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

for shooting down that Zero.
    The doctor was concerned that Pillsbury’s foot wouldn’t stop bleeding. Surgery was necessary, but there was no anesthetic, so Pillsbury was just going to have to do without. With Pillsbury gripping the bed with both hands and Louie lying over his legs, the doctor used pliers to tear tissue from Pillsbury’s foot, then pulled a long strip of hanging skin over his bone stump and sewed it up.
    Super Man
sat by the airstrip, listing left on its peg-legged landing gear, the shredded tire hanging partway off. The air raid had missed the plane, but it didn’t look like it. Its 594 holes were spread over every part of it: swarms of bullet holes, slashes from shrapnel, four cannon-fire gashes at least as large as a man’s head, the gaping punch hole besidePillsbury’s turret, and the hole in the rudder, as big as a doorway. The plane looked as if it had flown through barbed wire, its paint scoured off the leading edge of the engines and sides. Journalists and airmen circled it, amazed that it had stayed airborne for five hours with so much damage. Phil was hailed as a miracle worker, and everyone had cause to reassess the supposedly fainthearted B-24. A photographer climbed inside the plane and snapped a picture. Taken in daylight in the dark of the plane’s interior, the image showed shafts of light streaming through the holes, a shower of stars against a black sky.
    Louie, looking as battered as his plane, walked to
Super Man
. He leaned his head into one of the cannon holes and saw the severed right rudder cables, still spliced together as he had left them. He ran his fingers along the tears in
Super Man
’s skin. The plane had saved him and all but one of his crew. He would think of it as a dear friend.

    Louie at
Super Man
on the day after Nauru.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

    Louie boarded another plane and began his journey back to Hawaii with Phil, Cuppernell, Mitchell, and the bandaged Glassman. Pillsbury, Lambert, and Douglas were too badly wounded to rejoin the crew. In a few days, they’d be sent to Samoa, where a doctor would take one lookat Pillsbury’s leg and announce that it had been “hamburgered.” Lambert would be hospitalized for five months. * When a general presented him with a Purple Heart, Lambert apparently couldn’t sit up, so the general pinned the medal to his sheet. Douglas’s war was done. Brooks was lying in a grave in Funafuti’s Marine Corps cemetery.
    The crew was broken up forever. They would never see
Super Man
again.
    ——

    An oppressive weight settled on Louie as he flew away from Funafuti. He and the remains of the crew stopped at Canton, then flew on to Palmyra Atoll, where Louie took a hot shower and watched
They Died with Their Boots On
at the base theater. It was the movie he’d been working on as an extra when the war had begun, a lifetime ago.
    Back on Hawaii, he sank into a cold torpor. He was irritable and withdrawn. Phil, too, was off-kilter, drinking a few too many, seeming not himself. With a gutted crew and no plane, the men weren’t called for assignments, so they killed time in Honolulu. When a drunken hothead tried to pick a fight, Phil stared back indifferently, but Louie obliged. The two stomped outside to have it out, and the hothead backed out. Later, drinking beer with friends, Louie couldn’t bring himself to be sociable. He holed up in his room, listening to music. His only other solace was running, slogging through the sand around the Kahuku runway, thinking of the 1944 Olympics, trying to forget Harry Brooks’s plaintive face.
    On May 24, Louie, Phil, and the other
Super Man
veterans were transferred to the 42nd squadron of the 11th Bomb Group. The 42nd would be stationed on the eastern edge of Oahu, on the gorgeous beach at Kualoa. Six new men were brought in to replace the lost
Super Man
crewmen. Flying with unfamiliar men worried Louie and Phil. “Don’t like the idea a bit,” Louie once wrote in his diary. “Every time they mix up a crew, they have a crack up.” Among the
Super Man
veterans, the only thing that seemed noteworthy about the new men was that their tail gunner, a sergeant from Cleveland namedFrancis McNamara, had such an affinity for sweets that he ate practically nothing but dessert. The men called him “Mac.”
    For the moment, they had no plane. Liberators destined for the11th Bomb Group were being flown in from other combat areas, and the first five, peppered with bullet holes, had