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

days searching for missing planes, he knew how hard it was to see a raft, especially among clouds. For all he knew, he too had overlooked raft-bound men below him.
    But what had probably been their best chance of rescue had been lost. With every hour, they were drifting farther west, away from the flight lanes. If they weren’t found, the only way they could survive would be to get to land. To their west, they knew, there wasn’t a single island for some two thousand miles. * If by some miracle they floated that far and were still alive, they might reach the Marshall Islands. If they veered a little south, they might reach the Gilberts. If they were lucky enough to drift to those islands, rather than passing by and out again into the open Pacific, they’d have another problem. Both sets ofislands belonged to the Japanese. Watching
Daisy Mae
fly away, Louie had a sinking feeling.
    ——

    As the castaways watched their would-be rescuers disappear over the horizon, not far away, George “Smitty” Smith, who had sat up the night before the crash talking to Phil about Cecy, was piloting his B-24 over the ocean, searching for any sign of the lost men. About fifty miles short of Barbers Point, a base on the leeward side of Oahu, his crew spotted something. Spiraling in for a closer look, Smitty saw a muddle of yellow rectangular boxes, jostling on the surface. Large fish were circling them.
    The boxes had not come from
Green Hornet
. They were too close to Oahu to have traveled that far, especially as the currents wouldn’t have carried them in that direction. But Corpening’s plane had probably gone down somewhere along the north-south flight lane, the lane over which Smitty was searching. The boxes may well have been the last remains of Corpening’s plane, and the men aboard it.
    The boxes weren’t the only sighting that Smitty had that day. In the same region where
Green Hornet
had crashed, he spotted a shock-yellow object bobbing in the water. He swung his bomber down toward it. It appeared to be a provisions box, like the ones carried on B-24s, but he wasn’t sure. Smitty flew loops around the box for fifteen minutes. There was nothing anywhere near it: no debris, no rafts, no men. Smitty probably believed that he was looking at a piece of Phil’s plane, and if he did, he was probably right. He flew back to Oahu, thinking of his friend Cecy and all the pain she would feel when she learned that her fiancé was missing.
    On Oahu, the men of the 42nd squadron were losing hope. “Cuppernell, Phillips, Zamperini (the Olympic miler), and Mitchell, lost, on their way to Palmyra,” a ground crewman wrote in his diary. “I find it hard to get used to such a thing. Just the other day I drove them all to Kahuku and around—kidded around with them but now they’re probably dead! The other pilots act as though nothing has happened and speak of sending the other fellow’s clothes home as though it were an everyday occurrence. That’s the way it has to be played because that’s the way it is—it’s an everyday occurrence!”
    ——

    The castaways’ bodies were declining. Other than Mac’s feast on the chocolate bars, none of them had eaten since their early morningbreakfast before their last flight. They were intensely thirsty and hungry. After the B-24 sighting, they spent another frigid night, then a long fourth day. There were no planes, no ships, no submarines. Each man drank the last drops of his water.
    Sometime on the fifth day, Mac snapped. After having said almost nothing for days, he suddenly began screaming that they were going to die. Wild-eyed and raving, he couldn’t stop shouting. Louie slapped him across the face. Mac abruptly went silent and lay down, appearing strangely contented. Maybe he was comforted by Louie’s assertion of control, protected thereby from the awful possibilities that his imagination hung before him.
    Mac had good reason to lose faith. Their water was gone. After the B-24 had passed over, no more planes had come, and the current was carrying them far from the paths trafficked by friendly aircraft. If the search for them hadn’t been called off, the men knew, it soon would be.
    That night, before he tried to sleep, Louie prayed. He had prayed only once before in his life, in childhood, when his mother was sick and he had been filled with a rushing fear that he would lose her. That night on the raft, in words composed in his head, never passing his lips, he pleaded for