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Louie cranked the bomb bay doors shut by hand. He looked to the rear and saw Douglas, Lambert, and Nelson lying together, bloody. Douglas and Lambert were pawing along the floor, trying to reach their guns. Nelson didn’t move. He’d taken a shot to the stomach.

Louie shouted to the cockpit for help. Phil yelled back that he was losing control of the plane and needed Cuppernell. Louie said that this was a dire emergency. Phil braced himself at the controls, and Cuppernell got up, saw the men in back, and broke into a run. He found morphine, sulfa, oxygen masks, and bandages and dropped down next to each man in turn.

Louie knelt beside Brooks, who was still unconscious. Feeling through the gunner’s hair, he found two holes in the back of his skull. There were four large wounds in his back. Louie strapped an oxygen mask to Brooks’s face and bandaged his head. As he worked, he thought about the state of the plane. The waist, nose, and tail gunners were out, the plane was shot to hell, Phil was alone in the cockpit, barely keeping the plane up, and the Zeros were still out there. One more pass, he thought, will put us down.

Louie was bending over Brooks when he felt a tickle on his shoulder, something dripping. He looked up and saw Pillsbury in the top turret. Blood was streaming from his leg. Louie rushed to him.

Pillsbury was still in his seat, facing sideways, gripping the gun and sweeping his eyes around the sky. He looked absolutely livid. His leg dangled below him, his pant leg hanging in shreds and his boot blasted. Next to him was a jagged hole, the shape of Texas and almost as large as a beach ball, clawed out of the side of the plane. The turret was shot with holes, and the floor was jingling with flakes of metal and turret motor.

Top turret gunner Stanley Pillsbury, shown at the waist gun. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Louie began doctoring Pillsbury’s wounds. Pillsbury, swinging his head back and forth, ignored him. He knew that the Zero would come back to finish the kill, and he had to find it. The urgency of the moment drove the pain into a distant place.

Suddenly, there was a whoosh of dark, close, upward motion, a gray shining body, a red circle. Pillsbury shouted something unintelligible, and Louie let go of his foot just as Pillsbury banged the high-speed rotator on his turret. The turret grunted to life, whirling Pillsbury around ninety degrees.

The Zero reached the top of its arc, leveled off, and sped directly toward Super Man. Pillsbury was terrified. In an instant, the end would come with the most minute of gestures—the flick of the Zero pilot’s finger on his cannon trigger—and Super Man would carry ten men into the Pacific. Pillsbury could see the pilot who would end his life, the tropical sun illuminating his face, a white scarf coiled about his neck. Pillsbury thought: I have to kill this man.

Pillsbury sucked in a sharp breath and fired. He watched the tracers skim away from his gun’s muzzle and punch through the cockpit of the Zero. The windshield blew apart and the pilot pitched forward.

The fatal blow never came to Super Man. The Zero pilot, surely seeing the top turret smashed and the waist windows vacant, had probably assumed that the gunners were all dead. He had waited too long.

The Zero folded onto itself like a wounded bird. Pillsbury felt sure that the pilot was dead before his plane struck the ocean.

The last Zero came up from below, then faltered and fell. Clarence Douglas, standing at the waist gun with his thigh, chest, and shoulder torn open, brought it down.

In the ocean behind them, the men on the submarine watched the planes tussle over the water. One by one, the Zeros dropped, and the bombers flew on. The submarine crew would later report that not one Zero made it back to Nauru. It is believed that thanks to this raid and others, the Japanese never retrieved a single shipment of phosphate from the island.

——

The pain that had been far away during the gunfight