“The Whole Island Was Blowing Up”
On the night after the Nauru raid, as he lay in a tent in
Funafuti’s coconut grove, Louie woke to a forlorn droning. It was a small plane, crossing back and forth overhead. Thinking it was a crew lost in the clouds, he lay 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 atoll’s north end, came a sudden BOOM! Then another and another, each one louder. There was a siren and distant gunfire. Then a marine ran by, screaming, “Air raid!” The droning hadn’t been a lost American crew. It was probably a scout plane, leading Japanese bombers. Funafuti was under attack.
Funafuti, the morning after.
The airmen, Louie and Phil among them, jammed on their boots, bolted from their tents, and stopped, some spinning in panic. They couldn’t see any bomb shelters. The explosions were getting louder and closer. The ground shook.
Men ran for any cover they could find. Pilot
Joe Deasy and several other men plowed into a shallow pit around a coconut sapling. Herman Scearce, Deasy’s radioman, leapt into a trench next to a truck, joining five crewmates. Pilot
Jesse Stay jumped into another hole nearby. Three men crawled under
the truck; another ran into a garbage pit. One man ran right into the ocean, even though he didn’t know how to swim.
Dozens of natives crowded into a large white church. Realizing it would stand out brilliantly, a marine ran in and ordered the natives out. When they wouldn’t move, he drew his sidearm. They scattered.
In the infirmary,
Pillsbury lay in startled confusion. One moment he was asleep; the next, the atoll was rocking with explosions, a siren was howling, and people were dragging patients onto stretchers and rushing them out. Then Pillsbury was alone. He’d apparently been forgotten. He sat up, frantic. He couldn’t stand.
Louie and Phil ran through the coconut grove. Bombs were overtaking them, making a sound one man likened to a giant’s footfalls: Boom … BOOM … BOOM! At last, with the bombs so close they could hear them whistling, they dove under a hut built on flood stilts, landing in a heap of men.
An instant later, everything was scalding white and splintering noise. The ground heaved, the air whooshed, the hut shuddered. Trees blew apart. A bomb struck the tent where Louie and Phil had been seconds before. Another hit the truck, sending it and the remains of the men under it skimming past Jesse Stay’s head. Another bomb landed on a gunner in Scearce’s trench. It didn’t go off but sat there hissing. The gunner shouted, “Jesus!” It took them a moment to realize the bomb was actually a fire extinguisher.
The bombs moved down the atoll. Each sounded farther away; then the explosions stopped. Louie and the others stayed put, knowing the bombers would return. Matches were struck and cigarettes pinched in trembling fingers. If we’re hit, a 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, raced in, and carried him into a tiny cement building where the other wounded had been taken. It was pitch dark, and so crowded that men had been laid on shelves. Pillsbury lay panting, listening to the explosions, feeling claustrophobic, imagining bombs entombing them. The booming was louder, louder, and then it was
overhead, tremendous crashing. The ceiling trembled, and cement dust sifted down.
Outside, it was hell on earth. Men moaned and screamed, one calling for his mother. 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. Phil had never known such terror. Louie crouched beside him, seized with fear.
Staff Sergeant
Frank Rosynek huddled in a trench, wearing nothing but a helmet, untied shoes, and boxers. “The bombs sounded like someone pushing a piano down a long ramp before they hit and exploded,” he wrote. “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.… At intervals between a bomb falling it sounded like church: voices from nearby slit trenches all chanting the Lord’s Prayer together. 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.”
On the fourth pass, the Japanese hit the jackpot, bull’s-eyeing a row of parked B-24s that were gassed up and loaded with bombs. One exploded, and another burst into flames, sending machine gun bullets whizzing everywhere, tracers drawing ribbons in the air. Then the five-hundred-pound bombs on the planes started going off.
Finally, silence. Men began stirring, hesitantly. As they did, a B-24 blew in a gigantic explosion, accelerated by its 2,300 gallons of fuel and 3,000 pounds of bombs. It sounded, wrote one man, “like the whole island was blowing up.” With that, it was over.
At dawn, men crept from their hiding places. The man who’d run into the ocean waded ashore, having clung to a rock for three hours in rising tide. Louie and Phil joined a procession of stunned, shaking men.
Funafuti was wrecked. A bomb had leveled the church, but thanks to the marine, no one had been inside. Where Louie and Phil’s tent had been, there was only a crater. Another tent lay collapsed, a bomb standing on its nose
on top of it. Someone tied the bomb to a truck, dragged it to the beach, and turned sharply, sending the bomb skidding into the ocean.
Where the struck B-24s had been, there were giant holes ringed by decapitated coconut trees. One crater was thirty-five feet deep and sixty feet across. Bits of bomber were everywhere. Landing gear and seats that had seen the sunset from one side of Funafuti greeted the sunrise from the other. All that was left of one bomber was a tail, two wingtips, and propellers. An engine sat alone on the runway; the plane it belonged to was nowhere to be found. Louie saw a journalist staring into a crater, crying. Louie walked to him, bracing to see a dead body. Instead, he saw a typewriter, flat as a pool table.
The wounded and dead were everywhere. Two mechanics who had been caught in the open were bruised all over from the concussive force of explosions.
They were so traumatized they couldn’t talk. Men stood in a solemn circle around what was left of the truck. The three men who had been under it were beyond recognition. Louie came upon the body of a native, half his head gone. Phil was unscathed; Louie had only a cut arm.
Louie went to the infirmary.
Pillsbury lay with his leg hanging in the air, dripping blood on the floor.
Cuppernell sat with him, thanking him for shooting down that
Zero.
Pillsbury’s leg, which a doctor described as “hamburgered,” needed immediate surgery. There was no anesthetic. As Pillsbury gripped the bed and Louie lay over his legs to hold them still, the doctor used pliers to tear tissue from Pillsbury’s foot, then pulled a long strip of hanging skin over his toe-bone stump and sewed it up.
Louie walked to
Super Man, which still sat where it had spun to a halt. The Japanese had missed it, but he couldn’t tell by looking at it. Its 594 holes covered it: swarms of bullet holes, shrapnel slashes, cannon-fire gashes as large as a man’s head, the gaping hole in Pillsbury’s turret, and the rudder hole, big as a doorway. Men circled the plane, amazed that Phil had kept it airborne for five hours in that condition.
Louie ran his fingers along the tears in the plane’s skin. Super Man had saved him and all but one of his crew. He would think of it as a dear friend.
Louie boarded another plane and headed home with Phil, Cuppernell,
Mitchell, and
Glassman. Pillsbury,
Lambert, and
Douglas were too badly wounded to rejoin the crew. Brooks was lying in
Funafuti’s cemetery.
The crew was broken up forever. They’d never see Super Man again.
Back on Hawaii, Louie and Phil sank into depression. With a gutted crew and no plane, they were grounded. Louie ran obsessively, trying to forget
Harry Brooks’s stricken face.
On May 24, the
Super Man survivors were transferred to the 42nd squadron of the 11th
Bomb Group. Six new men replaced the lost crewmen. “Don’t like the idea a bit,” Louie wrote in his diary. “Every time they mix up a crew, they have a crack-up.” The only thing noteworthy about the new men was
that the tail gunner, Sergeant Francis McNamara, ate practically nothing but dessert. They called him “Mac.”
B-24s destined for their squadron began arriving. One, Green Hornet, worried everyone. Even with an empty bomb bay and all four engines roaring, it was only just able to stay airborne, flying with its tail far below its nose. It was relegated to errands, and mechanics pried parts off of it for other planes. Louie flew in it briefly, called it “the craziest plane,” and hoped he’d never be in it again.
