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An instant later, everything was scalding whiteness and splintering noise. The ground heaved, and the air whooshed around, carrying an acrid smell. Trees blew apart. A bomb struck the tent in which Louie and Phil had been sleeping a minute before. Another burst beside a pile of men in a ditch, and something speared into the back of the man on top. He said, “This feels like it, boys,” and passed out. A bomb hit the ordnance truck, sending it into the air in thousands of pieces. The remains of the truck and the men under it skimmed past Jesse Stay’s head. A nose gunner heard a singing sound as the parts of the truck flew by him. It was apparently this truck that landed on one of the tents, where two airmen were still on their cots. Another bomb tumbled into Scearce’s trench, plopping right on top of a tail gunner. It didn’t go off, but sat there hissing. The gunner shouted, “Jesus!” It took them a moment to realize that what they’d thought was a bomb was actually a fire extinguisher. Yards away, Louie and Phil huddled. The hut shook, but still stood.

The bombs moved down the atoll. Each report sounded farther away, and then the explosions stopped. A few men climbed from their shelters to help the wounded and douse fires. Louie and the others stayed where they were, knowing that the bombers would be back. Matches were struck and cigarettes were pinched in trembling fingers. If we’re hit, one man grumbled, there’ll be nothing left of us but gravy. Far away, the bombers turned. The booming began again.

Someone running by the infirmary saw Pillsbury, hurried in, threw him on a stretcher, and dragged him into a tiny cement building where the other wounded had been taken. The building was so crowded that men had been laid on shelves. It was pitch-dark, and doctors were shuffling around, peering at their patients by flashlight. Pillsbury lay panting in the darkness, listening to the bombs coming, feeling claustrophobic, his mind flashing with images of bombs entombing them. With men stacked everywhere and no one speaking, he thought of a morgue. His leg hurt. He began groaning, and the doctor felt his way to him and gave him morphine. The booming was louder, louder, and then it was over them again, tremendous crashing. The ceiling shuddered, and cement dust sifted down.

Outside, it was hell on earth. Men moaned and screamed, one calling for his mother. A pilot thought the voices sounded “like animals crying.” Men’s eardrums burst. A man died of a heart attack. Another man’s arm was severed. Others sobbed, prayed, and lost control of their bowels. “I wasn’t only scared, I was terrified,” one airman would write to his parents. “I thought I was scared in the air, but I wasn’t. [It was] the first time in my life I saw how close death could come.” Phil felt the same; never, even during the fight over Nauru, had he known such terror. Louie crouched beside him. As he had run through the coconut grove, he had moved only on instinct and roaring adrenaline, feeling no emotion. Now, as explosions went off around him, fear seized him.

Staff Sergeant Frank Rosynek huddled in a coral trench, wearing nothing but a helmet, untied shoes, and boxer shorts. The tonnage coming down, he later wrote, “seemed like a railroad carload. The bombs sounded like someone pushing a piano down a long ramp before they hit and exploded. Big palm trees were shattered and splintered all around us; the ground would rise up in the air when a bomb exploded and there was this terrific flash of super bright light that it made. The concussion blew pieces of coral into our hole and we blindly groped for them and tossed them out as quick as we could find them. At intervals between a bomb falling it sounded like church: voices from nearby slit trenches all chanting the Lord’s prayer together—over and over again. Louder when the bombs hit closer. I thought I even heard some guys crying. You were afraid to look up because you felt your face might be seen from above.”

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