Unbroken_ A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand [50]
Louie scrounged up parachute cord and went to each injured man, looping cord around him as a belt, then wrapping the rope around stationary parts of the plane. Nelson, with his belly wound, couldn’t have a rope wrapped around his torso, so Louie fed the line around his arm and under his armpit. Fearing that they’d end up on fire, he didn’t knot the cords. Instead, he wound the ends around the hands of the injured men, so they could free themselves easily.
The question of how to stop the bomber remained. Louie had an idea. What if they were to tie two parachutes to the rear of the plane, pitch them out of the waist windows at touchdown, and pull the rip cords? No one had ever tried to stop a bomber in this manner. It was a long shot, but it was all they had. Louie and Douglas placed one parachute in each waist window and tied them to a gun mount. Douglas went to his seat, leaving Louie standing between the waist windows, a rip cord in each hand.
Super Man sank toward Funafuti. Below, the journalists and the other bomber crews stood, watching the crippled plane come in. Super Man dropped lower and lower. Just before it touched down, Pillsbury looked at the airspeed gauge. It read 110 miles per hour. For a plane without brakes, it was too fast.
——
For a moment, the landing was perfect. The wheels kissed the runway so softly that Louie stayed on his feet. Then came a violent gouging sensation. What they had feared had happened: The left tire was flat. The plane caught hard, veered left, and careened toward two parked bombers. Cuppernell, surely more out of habit than hope, stomped on the right brake. There was just enough hydraulic fluid left to save them. Super Man spun in a circle and lurched to a stop just clear of the other bombers. Louie was still in the back, gripping the parachute cords. He had not had to use them.*
Douglas popped open the top hatch, dragged himself onto the roof, raised his injured arm over his head, and crossed it with his other arm, the signal that there were wounded men inside. Louie jumped down from the bomb bay and gave the same signal. There was a stampede across the airfield, and in seconds the plane was swarming with marines. Louie stood back and ran his eyes over the body of his ruined plane. Later, ground crewmen would count the holes in Super Man, marking each one with chalk to be sure that they didn’t count any twice. There were 594 holes. All of the Nauru bombers had made it back, every one of them shot up, but none so badly as this.
Brooks was laid on a stretcher, placed on a jeep, and driven to a rudimentary, one-room infirmary. He was bleeding inside his skull.
They carried Pillsbury to a barracks to await treatment. He was lying there about an hour later when the doctor came in and asked him if he knew Harry Brooks. Pillsbury said yes.
“He didn’t make it,” the doctor said.
——
Technical Sergeant Harold Brooks died one week before his twenty-third birthday. It took more than a week for word to reach his widowed mother, Edna, at 511½ Western Avenue in Clarksville, Michigan. Across town on Harley Road, the news reached his fiancée, Jeannette Burtscher. She learned that he was gone nine days before the wedding date that they had set before he left for the war.
Harry Brooks.
* Eight months later, Charlie Pratte became the first pilot to stop a B-24 with parachutes. His bomber, Belle of Texas, had been shot up over the Marshall Islands and had no brakes, leaving Pratte to attempt a landing on a runway far too short for bombers. To make matters worse, Pratte had eaten bad eggs and was vomiting