unbroken-laura-hillenbrand

was scrambled to hunt for it. After an hour and a half of
searching, Louie spotted a curl of gray smoke. Two Catalina
flying boats were heading toward it. Super Man followed.
When they arrived at the crash site, the men were
astonished by what they saw. Two life rafts, holding the
entire five-man B-25 crew, floated amid plane debris.
Around them, the ocean was churning with hundreds of
sharks, some of which looked twenty feet long. Knifing
agitated circles in the water, the creatures seemed on the
verge of overturning the rafts.
The Catalinas reached the men before the sharks could,
and the B-25 men treated their rescuers to drinks that night.
But the Super Man crew now understood the feelings of the
grenade throwers on Canton. On a later flight, when they
saw several sharks harassing six whales, they dove low
over the water and shot at the sharks. Later, they felt guilty.
On future flights, when they saw sharks, they let them be.
——
Nauru was a little afterthought of land, eight square miles of
sand sitting alone in the Pacific, about twenty-five hundred
miles southwest of Hawaii. It was the kind of place that the
world might have left alone, were it not for the fifty thousand
tons of high-grade phosphate that lay under the feet of the
grass-skirted natives. A central ingredient in fertilizer and
munitions, the phosphate had been discovered in 1900, and
since then the island had been home to a community of
European businessmen and Chinese workers who mined
the land. When the war began, Nauru became a priceless
prize.
Japan seized Nauru in August 1942, imprisoning the
Europeans who had not fled and forcing the natives and the
Chinese to mine phosphate and build a runway. They