Training was a crucible, and it transformed Phil’s crew. They would not all live through what lay ahead, but the survivors would speak of their good fortune in serving among such skilled men. They worked together with seamless efficiency, and judging by their training scores, in the grim business of bombs and bullets, there was no better crew in the squadron. Among surviving crewmen and men from other crews, the warmest praise would be reserved for Phil. B-24s were built for tall pilots, and though Phil needed a cushion to get his feet to the pedals and his eyes over the control panel, by all accounts he was superb at his job. Phil, Louie told a reporter, was “a damn swell pilot.”
The B-24 assigned to Phil’s crew had its own personality. It had a valve that oozed fuel into the bomb bay, prompting Pillsbury to develop a nervous habit of pacing the fuselage, sniffing the air. It had a curmudgeonly fuel transfer valve that Pillsbury and Douglas had to finesse into place, lest it stick wide open, slow an engine, or trigger a deafening backfire. The fuel gauges were reliable only until the tanks neared empty, at which point they sometimes reported that the plane was magically gaining fuel. One engine, for reasons known only to the plane, was thirstier than the others, so the gauges had to be watched constantly.
In time, the men’s misgivings about the Liberator fell away. In hundreds of hours of intense training, their plane never failed them. For all its ugliness and quirks, it was a noble thing, rugged and inexhaustible. The ground crewmen felt the same, nursing Phil’s plane with affection and fretting while it flew. When it returned, they received it with relief, scolding the crew for any scratches. Airmen talked of “flying boxcars,” but Phil and Louie dismissed them. Louie described it as “our home.”
On the ground, the crew drank together, swam in the local lakes, and cruised around Ephrata and Sioux City. In the latter, Louie discovered that the enlisted ground crewmen, who had preceded them into town, had convinced the local women that their insignia indicated that they were officers. As Louie set off to right this wrong, Phil pulled night duty at the operations office. Sometime one night, he drifted into a troubled dream. In it, he came home from the war only to find that Cecy had given him up.
On a Saturday afternoon in mid-October of 1942, the men of the 372nd were told to pack their bags. Their training was being cut short, and they were to be sent to California’s Hamilton Field, then rushed overseas. Phil was crestfallen; Cecy was about to come see him. He would miss her by three days. On October 20, the squadron flew out of Iowa.
At Hamilton Field, an artist was working his way down the planes, painting each one’s name and accompanying illustration. Naming bombers was a grand tradition. Many B-24 crews dreamed up delightfully clever names, among them E Pluribus Aluminum, Axis Grinder, The Bad Penny, and Bombs Nip On. Quite a few of the rest were shamelessly bawdy, painted with scantily clad and unclad women. One featured a sailor chasing a naked girl around the fuselage. Its name was Willie Maker. Louie had a snapshot taken of himself grinning under one of the more ribald examples.
Phil’s plane needed a name, and no one could think of one. After the war, the survivors would have different memories of who named the plane, but in a letter penned that fall, Phil would write that it was copilot George Moznette who suggested Super Man. Everyone liked it, and the name was painted on the plane’s nose, along with the superhero himself, a bomb in one hand and a machine gun in the other. Louie didn’t think much of the painting—in photographs, the gun looks like a shovel—but Phil loved it. Most crews referred to their planes as “she.” Phil insisted that his plane was all man.
The men were slated for combat, but they hadn’t been told where they would serve. Judging by the heavy winter gear, Louie thought that they were bound for Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, which had been invaded by the Japanese months before. He was happily wrong: they were going to Hawaii. On the evening of October 24, Louie called home for a last good-bye. He just missed Pete, who came for a visit only a few minutes after his brother hung up.
Sometime after speaking to Louie, Louise pulled out a set of note cards on which she kept lists of Christmas card recipients. After Louie’s last visit home, she’d taken out one of the cards and, on it, jotted down the date and a few words about Louie’s departure. This day, she noted Louie’s phone call. These were the first two entries in what would become Louise’s war diary.
Phil at the helm of Super Man.Courtesy of Louis Zamperini
Before he left Hamilton Field, Louie dropped a little package in the mail, addressed to his mother. When Louise opened it, she found inside a pair of airman’s wings. Every morning, through all that lay ahead for her, Louise would pin the wings to her dress. Every night, before she went to bed, she’d take them off her dress and pin them to her nightgown.
On November 2, 1942, Phil’s crew climbed aboard Super Man and readied to go to war. They were heading into a desperate fight. North to south, Japan’s new empire stretched five thousand miles, from the snowbound Aleutians to Java, hundreds of miles south of the equator. West to east, the empire sprawled over more than six thousand miles, from the border of India to the Gilbert and Marshall islands in the central Pacific. In the Pacific, virtually everything above Australia and west of the international date line had been taken by Japan. Only a few eastward islands had been spared, among them the Hawaiian Islands, Midway, Canton, Funafuti, and a tiny paradise called Palmyra. It was from these outposts that the men of the AAF were trying to win the Pacific, as the saying went, “one damned island after another.”
That day, Super Man banked over the Pacific for the first time. The crew was bound for Oahu’s Hickam Field, where the war had begun for America eleven months before, and where it would soon begin for them. The rim of California slid away, and then there was nothing but ocean. From this day forward, until victory or defeat, transfer, discharge, capture, or death took them from it, the vast Pacific would be beneath and around them. Its bottom was already littered with downed warplanes and the ghosts of lost airmen. Every day of this long and ferocious war, more would join them.
* In June 1941, the air corps became a subordinate arm of the Army Air Forces. It remained in existence as a combat branch of the army until 1947.
OAHU WAS STILL RINGING FROM THE JAPANESE ATTACK. The enemy had left so many holes in the roads that the authorities hadn’t been able to fill them all yet, leaving the local drivers swerving around craters. There were still a few gouges in the roof of the Hickam Field barracks, making for soggy airmen when it rained. The island was on constant alert for air raids or invasion, and was so heavily camouflaged, a ground crewman wrote in his diary, that “one sees only about ⅓ of what is actually there.” Each night, the island disappeared; every window was fitted with lightproof curtains, every car with covered headlights, and blackout patrols enforced rules so strict that a man wasn’t even permitted to strike a match. Servicemen were under orders to carry gas masks in hip holsters at all times. To reach their beloved waves, local surfers had to worm their way under the barbed wire that ran the length of Waikiki Beach.
The 372nd squadron was sent to Kahuku, a beachside base at the foot of a blade of mountains on the north shore. Louie and Phil, who would soon be promoted to first lieutenant, were assigned to a barracks with Mitchell, Moznette, twelve other young officers, and hordes of mosquitoes. “You kill one,” Phil wrote, “and ten more come to the funeral.” Outside, the building was picturesque; inside, Phil wrote, it looked “like a dozen dirty Missouri pigs have been wallowing on it.” The nonstop revelry didn’t help matters. After one four A.M. knockdown, drag-out water fight involving all sixteen officers, Phil woke up with floor burns