by Lynn Vincent
Minutes later, a miracle: A large swell buoyed the group above the wave tops. In the distance, they saw another group of survivors, and with them, what appeared to be a makeshift raft.
• • •
Aboard the McVay rafts, the men sat quietly, up to their waists in the water. All that could be said had been said. Now, the hours ticked by, suspended in an obscure stillness. Long, rolling swells lifted the flotilla, but a receding pattern of identical swells, like giant furrows in a plowed field, kept them from seeing very far. There was almost no wind and the sun bore down as if through a magnifying glass. Vince Allard, the quartermaster, had cut apart a piece of the loose canvas and made cornucopia hats, which kept the sun off their heads. During the heat of the day, the men pulled the hats down over their ears, pulled up their life jacket collars to cover their necks, and kept their hands under cover. The layer of fuel oil coating their bodies kept the rest of their skin from frying, as did a layer of butter.
McVay served lunch: a piece of onion, two malt tablets, and a half-inch square of Spam. Perhaps not wanting to be the first to show weakness, no one asked the skipper for water. McVay estimated that he had five or six days of sparse rations left. He had done a lot of saltwater fishing and could see silver schools of bonita and small mackerel wheeling and glinting beneath the surface. Allard, who had grown up near Washington’s Okanogan River, turned out to be the best fisherman of the bunch. The best thing about the fishing was that it stirred excitement among the castaways. The group watched Allard with interest, cheering him on when fish ventured near his hook and bit. But McVay was dubious about the edibility of the catch, and would not let the men eat it.
• • •
In the Redmayne group, the days stretched out and a leaden lethargy blanketed the barely conscious men. Denied rest by his stinging and injured eyes, Petty Officer Eugene Morgan sat on one of the floater nets and squinted and blinked at the scene around him. Water. Sharks. Exhaustion. Death. More water. Fellows giving up, swimming away. Others trying and failing to stop their shipmates.
Several times, men desperate for a reprieve had come to Eugene Morgan, intent on swimming off to a phantom island. Looking into their eyes was like looking into a vacant house. It was as if their souls had already exited their bodies.
The day before, Eugene had been keeping his eye on a floater net some distance away bearing more than a dozen men when the sharks attacked in a tornado of fins and froth. Eugene sat bolt upright and watched in horror. Around him, men clamped their hands over their ears to block out the nightmare screams that crescendoed just before their crewmates disappeared.
Now, Eugene considered his own waterlogged floater net and shifted to find a more comfortable position. Through his burning eyes, he caught a glimpse of an object in the distance. It looked like a canvas bag. To cut down on the pilfering, Chief Benton had directed that all supplies be gathered on a raft bearing only officers. Had one of the bags of provisions escaped from the raft again? Eugene’s floater net, which was attached to the officers’ raft, was drenched, uncomfortable, and always getting tangled, yet he felt reluctant to leave it. But in this case, he decided that the risk might be worth the reward. He extricated himself from the net and paddled toward the object.
He’d been right: After a few moments of effort, he wrangled what turned out to be a canvas bag of rations. He headed back toward the officers’ raft, but as he got close, something hit him hard. Eugene spun wildly around, expecting to find another man after his prize, but he saw instead a streaking fin and felt cool water accelerate around his groin. Looking down, he saw that his skivvies were gone, torn from his body by a shark. Terror filled Eugene’s chest. Clutching the rations, he scrambled back to the group before the predator could return for a second bite.
Eugene squinted, blinked, and made his way over to the nearby officers’ raft, where he turned over the bag of provisions that had cost him his underwear. A sailor named Anthony, a pharmacist’s mate, noticed how bad Eugene’s eyes had become and called him to the sickbay raft. Eugene gladly complied, reckoning that a few inches of cork might offer a bit more protection than a holey old net. On the sickbay raft, he noticed a can or two of provisions tucked down under the water by everyone’s legs, their lids punched in to prevent them from floating away. Eugene found it merely curious that this small treasure had escaped the inventory system the officers had put in place for the entire group. But other men seethed over the fact that all the supplies were now under the officers’ control, and they vowed to kill the hogging sons of bitches when they all got ashore.
