CHAPTER 13

Missing at Sea

Joe Deasy landed Daisy Mae on Palmyra late that afternoon, having seen no trace of Corpening’s plane. That night, he received stunning news: Green Hornet had never landed. “Holy smoke!” he said. Two planes were now down, taking twenty-one men with them.

A rescue effort was organized. Because Daisy Mae and Green Hornet had flown together at first, the organizers knew Green Hornet had gone down after Daisy Mae left it but before it reached Palmyra. That was a stretch of eight hundred miles. In the whorl of currents in that area, survivors could be drifting in any direction. The search area would have to be enormous.

At dawn, the search planes took off.

Louie woke with the sun. Mac lay beside him. Phil lay in his raft, his mind still fumbling. Only the sharks stirred.

Louie decided to divvy up breakfast. He reached in the raft pocket. The chocolate was gone. He looked at Mac. Mac looked back at him with wide, guilty eyes.

The realization that Mac had eaten their only food rolled hard over Louie. He knew they could die without it, but he quelled the thought. They’d be rescued today, perhaps tomorrow, he told himself, and the chocolate wouldn’t matter. Curbing his anger, he told Mac he was disappointed in him, but understanding that Mac had acted in panic, he reassured him they would soon be rescued. Mac said nothing.

The night chill gave way to a sweltering day. The men were hungry, but they could do nothing about it. The fishing gear was useless. There was no bait.

As they lay in silence, a purring sound drifted between their thoughts. Searching the sky, they saw a bomber, well to the east. Flying much too high to be a search plane, it was probably headed to Palmyra.

Louie lunged for the flare gun, loaded it, aimed high, and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand, and the flare streaked up. As it shot overhead, Louie shook a sea dye pack into the water. A pool of vivid yellow bloomed over the ocean.

Louie, Phil, and Mac watched the bomber, hoping, hoping. Slowly, the flare sputtered out. The bomber kept going, then was gone.

The sighting gave the castaways a distressing piece of information. They hadn’t known in which direction they were drifting. Since the Hawaii–Palmyra flight lane ran near Green Hornet’s crash site, the appearance of a bomber far to the east meant the rafts were drifting west, away from the view of friendly planes. Their chances of rescue were already dimming.

That evening, the search planes returned to their bases. No one had seen anything. They’d be back up at first light.

Phil slept for most of the following day. Louie thought about food. Mac hunkered down. For another day, rescue didn’t come.

On the third morning, they again heard engines. Then there it was, a B-24, low and right overhead, plowing through the clouds. A search plane.

Louie fired the flare gun. The flare shot at the bomber, and for a moment, the men thought it would hit the plane. It missed, passing alongside and making a fountain of red. Louie reloaded and fired three more flares.

The plane was Daisy Mae. Its crewmen were straining their eyes at the ocean, passing binoculars between them. But with clouds closing and parting, searching was extremely difficult.

Daisy Mae, shown after a forced landing.

The flares died, and Daisy Mae flew on. No one aboard saw anything.

The castaways’ best chance of rescue was lost. Every hour, they were farther west. If they weren’t found, their only hope would be to find land. Ahead, there wasn’t a single island for some two thousand miles. If by some miracle they made it that far alive, they might reach the Marshall or Gilbert Islands. Then they’d have another problem. Both sets of islands belonged to the Japanese. Watching Daisy Mae fly away, Louie had a dark feeling.

The castaways’ bodies were declining. They drank the last of their water and were intensely thirsty and hungry. They spent another frigid night, then a long fourth day. They knew if the search hadn’t been called off, it soon would be.

On the fifth day, Mac snapped. After having said almost nothing for days, he suddenly began screaming that they were doomed. Wild-eyed and raving, he couldn’t stop shouting. Louie slapped him. Mac went silent.

As the lost men drifted into oblivion, their last letters reached their loved ones, who had not yet been informed of what had happened; to avoid needlessly alarming family members, military policy was to search for a week before officially declaring men missing. In his last note to Cecy, Phil wrote of the moon over Hawaii and how it reminded him of the last time he saw her. “I’m waiting for the day when we can begin doing things together again as we used to do,” he wrote. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

On the weekend after the crash, the Zamperinis had a merry visit with Cuppernell’s parents, who lived in Long Beach. Pete, now a navy officer stationed in San Diego, wrote Louie about it, asking him to tell Cuppernell his parents were doing great. He tucked a photo of himself in the envelope. On the back, he wrote, “Don’t let ’em clip your wings.”

As his brother’s letter made its way toward Hawaii, Louie was on a raft far out in the Pacific. For the first time since he was a little boy, he prayed, speaking the words only in his mind.

A week after Green Hornet vanished, the search was abandoned. Phil’s crew was officially declared missing, and the process of informing family members began.

On Oahu, an officer walked into the quarters that Louie, Phil, Mitchell, and Cuppernell had shared. He was there to catalog the men’s belongings and send them home. Louie’s room was mostly as it had been when he’d left that Thursday morning: a footlocker, a diary that ended with words about a rescue mission, a pinup of actress Esther Williams on the wall. The note Louie had left on the locker was gone, as was the liquor.

In Princeton, Indiana, on Friday, June 4, 1943, Kelsey Phillips, Phil’s mother, received a telegram.

I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT THE COMMANDING GENERAL PACIFIC AREA REPORTS YOUR SON–FIRST LIEUTENANT RUSSELL A PHILLIPS—MISSING SINCE MAY TWENTY-SEVEN. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION OF HIS STATUS ARE RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED.

At Camp Pickett in Virginia, the same news reached Phil’s father, who was serving as an army chaplain. He took leave and rushed for home.

The telegram reached the Zamperinis that same evening. Louie’s mother, Louise, called Sylvia, who was living in a nearby suburb with her new husband. Sylvia became so hysterical that a neighbor ran to her, but Sylvia was crying too hard to speak. Sobbing, she got in her car and drove to Torrance. Pulling up at her parents’ house, she put on a brave face.

Her father was quiet; her mother was consumed with anguish. Sylvia, who like everyone else assumed Louie had crashed in the ocean, told her mother not to worry. “With all those islands,” Sylvia said, “he’s teaching someone hula.” Pete arrived. “If he has a toothbrush and a pocket knife and he hits land,” he said, “he’ll make it.”

Louise found the snapshot taken the day Louie left, when he’d stood beside her on her front steps, his arm around her waist. On the back, she wrote, Louis Reported missing—May 27, 1943.

Stanley Pillsbury and Clarence Douglas were in a hospital, trying to recover from the wounds incurred over Nauru. Douglas’s shoulder was ravaged, and he seemed emotionally gutted. Pillsbury still couldn’t walk. In his dreams, planes dove at him, endlessly.

Pillsbury was in his bed when Douglas came in.

“The crew went down,” he said.

Pillsbury could barely speak. His first emotion was overwhelming guilt. “If I had only been there,” he said later, “I could have saved it.”

On Oahu, Louie’s friends hung a small flag in his memory. It would hang there as Louie, Phil, and Mac drifted west and the Allies carried the war across the Pacific and into the throat of Japan.

In Torrance, Louise Zamperini’s hands broke out in weeping sores, a consequence of her emotional trauma. Somewhere in those jagged first days, a fierce conviction came over her. Her son, she was absolutely certain, was alive.