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

clusters, awarded to Allen for his valor in the missions of Makin, Tarawa, and Nauru. “Pending final determination of your son’s status,” the cover letter read, “the Oak Leaf Clusters are being sent to you for safe-keeping.” Though the Phillipses didn’t know it, the medals arrived the same week Allen was captured.
    Chaplain Phillips wanted to send the oak-leaf clusters to his wife but feared losing them in the mail, so he kept them with him in Virginia. He took a picture of them, along with Allen’s service ribbons, wings, insignia, and Air Medal, attached the picture to a maroon piece of felt he’d cut from a lady’s hat, and glued the felt to a walnut plaque. When he got back to Indiana, he planned to attach the actual medals and ribbons to the felt and stand the plaque on the bookcase, under Allen’s picture. “It certainly is swell,” he wrote to his daughter.
    In the absence of information, all the Phillipses could do was ponder what little they knew. They, like the Zamperinis, refused to conclude that their boy was dead. “I think I have thought of every conceivable angle to what Allen did and I have not dismissed any of them from my mind yet,” Chaplain Phillips wrote to his daughter in August. “So many things could be true about it all that they build up for me a feeling of confidence that will not be shaken. Some day we are all going to have that reunion we are hoping and waiting for.”
    For Cecy Perry, the news that her fiancé was missing was followed by a letter from her old friend Smitty, one of the pilots who had searched for
Green Hornet
. In his letter, Smitty told Cecy everything that was known about Allen’s disappearance and how dedicated the searchers were to finding him. He didn’t tell her that he had seen what had probably been the provisions box for the lost plane, floating by itself on theocean. He wrote about having sat with Allen on the night before he disappeared, and how Allen had been thinking of her and hoping to get leave to see her.

    Phil’s fiancée, Cecy Perry.
Courtesy of Karen Loomis

    After Smitty’s letter, no news came. Cecy, desperate for information, felt isolated in Indiana. One of her friends was living in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and Cecy thought that in the capital, she could find out more about Allen. She gave up teaching, traveled east, and moved into her friend’s apartment, which she decorated with pictures of Allen. She got a job with TWA, thinking that through the airline, she might learn something. She spent much of her time asking questions, but learned nothing.
    Cecy was a sensible, educated woman, but in her anguish, she did something completely out of character. She went to a fortune-teller and asked about Allen.
    The fortune-teller told her that Allen wasn’t dead. He was injured but alive. He would be found, she said, before Christmas. Cecy latched onto those words and believed them.
    ——

    By the spring of 1944, the mothers of the
Green Hornet
crewmen, as well as other family members, had begun to correspond. In dozens of letters that crisscrossed America, they shared their emotions and bolstered each other’s hopes about “our boys.” Kelsey would later say that she came to love all of them through those letters.
    “This year sure has been an awful long year just waiting of some word from them,” wrote Delia Robinson, the sister of
Green Hornet
gunner Otto Anderson, that June. “We just have to keep on hoping.” The waiting had taken its toll on crewman Leslie Dean’s mother, Mable—her failing health had sent her to Wichita for weeks of treatment—but she, like the others, had not given up. “We thought surely we would have heard something when the year was up,” she wrote to Louise. “So it seems they are
not sure
the crew were killed, or they would have notified us long before this. So I feel that we can still have hope of them being alive somewhere.”
    Mable Dean wrote those words on June 27, 1944. On that very day, exactly thirteen months after
Green Hornet
had gone down, messages were typed up at the War Department and sent to the families of the plane’s crewmen. When Louise Zamperini’s message reached her door, she opened it and burst into tears. The military had officially declared Louie, and all the other crewmen, dead.
    Kelsey Phillips was not persuaded. She either learned or guessed that the
La Porte Herald-Argus
, the newspaper of their former hometown, would publish the news. She contacted