• • •
Glenn Morgan’s group began the day with a solemn task: burying Howard Freeze. The pain of his severe burns had sent the young lieutenant into a mild hysteria. Tuesday evening, he had fallen asleep exhausted, and when Fred Hart tried to wake him, he couldn’t. Freeze was dead. But there were a lot of sharks circling the rafts, and the men decided to wait until Wednesday to bury him. Hart and others gently slipped off the lieutenant’s ring and watch—keepsakes for his family—and slid his body over the side. Morgan could not watch.
Long, silent hours drifting on the vast blue plain had given Morgan plenty of time to think. When Moran said the SOS went out but it was possible no one had heard it, Morgan had rejected the idea. Now, he was beginning to think the radioman had nailed it. It was clear that rescue was not coming. This realization seemed to be spreading through Morgan’s group, which now contained nineteen men in four rafts. Bravado and optimism had given way to an irritable pall.
Earlier that morning a rain squall had soaked the group but also provided fresh water. They managed to catch about a gallon of it in one of the canvas sheets. Eagerly, those nearest dipped in enamel cups for a drink, but immediately spat it out. The water was brackish. Not as salty as the sea, but too salty to drink, made so by the dried sea salt that lay invisible on the canvas. The men used the remaining rainwater to rinse the canvas clean. Another squall hovered in the distance, hanging from the sky like a veil.
Morgan noticed fevered activity on another raft whose occupants had used their four-by-eight canvas and the two raft paddles to rig a sail.
“What are you fellas doing?” Moran said.
“We’re gonna sail over toward where those lights came from last night and find out what’s going on,” one man said.
Morgan hadn’t seen any lights, but now his eye caught a sudden movement. It was Harold Shearer. He had been sitting in his own raft near the side of Morgan’s. Now Morgan watched Shearer clamber quickly to the opposite side, where he tumbled into the sea. Lanter and another sailor lunged to the side of the raft, grabbed handfuls of Shearer’s shirt and dungarees, and hauled him back aboard.
“What are you doing?” Lanter yelled.
“You’re not going to put me in a bag and throw me over!” Shearer babbled, delirious.
Morgan could only deduce that when Shearer saw the men in the other raft fashioning their canvas into a sail, he thought they were making him a bag for burial at sea. Shearer had seen it before. They’d all seen it when those nine men died after the suicide strike off Okinawa. Indy’s sailmaker had used canvas to make body bags and sewn all the dead men inside them.
Shearer began an uncontrolled shivering and lapsed back into silence.
“We have to get him out of the water or he’ll get pneumonia,” Moran said. “Let’s bring him over to this raft.” Except for the last of the evaporating rainwater, Morgan and Moran’s raft was dry.
“Yeah, well, where are we gonna put him?” another sailor said.
Moran eyed him. “You’re gonna trade places with him.”
“Like hell I will! Why don’t you or Morgan go over there instead?”
Moran squared his body toward the sailor. Low and even, he said, “Get over there, and do it now.” Then he softened his tone. “We’ll take turns.”
With Lanter’s help, Morgan and Moran pulled Shearer onto the dry raft. Morgan dug a morphine syrette from their first-aid
kit and replaced Shearer’s shivering with a deep sleep. The sulking sailor spider-walked over to Shearer’s raft and sat down in water waist deep.
AUGUST 1, 1945, WEDNESDAY—AFTERNOON
In the Redmayne group, Ensign Donald Blum was wrestling a monster called sleep—not normal sleep, but the sleep of the damned. After nearly seventy-two hours with few rations and little rest, he found himself nodding off constantly. Balanced on the edge of consciousness, he struggled to determine whether he was trapped in a nightmare. Sometimes, when Blum was certain he was awake, he had to work hard to separate reality from hallucinations. He obsessed over drinking water and conjured images of fresh-grown tomatoes from his mother’s victory garden back home.
When the waves crested, the men on the southern edge of this group could glimpse men in the water to the south, but did not know who they were.
