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

When sleep came, it was fitful and haunted. Because she knew nothing of what had happened to her brother, her mind latched onto the image she had seen in the newspaper after Nauru: Louie peering through a hole in the side of
Super Man
. The image had fixed in her mind the idea of Louie being shot, and this was the point around which her nightmares circled: never a crash, never water, only bullets bloodying Louie as he sat in his plane. Sylvia was always trying to get to Louie, but she was never able. As bad as the nightmares were, in them, Louie was never killed. Even Sylvia’s imagination didn’t allow for her brother’s death.
    In December 1943, the family prepared to celebrate their first Christmas without Louie. The mailman knocked at the door each day to deliver a harvest of cards and letters, most of them offering sympathy. The holiday tree was strung with popcorn and cranberries, and beneath it sat a collection ofgifts for Louie. The gifts would be tucked away in the belief that one day, Louie would come home to open them himself.
    Louise bought a little Christmas card depicting a cherub in a red dress blowing a horn as she stood surrounded by lambs. Inside, she wrote a message.
    Dear Louis. Where ever you are, I know you want us to think of you as well and safe. May God be with you, + guide you. Love from all. Mother Dad Pete Sylvia and Virginia. Christmas 25-43
.

    ——

    Two months later, after a campaign of saturation bombing, America seized Kwajalein. The island’s dense jungle had been bombed away; in its place were massive craters, burned tree stumps, and churned earth. “The entire island looked as if it had been picked up twenty thousand feet and then dropped,” said one serviceman. In what was left of an administrative building, someone found a stack of documents. Outside, a serviceman, climbing through the remains of a wooden structure, saw something in the wreckage and dug it out. It was a long splinter of wood. Etched along the slat, in capital letters, was the name LOUIS ZAMPERINI .
    On Oahu, Joe Deasy was summoned to Hickam Field. When he arrived, he was handed translations of some of the Japanese documentsthat had been taken from Kwajalein. He began to read. Two American airmen, the documents said, had been fished from a life raft and brought to Kwajalein. Their names weren’t given, but they were described as a pilot and a bombardier. They’d been in a plane crash—the date was apparently provided—and three men had survived, but one had died on the raft. The other two had drifted for forty-seven days. Included among the papers were interrogation reports and drawings of B-24s made by the captives. The report stated that the men had been beaten, then sent to Japan by boat.
    The moment that Deasy read the report, he knew who the men were. Deasy had been long at war, and the experience had ground away his emotions, but this revelation broke through: Phillips and Zamperini had survived their crash. Deasy’s elation was tailed by a sinking sense of guilt: In their painstaking search of the ocean, they had missed seeing the lost men, but the enemy had not.
    “I was happy to have found them,” Deasy recalled, “but the next thing is, where the hell are they?” If the report of their transport to Japan was correct, it still didn’t mean they had gotten there alive, or that they had survived whatever lay in store for them there.
    The military now knew with a fair amount of certainty that everyone who had gone up on
Green Hornet
, with the exception of Zamperini and Phillips, was dead. Apparently because of the sketchiness of the reports and the fact that Louie’s and Phil’s fates were still unknown, the families of the dead and the two still missing weren’t notified.
    Like the Zamperinis, the Phillips family had been largely in the dark since Allen had disappeared. Allen’s father was at Camp Pickett in Virginia; his mother, Kelsey, rattled around in her empty house in Princeton, Indiana. After the telegram informing them that Allen was missing, they received a letter from an adjutant from the 42nd squadron, giving details on how Allen had disappeared. The adjutant wrote with a tone of finality, speaking of “your hour of grief,” noting that Allen “will always be revered by the members of this organization” and offering to “extend myself to you to ease your sorrow.” The next month, a package came to Allen’s father at Camp Pickett. In it were two bronzeoak-leaf