Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [42]
THE MOST FRIGHTENING experience in life is going down in a plane. Those moments when you fall through the air, waiting for the inevitable impact, are like riding a roller coaster—with one important difference. On a roller coaster you close your eyes, hold on despite the sheer horror, and come through. In a plummeting plane there’s only sheer horror, and the idea of your very imminent death is incomprehensible. Of course, only if you’ve lived through a crash can you tell anyone about the abject terror. You think, This is it. It’s over. I’m going to die. You know with 100 percent of your being that the end is unavoidable. Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It’s not so strange. Where there’s still life, there’s still hope.
What happens is up to God.
Phil looked at me. I knew without his uttering a sound that we were probably dead. Still, his lips moved. Maybe he shouted, maybe he whispered, but I heard him loud and clear. I’ll never forget his words: “Get to your stations and prepare to crash.”
I RUSHED TO my position in the waist section, at the right window, next to the machine-gun tripod. I already wore my life jacket; I knew the drill because we’d practiced it again and again on the ground.
In every water emergency a lot depends on how you land—if you land. A B-17 can make a smooth touchdown; if you dump the fuel beforehand, it will float for about thirty minutes, enough time to get all the life rafts and supplies off the plane. B-25s can also handle the water, but B-24s usually fell apart no matter how good the landing. The retractable bomb-bay doors were about a quarter inch from being flush with the fuselage. Hit the drink at two hundred miles an hour, catch the edge, and water rushes in, tearing the plane to bits—and that’s if you come in easy.
In our case, none of that mattered.
All B-24s pack two life rafts in fuselage compartments above the wings, mounted against spring-loaded plates. The outside covers latch with a pin, with a weight on the end. When the plane hits water, the impact dislodges the pin, the doors burst open, and the spring plate throws the rafts out about a hundred feet, over each wing, into the ocean. That pulls a trigger mechanism and the rafts inflate while still attached to the plane by parachute cord. When the plane sinks below a certain depth, the cords pull free of the plane.
A third life raft was packed in the bomb bay next to my position. My job was to get it out of the plane after a water landing. A big, waterproofed metal box of rations sat nearby, with enough fortified chocolate, cans of water, and other food supplies to last ten guys for two weeks. The engineer or tail gunner’s job was to grab the survival box.
My stomach tightened and lurched as we tumbled and turned. I crouched low and braced myself against the soft round raft. In fact, I’m sure I hugged it.
The nose and the left wing hit the water simultaneously. We did half a cartwheel.
I expected my life to flash before my eyes. It didn’t.
Then the plane blew apart.
FROM PHIL’S WARNING to impact took less than two minutes, then the world was on fire. Had I been in a boat nearby, watching the Green Hornet explode into a ball of flame, it might have sounded like melting, twisting metal and fireworks trying to harmonize. Surrounded by chaos, I heard nothing but my fear.
The crewman to my left died instantly. The ration box flew by my head and disappeared. The crash tossed me forward and down, forcing me under the tripod, which was bolted to the deck plates. The raft jammed beneath my body and wedged me in. The double tail snapped off, and the wires connecting the elevators and trim tabs to the cockpit controls sheared and whipped around the tripod like tightly coiled springs, further caging me. It took only seconds, enough time to realize that I was still alive, trapped, and the plane was sinking.
No matter how I struggled, I just couldn’t get loose from the tripod and the sharp, springy wires that wound around me