Near Blum, Ensign Twible wanted to do something to help the men, so he ordered them to pray. Many did, while others learned the Lord’s Prayer for the first time. Electrician’s Mate Second Class William Drayton had heard the words many times, but it was in the extremity of this plight that he finally understood their meaning.
Blum, though, wasn’t so sure about any kind of higher power. He’d heard men praying since the beginning of this calamity—the Lord’s Prayer, asking God for rescue, and so forth. Now men were talking of heaven. The idea just didn’t register with Blum. If God was going to rescue them, why had he put them in this mess in the first place? In the end, Blum believed the only one he could count on was himself. He had finalized his plan: He would convince the others to send him, along with a raft of supplies, to search for land.
In the same group, Harpo Celaya’s three-day attempt to avoid eye contact with the sharks ended abruptly. One of the huge predators burst through the surface into the air, thrashed at the apex of its flight, and eyeballed Celaya on its way down like some kind of carnivorous acrobat. The sudden, aggressive appearance of the shark marked a turn in the behavior of the group. Moments earlier, a sailor had lunged for Harpo and demanded sexual congress in the lewdest terms. Then, men began attacking each other with fists and knives, fighting savagely, spilling fresh blood into the water. This attracted more sharks. Now forced to acknowledge their presence, Harpo looked down and saw them, a deadly horde twisting like a cyclone scant feet below.
Fred Markmann still clutched the little line he shared with Celaya, but he was fading fast. Harpo paddled over to Redmayne’s raft and begged the lieutenant to let Markmann aboard.
“No!” Redmayne said, and pushed Harpo away. When Harpo made it back to Markmann, he heard someone speaking Spanish. He shook his head to clear his ears. But yes, it was definitely Spanish.
Harpo wrapped the rope tightly around Markmann’s hand, grabbed his friend’s shoulders, and looked him square in the eyes. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Harpo swam toward the Spanish-speaking voice and when he reached the raft where it was coming from, joy and relief flooded his heart.
“Celaya!” Santos Pena cried. “¿Cómo estás, mi amigo? ¡Pensé que estabas muerto!”
Celaya reached up to hug his friend. “I thought you were dead, too!”
With Pena was their buddy Sal Maldonado, a baker. The three men laughed and poured out their stories, each flushed with elation. As it turned out, Pena had been in the Redmayne group the whole time. After fifteen or twenty minutes, Harpo told Pena about Markmann. “I have to get back,” he said. “Stay safe.”
Brimming with good news, Harpo paddled back to his regular spot by the raft, but Markmann was gone. Harpo spun in a desperate arc, scouring the sea with his eyes, scissoring his legs to get higher in the water. Finally, in the distance, he caught sight of Markmann looking back at him from atop a high swell. He was waving goodbye.
8
* * *
HAROLD SHEARER SAT STONE-STILL next to Kenley Lanter, his scorched arms still thrust ahead like the Mummy. Morgan saw that his eyes remained fixed in a distant stare and wished there was something he could do for him.
Lanter seemed to read his mind. “Hey, the bandages in the first-aid kit are sopping wet, but it might help Shearer’s arms if we wrap them. What do you say?”
Morgan signaled his agreement by climbing carefully over to Lanter’s raft to help. Lanter dug out the bandages, which turned out to be not only soaked, but also black, covered with fuel oil. When he unfurled them, however, they seemed clean inside. Morgan found some mineral oil in the first-aid kit and poured it over Shearer’s burns. To apply the bandages Lanter and Morgan had to lift the sagging strips of burned flesh, cradle them in the bandages, then wrap the whole mess around Shearer’s raw arms. Throughout this operation, Shearer seemed almost oblivious.
Several men in the group had waterproof watches. That meant they knew what time it was and could institute a formal chow call. They implemented Moran’s rationing policy by carefully dividing a single can of Spam into nine or ten equal slices and then tossing the empty can over the side. Each man was issued a single slice, along with two hardtack wafers. This feast they washed down with three ounces of water.
