so evasive action was impossible. B-24s were in the control of the bombsight for three to five minutes on approach;Japanese range finders needed less than sixty seconds to pinpoint bomber