by Lynn Vincent
The coxswain treaded water and wrestled with himself. To this point, he had been the enforcer of the group, but Pace was a good friend. Was he really a danger to anyone?
“You have to do it, man,” came a voice from his side. “It’s just a matter of time before he goes out of his head completely and comes after one of us. We all agreed. Even him.”
The coxswain locked eyes with another man who shared the burden of the pact, and saw a message there. He then whirled on the sailor who had urged him to take Pace out.
“I’ll do you before I do him,” the coxswain snapped. Then he drew back his arm and slapped Pace so hard that he came to his senses. To keep their friend out of danger, the three men linked arms for the rest of the night, praying that all this would end soon, and that at least they would die together.
11
* * *
AUGUST 2, 1945, THURSDAY—MORNING
Philippine Sea
WILBUR GWINN COULD HARDLY believe it: The new antenna was already broken. Flying over the Philippine Sea in his Lockheed PV-1 Ventura bomber, Wilbur “Chuck” Gwinn, a lieutenant junior grade, was already an hour behind schedule. It was the new aerial weight they were testing. Designed to extend the Ventura’s trailing antenna wire, the weight was supposed to improve long-range radio communications. So far, though, it had been nothing but a pain in the neck.
Gwinn had taken off early that morning from his base in Peleliu, Palau, at the very bottom of the horseshoe archipelago that formed the Philippine Sea. Before commencing their regular sector search for enemy craft, Gwinn’s crew had reeled out the antenna wire. The new weight lasted all of two minutes before snapping off, leaving the wire to whip and twirl in the wind. Gwinn had to make a one-eighty and return to base to get a new one installed. At 9:10 a.m., he rolled down the runway again, determined this time to wait until he was well under way in his sector to test the blasted thing again.
Now it was just after 11 a.m. Gwinn, call sign Gambler 17,I was 350 miles almost due north of Palau, cruising at three thousand feet, straight into the sun. Under the hard glare, the Philippine Sea appeared as smooth and reflective as a foil sheet. At this altitude, he could see twenty square miles at a glance. His crew reeled out the antenna wire again. So far, so good.
Spoking out from the southern rim of the Philippine Sea, the unofficial backwater of the war, these ho-hum sector searches clashed with Chuck Gwinn’s passion for excitement. Born on a California ranch nestled between the Santa Cruz and Diablo Mountains, he had always been an up-and-comer. While still in his teens, he went to work for Douglas Aircraft, simultaneously studying at the University of Southern California. In 1943, at age twenty-one, he earned his Navy wings and became a test pilot. Now, at twenty-four, Gwinn was an aircraft commander in the patrol-bomber squadron VPB-152, his PV-1 Ventura the race car of the Pacific patrol fleet.
Gwinn’s chief radioman, Bill Hartman, popped up on the intercom with bad news: The antenna weight had broken off again.
“Our long-range radio is now inoperative, sir,” Hartman said, exasperated. Gwinn sighed. This time, the weight had lasted five minutes.
Gwinn turned the controls over to his copilot, Lieutenant Warren Colwell, and ducked out of the cockpit into the Ventura’s belly. The burbling hum of her two-thousand-horsepower engines filled his ears. Behind the plane, the antenna wire whirled and snapped like a ringmaster’s whip. If the boys didn’t get it under control, it might lash the Ventura’s tail and damage it.
Gwinn scowled. “Johnson, Hickman, reel that thing in.”
Joe Johnson was Gwinn’s plane captain, the enlisted man in charge of the aircraft’s material condition. Herb Hickman was the aviation ordnanceman aboard. Gwinn watched as they retracted the wire, but he was not one to give up. There was a window in the Ventura’s deck. Maybe Johnson and Hickman could pull the antenna wire through it, then attach it to something inside the fuselage to make it trail properly.
“Here, sir, try this,” Johnson said.
It was a piece of rubber hose. Gwinn attached it to the end of the wire, and the crew paid it out again, into the Ventura’s slipstream. Gwinn bent down and peered through the window to take a look—and almost as quickly leapt to his feet again and dashed for the cockpit.
“What’s the matter?” Hickman shouted over the propeller noise.
Gwinn shouted back, “Look down and you’ll see!”
• • •
Nearly four days in the water had sanded away the sharp edges of John Woolston’s reason. The morning of the fourth day, he knew two things. One, he was extremely hungry, and two, there was food in the water. He could look down and see it: a swarm of sharks circling not far below, right there for the taking.
Woolston had seen other men hit by sharks, had heard their bubbling screams. He’d been wondering vaguely why he hadn’t been attacked. Probably his gray uniform made him blend in with the water.
