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

light that it made. The concussion blew pieces of coral into our hole and we blindly groped for them and tossed them out as quick as we could find them. At intervals between a bomb falling it sounded like church: voices from nearby slit trenches all chanting the Lord’s prayer together—over and over again. Louder when the bombs hit closer. I thought I even heard some guys crying. You were afraid to look up because you felt your face might be seen from above.”
    Two more soldiers were killed on the third pass. On the fourth pass, the Japanese hit the jackpot. Two bombs bull’s-eyed the gassed-up, loaded B-24s parked by the runway. The first went up in a huge explosion, sending bomber parts showering all over the island. Another burst into flames. The fires set off machine gun bullets, which whizzed in all directions, their tracers drawing ribbons in the air. Then the five-hundred-pound bombs on the planes started going off.
    Finally, the atoll fell silent. A few of the men, shaking, stood up. As they walked among the wreckage, another B-24 blew up, the explosion accelerated by its 2,300 gallons of fuel, 3,000 pounds of bombs, and cache of .50-caliber ammunition. A copilot wrote that it sounded “like the whole island was blowing up.” With that, it was over.
    ——

    When dawn broke, men began creeping from their hiding places. The man who had run into the ocean waded ashore, having clung to a rockfor three hours as the tide rose. With the morning light, the man who had cursed his generals as he had dug his foxhole discovered that those generals had been digging right next to him. Louie and Phil crawled out from beneath the hut. Phil was unscathed; Louie had only a cut on his arm. They joined a procession of exhausted, stunned men.

    Funafuti, the morning after.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

    Funafuti was wrecked. A bomb had struck the church roof, sending the building down onto itself, but thanks to Corporal Ladd, there had been no one inside. There was a crater where Louie and Phil’s tent had been. Another tent lay collapsed, a bomb standing on its nose in the middle of it. Someone tied the bomb to a truck, dragged it to the beach, and turned sharply, sending the bomb skidding into the ocean. Rosynek walked up the runway and found six Japanese bombs lying in a neat row. The bombs were armed by spinning as they fell, but whoever had dropped them had come in too low, not leaving the bombs enough drop space to arm themselves. The men dragged them into the ocean too.
    Where the struck B-24s had been, there were deep holes ringed by decapitated coconut trees. One crater, Louie noted in his diary, was thirty-five feet deep and sixty feet across. Bits of bomber were sprinkledeverywhere. Landing gear and seats that had seen the sunset from one side of Funafuti greeted the sunrise from the other. All that was left of one bomber was a tail, two wingtips, and two propellers, connected by a black smudge. There was a 1,200-horsepower Pratt and Whitney engine sitting by itself on the runway; the plane that it belonged to was nowhere to be found. Louie came upon a reporter staring into a crater, in tears. Louie walked to him, bracing to see a dead body. Instead, he saw a typewriter, flattened.
    The wounded and dead were everywhere. Two mechanics who’d been caught in the open were bruised all over from the concussive force of the explosions. They were so traumatized that they couldn’t talk, and were using their hands to communicate. Men stood in a solemn circle around a couple of seats and twisted metal, all that was left of the ordnance truck. The three men who had sought shelter under it were beyond recognition. A radioman was found dead, a bomb shard in his head. Louie came upon the body of a native, dressed in a loincloth, lying on his back. Half of his head was missing.
    A radio operator would say that there had been aboutfourteen Japanese bombers, but thinking that there had been two sets of three, someone dubbed them “the Stinking Six.” Everyone expected them to return. Phil and Louie joined a group of men digging foxholes with shovels and helmets. When they had a moment, they walked to the beach and sat together for an hour, trying to collect their thoughts.
    ——

    Sometime that day, Louie went to the infirmary to help out. Pillsbury was back in his cot. His leg was burning terribly, and he lay with it dangling in the air, dripping blood into a puddle on the floor. Cuppernell sat with him, thanking him