Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [38]
About one in the morning I awoke to the sound of aircraft overhead. I thought, Well, somebody’s coming in from the States. Wrong. The Japanese had intercepted the pilot’s radio transmission and learned our location. We had no warning because the marines, evidently, had not been fully alert and had not picked up the planes on their radar. Or maybe, like me, they thought they were friendly.
Explosions started at the far end of the island as Sally or Betty bombers, or both, pattern-bombed our installation. The attack continued for ninety minutes and did considerable damage. Every airman in my tent immediately and spontaneously dashed for cover, no matter that it was raining and we were clad only in our briefs. We tumbled into an air-raid shelter dug under a native hut and jammed in like sardines, our hearts pounding. Someone landed on top of me. Just then—boom—a mortar hit and blew my tent and the war correspondents’ tent to kingdom come. Later I found a reporter huddled over his mangled typewriter mourning it as if it were a close friend.
More damage. During the first pass, a frag bomb ripped an army truck to pieces and mangled three men from the 371st to ribbons. On the second pass the church took a direct hit. Fortunately we had evacuated two minutes earlier and also told the natives to hide in foxholes. Three died when they didn’t get inside far enough. On the third pass they killed more soldiers. On the fourth pass we took direct hits on two B-24s, each fully gassed and stocked with bombs. Later we found landing gear and motors four hundred yards away.
The Japanese laid tiny Funafuti to waste and got us good, ruining several planes, demolishing the personnel area, and filling our makeshift hospital with dead and dying. I went to the field hospital again to help Dr. Roberts.
The next day we remained on alert, waiting for the Japanese to return. They didn’t. Eventually the commander ordered incomplete crews and those without ships but fit for combat to fly back to Canton. Those still in good shape flew to Tarawa to retaliate.
The day after that we left Canton for Palmyra, a beautiful island of palm trees and coral eight hundred miles south of Hawaii that served as a navy and marine base. It was gorgeous and almost like another world after what we’d been through. (Years later, former Los Angeles district attorney Vincent Bugliosi would write about a murder that happened there in And the Sea Shall Tell.) I ran into a few fellows from USC, and spent some time at the officers’ club. They also had a swell theater. I saw They Died with Their Boots On, starring Errol Flynn, had a few beers, took a hot shower, and went to sleep glad I was alive and that my boots were under the bed.
FOR SOME REASON, when General Hale submitted his report of our mission to headquarters in Hawaii he wrote that the destruction had been very light. It wasn’t true and it made me mad. Half our planes were hit, ours the worst. And though everyone made it back to Funafuti, we lost ships there on the ground when the Japanese retaliated. I still have pictures that show the total devastation. Few of our B-24s could be salvaged. Caught in their bunkers, they exploded and left holes thirty feet deep and eighty feet across.
Of course, Hale never recommended Distinguished Flying Crosses for Superman’s crew. I credit this omission to a lack of communication between General Hale and myself. I believe the trouble started shortly after I arrived in Hawaii. After any raid, the press would interview the commanding officer; if I was on the mission they’d also talk to me, the famous Olympian. Sometimes our stories didn’t exactly jibe; more often my picture appeared instead of General Hale’s. I’m convinced he resented that, but the press was right. You had to talk to the soldier on the front line to get the story.