Woolston bobbed gently in his sodden life jacket. The sun baked his head, but the water was cool and incredibly clear. He gazed down through wavering shafts of sunlight and measured the predators with the practiced eye of an engineer. They were big—twelve feet, give or take—and also delicious-looking. A few bites out of one of those and he could last out here a lot longer. But, invisible as he was, how could he get the sharks to come?
As a kid, he’d fished a lot in the San Juan Islands. He recalled that he always caught more with live bait because the wriggling attracted the fish. What could he use?
His toes! Quickly, Woolston stripped off his socks. He saw that his feet, contrasted against his uniform, were parchment white and spotlit by the sun. Perfect! He thrust his toes toward the sea bottom and began wiggling them at the sharks.
Take the bait, was all he could think. Take the bait!
He felt ebullient, poised for a breakthrough, giddy with hope. Woolston kept this up for a few minutes, but the sharks persisted in ignoring his toes. Then, slowly, his feet got tired. Finally, he gave up and put his socks back on.
• • •
In Gwinn’s Ventura, Herb Hickman pasted his face to the window and peered down at the ocean. It took about twenty seconds before waves, almost imperceptible at this altitude, lifted sunlight back to his eyes. Then he saw what had Gwinn excited. It was an oil slick. Probably a Japanese sub had crash-dived in an attempt to hide when her skipper picked up the Ventura. But the enemy skipper could not hide his telltale trail.
Hickman’s heart rate picked up to a fast staccato. Their routine patrol had just turned into a search-and-destroy mission.
In the cockpit, Gwinn climbed into his seat and swung the plane around, tail to the sun. Now he could see more clearly. He put the Ventura into a diving turn and asked Colwell if the radar was showing anything.
“Nothing,” Colwell shouted. “It’s like glass down there—you can’t see a thing.”
Gwinn issued orders to his crew: “Arm depth charges. Open the bomb bay doors.”
Hickman prepared the charges—there were six aboard, 325 pounds each—and Gwinn nosed the plane down until her belly skimmed the ocean at nine hundred feet, no higher than a brooding thundercloud in a close storm. Galvanized, he flew the oil slick as if it were a road map—a shining, black path that would lead him to the enemy.
• • •
Resignation had set in among McVay’s group of castaways: They would likely die out here. The previous day, McVay told the men that they had now drifted out of the shipping lane, reducing even further their chances of being seen. He did not tell them he had ceased to hope. Whenever conversation lapsed in his ragged fleet, images of the disaster spun through his mind. He thought of the men he knew—Moore, Flynn, Janney, the dentist Earl Henry. Henry’s perfect model of Indy, a gift for the new baby boy he would never meet, now lay on the sea bottom in the belly of the real ship.
McVay mourned his sailors. In his mind, he could see every single man. Silently, he called the roll, knowing they could never answer again.
Soon the men
spotted a large cardboard box floating near the rafts. They paddled over and discovered that it was a case of Lucky Strike cigarettes. A couple of men pulled it from the sea, ripped it open, and passed a carton to each man. Yeoman Alton Havins searched through his and found a treasure—a single dry cigarette, about half of which could be smoked. Other men also found smokable butts. But how to light them with the matches ruined?
They came up with a plan: They’d rip the collar from a kapok jacket, toss it in the 40 mm ammo can they’d found, and fire a flare into the can to start a little fire. They pleaded with the captain to let them do it.
McVay thought it over. The flares had proven too low and dim to signal an aircraft. Why not let the boys enjoy what might be their last real pleasure in this life? He gave his consent and the sailors let out a little whoop.
• • •
As Thursday ticked by, Morgan gazed over at the next raft and watched Harold Shearer. He sat motionless, with a vacant stare, arms thrust out, bandages grimy with fuel oil. Morgan felt sorry for him. Shearer was already in tremendous pain, but then to keep holding his arms aloft that way? It must be sheer misery. Morgan didn’t think he could hang on much longer. He also did not know that the next day, August 3, was Shearer’s birthday. He would turn twenty-five—if he lived that long.
For his part, Morgan felt almost good. Given their predicament, a ride on a soggy raft was pretty cushy compared with the alternatives. He let his mind drift, daydreaming.
Would they survive? Yes, he thought. Though it seemed against reason, he had little doubt. Surely a rain squall would blow in at some point. They could catch water in the canvas and replenish the kegs. And with the fish they were catching, Morgan felt they could hold out for a long time. Add in a little luck, and they’d be all right.
“Hey, Morgan.”
Lanter’s voice roused him from his trance.
“Look,” Lanter said, jerking his chin toward the horizon. “Do you see it?”
Morgan turned his eyes toward the line that divided sky and sea. He squinted, focused. Squinted and refocused. Then he saw it, a black speck moving back and forth, just above the horizon.
“I see it,” he said. “Is it a bird?”
“I don’t think so.”
Morgan locked his gaze on the speck. It didn’t act like a bird, but oscillated left then right again in straight lines. Still, it was awfully small.
