Unbroken. Laura Hillenbrand

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СКАЧАТЬ the flight, Louie walked to the airfield. The ground crewmen were preparing the planes, stripping out every ounce of excess weight and rolling black paint on the bellies and wings to make them harder to see against a night sky. Coming to Super Man, Louie climbed into the bomb bay, where the bombs sat ready. In honor of his college buddy Payton Jordan, who had just married his high school sweetheart, Louie scrawled Marge and Payton Jordan on a bomb.

      At 4:00 P.M. on December 23, 1942, twenty-six B-24s, laden with some 73,000 gallons of fuel and 75,000 pounds of bombs, rose up from Midway. Super Man slipped toward the rear of the procession. All afternoon and into the evening, the planes flew toward Wake. The sun set, and the bombers pressed on under the timid glow of moon and stars.

      At eleven P.M., when his plane was about 150 miles from Wake, Phil switched off the outside lights. Clouds closed in. The bombers were supposed to approach the atoll in formation, but with clouds around and the lights off, the pilots couldn’t find their flightmates. They couldn’t risk breaking radio silence, so each plane went on alone. The pilots craned into the dark, swerving away from the faint shadows of others, trying to avoid collisions. Wake was very close now, but they couldn’t see it. Sitting in the top turret of Super Man, Stanley Pillsbury wondered if he’d make it back alive. In the greenhouse below, Louie felt a buzzing inside himself, the same sensation that he had felt before races. Ahead, Wake slept.

      At exactly midnight, Colonel Matheny, piloting the lead plane, Dumbo the Avenger, broke radio silence.

      “This is it, boys.”

      Matheny dropped Dumbo‘s nose and sent the bomber plunging out of the clouds. There beneath him was Wake, three slender islands joining hands around a lagoon. As his copilot called out speed and altitude figures, Matheny pushed his plane toward a string of buildings on Peacock Point, the atoll’s southern tip. On either side of Matheny’s plane, B-24s followed him down. When he reached his bombing altitude, Matheny hauled the plane’s nose up and yelled to the bombardier.

      “When are you going to turn loose those incendiaries?”

      “Gone, sir!”

      At that instant, the buildings on Peacock Point exploded. It was forty-five seconds past midnight.

      Matheny tipped his bomber and looked down. Peacock Point, struck by Dumbo‘s bombs and those of its flanking planes, was engulfed in fire. Matheny knew he’d been lucky; the Japanese had been caught sleeping, and no one had yet manned the antiaircraft guns. As Matheny turned back toward Midway, wave after wave of B-24s dove at Wake. The Japanese ran for their guns.

      Up in Super Man, well behind and above Matheny’s plane, Louie saw broad, quick throbs of light in the clouds. He hit the bomb bay door control valve, and the doors rumbled open. He set his bomb rack on the “select” position, flipped on his bomb switches, and fixed the settings. Phil’s orders were to dive to 4,000 feet before dropping the bombs, but when he reached that altitude, he was still lost in clouds. Louie’s target was the airstrip, but he couldn’t see it. Phil pushed the plane still lower, moving at terrific speed. Suddenly, at 2,500 feet, Super Man speared through the clouds and Wake stretched out, sudden and brilliant, beneath it.

      Pillsbury would never shake the memory of what he saw. “It looked like a star storm,” he remembered. The islands, sealed in blackness a moment before, were a blaze of garish light. Several large infernos, spewing black smoke, were consuming the atoll’s oil tanks. Everywhere, bombs were striking targets, sending up mushrooms of fire. Searchlights swung about, their beams reflecting off the clouds and back onto the ground, illuminating scores of Japanese, wearing only fundoshi undergarments, sprinting around in confusion. What neither Pillsbury nor any of the other airmen knew was that among the men under their bombers that night were the ninety-eight Americans who had been captured and enslaved.

      Waist and tail gunners in the bombers fired downward, and one by one, the searchlights blew to pieces. To Pillsbury, “every gun in the world” seemed to be firing skyward. Antiaircraft guns lobbed shells over the planes, where they erupted, sending shrapnel showering down. Tracers from the firing above and below streaked the air in yellow, red, and green. As Pillsbury watched the clamor of colors, he thought of Christmas. Then he remembered: They had crossed the international date line and passed midnight. It was Christmas.

      Phil wrestled Super Man out of its dive. As the plane leveled off, Louie spotted the taillight of a Zero rolling down the north-south runway. He began synchronizing on the light, hoping to hit the Zero before it took off. Below, very close, something exploded, and Super Man rocked. A shell burst by the left wing, another by the tail. Louie could see tracers cutting neat lines in the sky to the right. He loosed a bomb over the south end of the runway, counted two seconds, then dropped his five other bombs over a set of bunkers and parked planes beside the runway.

      Relieved of three thousand pounds of bombs, Super Man bobbed upward. Louie yelled “Bombs away!” and Phil rolled the plane roughly to the left, through streams of antiaircraft fire. Louie looked down. His group of five bombs landed in splashes of fire on the bunkers and planes. He’d been a beat too late to hit the Zero. His bomb fell just behind it, lighting up the runway. Phil turned Super Man back for Midway. Wake was a sea of fire and running men.

      The crew was jumpy, coursing with adrenaline. There were several Zeros in the air, but in the darkness, no one knew where they were. Somewhere in the galaxy of planes, a Zero fired on a bomber, which fired back. The Zero disappeared. Pillsbury looked to the side and saw yellow dashes of tracer fire, heading directly toward them. A B-24 gunner had mistaken them for an enemy plane and was firing on them. Phil saw it just as Pillsbury did, and swung the plane away. The firing stopped.

      The bomb bay doors were stuck open. The motors strained, but couldn’t budge them. Louie climbed back and looked. When Phil had wrenched the plane out of its dive, the enormous g-forces had nudged the auxiliary fuel tanks out of place, just enough to block the doors. Nothing could be done. With the bomb bay yawning open and dragging against the air, the plane was burning much more fuel than usual. Given that this mission was stretching the plane’s range to the limit, it was sobering news.

      The men could do nothing but wait and hope. They passed around pineapple juice and roast beef sandwiches. Louie was drained, both from the combat and the incessant quivering of the plane. He stared out, sleepy, watching the stars through breaks in the clouds.

      Seventy-five miles away from Wake, one of the men looked back. He could still see the island burning.

      As day broke over the Pacific, Brigadier General Howard K. Ramey stood by the Midway airstrip, looking at the clouds and waiting for his bombers. His face was furrowed. A brow of fog hung two hundred feet over the ocean, spilling rain. In some places, visibility was down to a few yards. Finding tiny, flat Midway would be difficult, and there was the question of whether the bombers’ fuel would last long enough to bring them home.

      One plane appeared, then another and another. One by one, they landed, all critically low on fuel, one with a dead engine. Super Man wasn’t in sight.

      Out in the fog, Phil must have looked at his fuel gauge and known that he was in real trouble. With his bomb bay open and wind howling through the fuselage, he had dragged away most of his fuel and was running on empty. He didn’t know if he’d be able to find Midway, and he didn’t have enough fuel to make a second pass. At last, at around eight A.M., he saw Midway dimly through the mist. A moment later, one of Super Man‘s engines sputtered and died.

      Phil knew that the other engines would quit almost immediately. He nursed the plane along, spotting the runway and aiming for it. The engines kept turning. Phil dropped Super Man and touched down. Just after СКАЧАТЬ