Unbroken_ A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand [51]
Ten
The Stinking Six
AS EVENING FELL OVER FUNAFUTI, THE GROUND CREWS nursed the damaged bombers. When the holes were patched and mechanical problems repaired, the planes were fueled up and loaded with six five-hundred-pound bombs each, ready for a strike on Tarawa the next day. Super Man, still standing where it had spun to a halt, its entire length honeycombed, wouldn’t join them. It would probably never fly again.
Worn out from the mission and hours spent helping at the infirmary, Louie walked to a grove of coconut trees where there were tents that served as barracks. He found his tent and flopped down on a cot, near Phil. The journalists were in a tent next to theirs. At the infirmary, Stanley Pillsbury lay with his bleeding leg hanging off his cot. Nearby, the other wounded Super Man crewmen tried to sleep. Blackout descended, and a hush fell.
At about three in the morning, Louie woke to a forlorn droning, rising and falling. It was a small plane, crossing back and forth overhead. Thinking that it was a crew lost in the clouds, Louie lay there listening, hoping they’d find home. Eventually, the sound faded away.
Before Louie could fall back asleep, he heard the growl of heavy aircraft engines. Then, from the north end of the atoll, came a BOOM! A siren began sounding, and there was distant gunfire. Then a marine ran past the airmen’s tents, screaming, “Air raid! Air raid!” The droning overhead hadn’t been a lost American crew. It had probably been a scout plane, leading Japanese bombers. Funafuti was under attack.
The airmen and journalists, Louie and Phil among them, jammed their feet into their boots, bolted from the tents, and stopped, some shouting, others spinning in panic. They couldn’t see any bomb shelters. From down the atoll, the explosions were coming in rapid succession, each one louder and closer. The ground shook.
“I looked around and said, ‘Holy hell! Where are we going to go?’ ” remembered pilot Joe Deasy. The best shelter he could find was a shallow pit dug around a coconut sapling, and he plowed into it, along with most of the men near him. Herman Scearce, Deasy’s radioman, leapt into a trench next to an ordnance truck, joining five of his crewmates. Pilot Jesse Stay jumped into another hole nearby. Three men crawled under the ordnance truck; another flung himself into a garbage pit. One man ran right off the end of the atoll, splashing into the ocean even though he didn’t know how to swim. Some men, finding nowhere to go, dropped to their knees to claw foxholes in the sand with their helmets. As he dug in the dark with the bombs coming, one man noisily cursed the sonofabitch generals who had left the atoll without shelters.
Dozens of natives crowded into a large missionary church that stood in a clearing. Realizing that the white church would stand out brilliantly on the dark atoll, a marine named Fonnie Black Ladd ran in and yelled at the natives to get out. When they wouldn’t move, he drew his sidearm. They scattered.
In the infirmary, Stanley Pillsbury lay in startled confusion. One moment he’d been sleeping, and the next, the atoll was rocking with explosions, a siren was howling, and people were sprinting by, dragging patients onto stretchers and rushing them out. Then the room was empty, and Pillsbury was alone. He had apparently been forgotten. He sat up, frantic. He couldn’t stand.
Louie and Phil ran through the coconut grove, searching for anything that might serve as shelter. The bombs were overtaking them, making a sound that one man likened to the footfalls of a giant: Boom … boom … BOOM … BOOM! At last, Louie and Phil spotted a native hut built on flood stilts. They dove under it, landing in a heap of more than two dozen men. The bombs were now so close that the men could