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

sides were pilot fish, striped black and white.
    The sharks, which Louie thought were of the mako and reef species, were so close that the men would only have to extend their hands to touch them. The smallest were about six feet long; some were double that size, twice the length of the rafts. They bent around the rafts, testing the fabric, dragging their fins along them, but not trying to get at the men on top. They seemed to be waiting for the men to come to them.
    The sun sank, and it became sharply cold. The men used their hands to bail a few inches of water into each raft. Once their bodies warmed the water, they felt less chilled. Though exhausted, they fought the urge to sleep, afraid that a ship or submarine would pass and they’d miss it. Phil’s lower body, under the water, was warm enough, but his upper body was so cold that he shook.
    It was absolutely dark and absolutely silent, save for the chattering of Phil’s teeth. The ocean was a flat calm. A rough, rasping tremor ran through the men. The sharks were rubbing their backs along the raft bottoms.
    Louie’s arm was still draped over the side of his raft, his hand resting on Phil’s forehead. Under Louie’s hand, Phil drifted to sleep, attended by the sensation of sharks scraping down the length of his back. In the next raft, Louie, too, fell asleep.
    Mac was alone in his wakefulness, his mind spinning with fear. Grasping at an addled resolution, he began to stir.

Thirteen
Missing at Sea

    D AISY MAE
TOUCHED DOWN ON PALMYRA LATE THAT AFTERNOON . The crew hadsearched for Corpening’s plane all day but had seen no trace of it. Deasy had dinner, then went to the base theater. He was watching the film when someone told him to report to the base commander immediately. When he got there, he was told that
Green Hornet
had never come in. “Holy smoke!” he said. He knew that there were two possibilities. One was that Phillips’s crew had turned back to Hawaii; the other was that they were, as Deasy phrased it, “in the drink.” Someone went to check with Hawaii. Knowing that if
Green Hornet
was indeed down, they’d still have to wait until morning to search, Deasy went to bed.
    At around midnight, a sailor woke Deasy’s radioman, Herman Scearce, and told him that Phil’s plane was missing. The navy wanted to check Scearce’s radio log to see when the last contact with the plane was. Scearce asked the sailor to wake Deasy, and he, Deasy, and navy officials reviewed the log at the base office. It yielded little information.
    At four-thirty A.M. ,
Green Hornet
was declared missing. Two planes were now down—Corpening’s and Phillips’s—taking twenty-one men with them.
    The navy assumed command of the rescue effort. Once the sun was up,
Daisy Mae
would be sent out, along with at least two navy flying boats and at least one other AAF plane. Because
Daisy Mae
and
Green Hornet
had flown side by side early in the journey, the searchers knew that
Green Hornet
had not crashed during the first two hundred miles of the trip. It had apparently gone down somewhere between the point at which
Daisy Mae
had left it and Palmyra, a stretch of eight hundred miles. The trick was figuring out the direction in which any survivors would be drifting. The ocean around Palmyra was a whorl of currents, lying at the meeting point of the westward-carrying north equatorial current and the eastward-carrying equatorial countercurrent. A few miles of difference in latitude could mean a 180-degree difference in current direction, and no one knew where the plane had hit. The search area would have to be enormous.
    Each crew was given search coordinates. From Palmyra,
Daisy Mae
would fly north. From Oahu, several planes would fly south. Not long after sunup, the planes took off. Everyone knew that the odds of finding the crew were very long, but, said Scearce, “we kept hoping, hoping, hoping …”
    ——

    Louie woke with the sun. Mac was beside him, lying back. Phil lay in his raft, his mind still fumbling. Louie sat up and ran his eyes over the sky and ocean in search of rescuers. Only the sharks stirred.
    Louie decided to divvy up breakfast, a single square of chocolate. He untied the raft pocket and looked in. All of the chocolate was gone. He looked around the rafts. No chocolate, no wrappers. His gaze paused on Mac. The sergeant looked back at him with wide, guilty eyes.
    The realization that Mac had eaten all of the chocolate rolled hard over Louie. In the brief