Behind Torrance High stood a huddle of trees. On many evenings after her brother disappeared,
Louie’s sister Sylvia would drive to the school, turn her car under the trees, and park. As the car cooled, tears would stream down Sylvia’s cheeks. Sometimes she’d let herself sob, knowing no one would hear. Then she’d dry her face, straighten herself, and start the car again.
On the drive home, she’d think of a lie to explain why she’d been gone so long. She never told anyone how frightened she was.
In Torrance, the June 1943 telegram announcing Louie’s disappearance was followed by weeks of excruciating silence. In town, hope dissolved. In the
Zamperini house, the mood was different. In the first days after the telegram arrived, Louise Zamperini had been seized with the conviction that her son was alive. Her husband and children had felt the same. Weeks passed, but the family’s confidence was unshaken.
On July 13, Louise felt a wave of urgency. She wrote to the Seventh Air Force commander and begged him to keep searching; her son, she said, was alive. Unbeknownst to Louise, on that very day, Louie was
captured.
Weeks later, a reply came from the commander’s office. Given the failure
of the search, the letter said, the military had been forced to accept that Louis was dead, and they hoped Louise would accept this also. Louise ripped up the letter.
Pete was still in San Diego, training navy recruits. The stress over
Louie wore on him. When he visited home, everyone worried about how thin he was. In September, his last letter to Louie, mailed hours before he learned of Louie’s disappearance, came back to him. Scribbled on it were the words
Missing at sea.
That month, Sylvia’s husband left to serve as a tank gunner in Europe. He’d be gone for two years. Living alone, Sylvia was racked with anxiety for her brother and her husband. Like Pete, she was barely able to eat. Yearning to connect with someone, she moved back in with her parents.
She found her father with chin up, smiling bravely. Her little sister Virginia, still living at home, was distraught. At first, Louise cried often. Then she went quiet. The rash on her hands raged so badly that her hands were almost useless. When Louie’s footlocker was delivered, Louise couldn’t bear to open it. She had it dragged to the basement and covered with a blanket. She would never look inside.
Everyone in the family was suffering, but they never cried together, instead making up stories of Louie’s adventures on a tropical island. They never discussed the possibility that he was dead. When they walked in town, passersby glanced at them sadly, as if they pitied the family for being unable to accept the truth.
What the Zamperinis were experiencing wasn’t denial, and it wasn’t hope. It was belief. They could still feel Louie. Their distress came not from grief, but from the certainty that Louie was in trouble and they couldn’t reach him.
Every week, Sylvia wrote to Louie, sharing trivial news, writing as if everything were normal. With no idea where he was, she sent his letters to the
Red Cross. She’d drive out to mail them, then drive to Torrance High, park under the trees, and cry.
At night, alone in her childhood bed, Sylvia often broke down. When sleep came, it was haunted. Because she knew nothing of her brother’s fate,
her mind dwelt on an image she’d seen in the newspaper after
Nauru: Louie peering through a cannon hole in
Super Man. This was the focus of her nightmares: Louie being shot in his plane.
In December 1943, the family spent their first Christmas without Louie. The tree was strung with popcorn and cranberries, and beneath it sat a collection of gifts for Louie. In a card for her son, Louise wrote a message.
Two months later, after a massive bombing campaign, America seized
Kwajalein. Landing troops waded onto a wasteland, bombed flat. In the remains of a building, someone found documents. Outside, a soldier climbing through rubble found a long splinter of wood. Etched along it was the name
LOUIS ZAMPERINI.
Joe Deasy, the
Daisy Mae pilot who had searched for Phil’s lost crew, was on Oahu when he was summoned to headquarters and handed translations of the documents found on Kwajalein. Two American airmen, the documents said, had been found on a raft and brought to Kwajalein. The unnamed men were described as a pilot and a bombardier. They’d been in a crash—the date
was apparently provided—and had drifted for forty-seven days. With the papers were drawings of B-24s made by the captives. The report said the men had been beaten, then sent to
Japan by boat.
The moment Deasy read the report, he knew:
Phillips and Zamperini had survived their
crash. His elation was tailed by guilt: in their ocean search, they’d overlooked the lost men, but the enemy had not.
“I was happy to have found them,” Deasy recalled, “but the next thing is, where the hell are they?” Had they reached Japan alive? Had they survived whatever lay in store for them there?
The military now knew with a fair amount of certainty that everyone who’d gone up on
Green Hornet, other than Zamperini and Phillips, was dead. But apparently because of the sketchiness of the reports and the fact that
Louie’s and Phil’s fates were still unknown, the families of the dead and the two missing weren’t notified.
Like the Zamperinis, the Phillips family had been in the dark since Allen had disappeared. They, too, refused to conclude that their boy was dead. Allen’s father wrote of “a feeling of confidence that will not be shaken. Some day we are all going to have that reunion we are hoping and waiting for.”
Allen’s fiancée, Cecy, was desperate for information, and felt isolated in Indiana. She traveled to a Washington, D.C., suburb and moved into a friend’s apartment, decorating it with pictures of Allen. She got a job with an airline, hoping that through them, she might learn more about Allen, but she learned nothing. In her anguish, she did something completely out of character. She went to a fortune-teller.
Allen isn’t dead, the fortune-teller said. He’s injured, but alive. He’ll be found before Christmas. Cecy latched on to those words and believed them.
On June 27, 1944, exactly thirteen months after
Green Hornet crashed, telegrams were typed up at the War
Department and sent to the mothers of the plane’s crewmen. When Louise Zamperini opened hers, she burst into tears. The military had officially declared Louie, and all his crewmates, dead.
Allen’s mother, Kelsey, wasn’t persuaded. She contacted a newspaper and
asked the editors not to print the death notice; her son, she told them, was not gone. The editors honored her request.
When the shock from the death notice faded, the Zamperinis realized it changed nothing. It had been generated as a bureaucratic matter of course, an automatic designation made for all missing servicemen after thirteen months. “None of us believed it,” Sylvia said. “None of us.”
During family dinners, Pete and his father made plans to hunt for
Louie. When the war was over, they’d rent a boat and sail from island to island until they found him. They’d go on for as long as it took.
