Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini by Louis Zamperini Page A

mind the occasional shark. I was curious to see more and toured the village. My big discovery: girls wore a cloth (a lawa lawa ) around their bodies—and that’s all. That night the base theater featured Wives Under Suspicion with Warren William and Gail Patrick. Then a big storm blew in. We filled our canteens with ice water at the Reef and bunked down for the night in tents with dirt floors.
    I ate a fair breakfast, then waited for a briefing at 13:00 hours. Meanwhile our own plane arrived, liberated from the mud, and we traded crews. I supervised loading bombs: three 500-pound demolitions and five fragmentation cluster bombs with six 30-pound frags on each.
    At the briefing General Hale announced our target: Nauru Island, home to the world’s greatest concentration of phosphate. The Japanese sorely needed phosphate for fertilizer and explosives. Our orders were to fly west toward Guadalcanal, hang a sharp right, and come in on that heading to confuse the Japanese about our base location. Over Nauru the entire flight of twenty-six bombers would drop their payloads from eight thousand feet, at noon. We’d also maintain radio silence.
    Some of us questioned the plan, since Nauru was heavily fortified with antiaircraft guns. We believed the flights should vary in altitude. I turned to Phil and said, “That’s a pretty low bomb run. All the Japs have to do is synchronize on the lead flight and we’ll all get hit.”
    “Those are the general’s orders,” he said with a casual smile and a shrug. Phil didn’t fight unnecessary battles, but he had convinced me repeatedly on previous flights that he was one of the best pilots in our group. If Phil seemed relaxed, I wanted to relax, too.
    The next morning we were up at 03:00 hours, ready and anxious. At 05:00 we took off, but just barely. Between Funafuti’s limited, 3,500-foot airstrip and our plane’s heavy load, bombs and fuel and a crew of ten, it was tough to get off the ground. We flew low, flicked the lagoon with our landing gear, but managed to climb.
    Superman was the lead ship of E flight, of the 372nd squadron. Our navigator, Lieutenant Mitchell, gave us an ETA and finally announced the island was twenty minutes away, dead ahead. Then he squeezedinto the nose turret, with its twin .50 caliber machine guns, his job now the same as the other gunners’: to ward off enemy fighters and provide the bombardier—me—with an uninterrupted run on the target. With my Norden bombsight wired to the automatic pilot, I assumed control of the plane with each aiming correction. I did my calculations, fed them into the bombsight, and focused on the drop.
    Suddenly we entered a cloud of flak and antiaircraft fire. General Hale had, as I’d anticipated, made a mistake by having us all fly in at the same altitude. Puffs of black smoke dotted the sky around us—a dangerous situation. With bombs armed and ready, one hit in a vital spot would blow us to smithereens.
    An explosion rocked the plane as antiaircraft fire shattered our right vertical stabilizer. Then below us the fragments of another antiaircraft burst hit the fuselage like hailstones on a tin roof and penetrated the underside. The ship yawed but I got my crosshairs back on target. I managed to drop my payload on the planes, structures, and antiaircraft batteries along the runway. I also had a free-choice target. Spotting a small building at the end of the runway that looked like a radio shack, I dropped my bomb, and much to my surprise and delight I hit the island’s fuel-supply depot. A cloud of smoke and fire billowed skyward. A photo of this was in Life magazine.
    I looked out the greenhouse nose window and counted nine Zeroes in the air. Seven were nearby at ten o’clock. Three peeled off and headed our way. The first came dead ahead at one o’clock. He opened fire and Mitchell returned it, simultaneously. I heard a loud crack as a cannon shell from the Zero severed our turret power cables and whizzed past me,