During Wednesday’s lunch, Morgan watched as Charlie the shark cruised closer, the way he always did at mealtime. The oily residue left in the empty Spam cans seemed to excite him. Charlie’s approach appeared casual, almost friendly. When the shark came within a foot or so of the raft, Morgan slid from his seat on the edge back down into the relative safety of the latticework. Charlie closed the distance and, with one sweep of his tail, lifted his head completely out of the water and onto the edge of the raft—right where Morgan had been sitting. The shark paused for a moment, then eased himself backwards into the water and swam quietly away.
Morgan sat, stunned . . . until his mind drifted to other worries. They had now been in the water for three nights and three days. Doubt replaced his earlier confidence: What if rescue didn’t come? How long could they hold out? He had tried the raft fishing kits, which were stocked with dried bacon and colored yarn for lures. Not even Charlie was interested. But a man on another raft was getting better results.
It was Jim Belcher, a radioman striker who’d grown up fishing in Alabama. Morgan looked over to see him spitting partially chewed malt tablets into the water. Belcher had been sleeping in his skivvies on the deck starboard of turret 2 when the first torpedo hit. It was the first time he’d ever slept outside his own quarters, and the second torpedo hit the bunk area where he had slept every night before. At eighteen, he was only a seaman, just a gopher really, but now he was in his element. He used a dip net from the emergency kit to catch a small and wriggling purple fish, which he then used to lure larger silverfish, scooping them from the sea with his net. Lanter used his knife to clean and filet the catch then diced it into small pieces, which he served on the edge of his raft.
Not every man accepted this offering. Morgan tried a few pieces, mostly out of prudence. Best to test the available groceries before the other food ran out. He was surprised to find the fish easy to chew and the taste not half bad. The day’s catch boosted his confidence about their prospects for survival.
• • •
Buck Gibson wasn’t nearly as hopeful. Having witnessed several gruesome shark attacks, the men on his floater net continued fighting each other for space. Some had begun to ignore the injured and badly burned, letting those near death float away toward the sharks.
Just out of sight, the men in Denny Price’s group were terrified. Their waterlogged life jackets no longer held them up. Their faces were getting dangerously close to the surface, and they realized that the jackets that had saved their lives to this point might drown them in the end. They had knotted themselves into the vests to avoid accidentally slipping out of them, and now they were difficult to remove. With tender, peeling fingers, the men clawed at the knots. Some were unable to unravel the ties, their hands nearly useless after days of submersion. Moreover, small fish constantly nipped at their fingers and toes, and seve
ral men had exposed bone.
Mikolayek, who earlier had helped Cozell Smith bandage his shark-bitten hand, now helped Smith and others untie their vests and take them off. The men then held on to the vests, or sat on them, to keep their heads above water.
Also in this group, Verlin Fortin, who had quickly learned to swim, was struggling to stay afloat in his own vest when his best friend swam up and made an announcement. He was done with this nonsense and had decided to take a drink of ocean water. The next seconds seemed to last an age. Fortin watched his best friend dive below the surface to take his drink—but before he could, a shark plowed up and snatched him away. Fortin cried out, not in fear but with a voice that rose up clear and strong all the way from his belly: “Five days!” he vowed. “I’m going to make it five days, and if rescue doesn’t come, I’ll drink the water, too.”
• • •
Lyle Umenhoffer floated in his life jacket near the Haynes group, but on a far fringe. His little group had dwindled to fifteen men. To discourage sharks—which seemed less inclined to tear into a mass of men—they tried to float in a tight knot with the weakest and most badly injured at the center. That put Umenhoffer on the outer ring, where he had an eye-level view of the man-eating horde. The small ones, three to four feet long, seemed the most aggressive and were tensed to hunt. These were opportunists, snatching and shredding any man who detached himself from the group.
The largest sharks stretched sixteen to twenty feet long. One moment, these behaved like gentle and curious giants, nosing up close to inspect the men with black, unblinking eyes. The next moment they attacked, their steel-trap jaws snuffing out a man’s life before he could draw a breath to scream.
Umenhoffer had developed a technique for dealing with the sharks. He would wait until one of them cruised just alongside, then he would kick it, hard, in the flank, and the startled shark would dart away. He had administered at least ten such blows, and it worked every time.