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

barracks. In the corner of one of the rooms, they hung a small flag in memory of Zamp. It would hang there as Louie, Phil, and Mac drifted west and the Allies, the 11th Bomb Group’s 42nd squadron among them, carried the war across the Pacific and into the throat of Japan.
    * There was one spot directly west, about halfway to the Marshall Islands, where the ocean floor was just five feet below the surface. It was almost an island, but not quite.
* As soon as he could walk, Pillsbury was assigned to a new crew to replace a dead waist gunner. Superstitious about adding a new man, the crew received him coldly. On a mission, a Zero tried to ram the plane, and one of its rounds exploded inside the fuselage. The engineer found Pillsbury on the floor with a hunk of metal embedded just above his eye, the white of which was clouding with blood. The plane made a hasty landing, and Pillsbury was bandaged up and sent back to his gun. Somehow, Pillsbury survived the war, a fistful of medals and a permanent limp testifying to all he’d endured. “It was awful, awful, awful,” he said through tears sixty years later. “…  If you dig into it, it comes back to you. That’s the way war is.”

Fourteen
Thirst

    P HIL FELT AS IF HE WERE ON FIRE. THE EQUATORIAL SUN LAY upon the men, scalding their skin. Their upper lips burned and cracked, ballooning so dramatically that they obstructed their nostrils, while their lower lips bulged against their chins. Their bodies were slashed with open cracks that formed under the corrosive onslaught of sun, salt, wind, and fuel residue. Whitecaps slapped into the fissures, a sensation that Louie compared to having alcohol poured onto a wound. Sunlight glared off the ocean, sending barbs of white light into the men’s pupils and leaving their heads pounding. The men’s feet were cratered with quarter-sized salt sores. The rafts baked along with their occupants, emitting a bitter smell.
    The water cans were empty. Desperately thirsty and overheated, the men could do no more than use their hands to bail seawater over themselves. The coolness of the ocean beckoned and couldn’t be answered, for the sharks circled. One shark, six or eight feet long, stalked the rafts without rest, day and night. The men became especially wary of him, and when he ventured too close, one of them would jab him with an oar.
    On the third day without water, a smudge appeared on the horizon. It grew, darkened, billowed over the rafts, and lidded the sun. Downcame the rain. The men threw back their heads, spilled their bodies back, spread their arms, and opened their mouths. The rain fell on their chests, lips, faces, tongues. It soothed their skin, washed the salt and sweat and fuel from their pores, slid down their throats, fed their bodies. It was a sensory explosion.
    They knew it wouldn’t last. They had to find a way to save the water. The narrow water tins, opened to the downpour, caught virtually nothing. Louie, keeping his head tipped up and his mouth open, felt around the raft for something better. He dug into the raft pockets and pulled out one of the air pumps. It was sheathed in a canvas case about fourteen inches long, stitched down one side. He tore the seam open, spread the fabric to form a triangular bowl, and watched happily as the rain pooled on the fabric.
    He had collected some two pints of water when a whitecap cracked into the raft, crested over, and slopped into the canvas, spoiling the water. Not only had the most productive part of the storm been wasted, but the canvas had to be rinsed in the rain before Louie could resume capturing water. Even when that was done, there was no way to avoid the next whitecap, because Louie couldn’t see them coming.
    Louie tried a new technique. Instead of allowing large pools of water to gather, he began continuously sucking the captured water into his mouth, then spitting it in the cans. Once the cans were full, he kept harvesting the rain, giving one man a drink every thirty seconds or so. They tore open the second pump case to form another rain catcher. When the sun emerged, they found that the canvas cases also made excellent hats. They began rotations with them, two men in, one man out.
    ——

    The men were ravenous. It was now clear that Mac’s binge on the chocolate, which had seemed only moderately worrisome at the time, was a catastrophe. Louie resented Mac, and Mac seemed to know it. Though Mac never spoke of it, Louie sensed that he was