“I guess it’s a bird—” Morgan started to say when the speck flashed a glint of light.
“Hell, it’s a plane!” Lanter cried.
In the rafts, all hands swiveled to look—all except for Shearer, who did not seem to care. The rest of the men set up a murmuring. Where most had sat mute and sphinxlike, now anticipation bubbled up. Nineteen pairs of eyes locked onto the mystery plane and did not let go.
* * *
I. Aircraft call signs are pronounced one number at a time. Gambler 17 would be spoken “Gambler One Seven.”
12
* * *
LIEUTENANT GWINN FOLLOWED THE oil slick for about fifteen nautical miles before reaching its tip. He was about to order Hickman to release the first depth charges when he noticed a strange lump in the smooth, black surface. Then more anomalies, dozens more, resembling nothing so much as bumps on a cucumber. What in the world were they?
“Secure from bomb run,” he ordered over the intercom. The Ventura zoomed low over water, and the bumps resolved into the last thing Gwinn expected to see—people!
He checked the time—11:18 a.m.—and pulled his yoke to bring the plane around for another pass. He and Colwell counted heads—ten, twenty, thirty.
Gwinn descended to three hundred feet to take a closer look. Now he could easily see oil-covered men waving, splashing, slapping the water. The crew in the belly of the plane stared down through the bomb bay doors. Hickman was so astonished he would later have no words to describe the feeling.
A thought arrowed through Gwinn’s mind: ducks on the pond. Who were these people? During his preflight brief, he’d been told of ships passing along the route between Guam and Leyte. The oil slick was huge and seemed to indicate that a large vessel had been sunk. But there had been no mention of a sinking during his brief, and none since he’d been airborne. Were these Americans?
“Men in the water!” Gwinn shouted over the intercom. “Drop the life raft. Drop sonobuoys.” He hoped someone in the water would know how to use the buoys to communicate.
Quickly, Gwinn and Colwell calculated a dead-reckoning position and passed it to Chief Hartman, who at 11:25 a.m. transmitted a coded dispatch to VPB-152, their patrol squadron at Palau, and to all ships in the area:
THIRTY SURVIVORS SIGHTED. SEND ASSISTANCE.
Gwinn continued his visual probe of the oil slick, flying low enough to see, but not so low as to rattle the men in the water with his propeller wash. Soon, he spotted another group of men, this one large, as many as 150. Incredible. The Ventura crew dropped another sonobuoy and took a LORAN fix—or Long Range Navigation position. At 12:45 p.m., Gwinn had Chief Hartman send another coded message: Gambler 17’s position—11-54N, 133-47E—along with the new count of survivors and a request for rescue ships.
The long-range antenna wire was still a tangled mess. Gwinn hoped the transmission was going out.
• • •
The Morgan group had barely begun using their signal mirrors when the plane broke off its patrol and flew straight toward the flotilla. As it neared, it took shape as a PV-1 Ventura—a U.S. Navy bomber! The castaways began to whoop and holler and wave their arms. Elation filled Morgan as he watched the pilot put the Ventura into a gentle dive and buzz in low just above the group. About a hundred yards farther on, he saw an object eject from the plane and hit the water. The pilot then pulled up, cut a circle in the sky over the rafts, and flew off. Near the flotilla, a bright yellow-green ring blossomed in the sea.
• • •
Aviation Machinist Mate Second Class Jim Graham was sitting in the after-station hatch of a PBM-5 Mariner—a patrol bomber flying boat—gazing down at the vast smooth mirror of the ocean. Graham was off duty. The Mariner, piloted by Lieutenant Sam Worthington, had taken off from Saipan (at the northeastern edge of the horseshoe) three and a half hours earlier. Now westbound for Leyte, the plane was skimming over broken clouds at eight thousand feet when Graham spotted an anomaly. Interrupting the ocean’s glossy, boundless sweep was a large yellow-green blotch. It looked to him like a dye marker.
On the intercom, Graham notified Worthington, who immediately banked left and entered a steep descent. At one to two hundred feet, the Mariner zoomed over a group of twelve to fifteen men wearing gray kapok life jackets, followed by more knots of swimmers and a wooden raft, the whole scene set in a thick, winding slick of oil.
The twelve-man crew of the plane came to full alert: Japs!
But looking closer, maybe not. Was it a ditched B-29 crew? No: too much oil. Had a tanker sunk, then? No: too many men in the water. Well, they were survivors of some kind. The pilot, Worthington, spotted Gwinn’s Ventura orbiting some distance away and raised him on the radio. Gwinn briefed Worthington and said he was concerned that his messages hadn’t gone out because of his fouled antenna wire. Worthington replied that he’d climb to altitude and transmit an all-points message. His crew kicked out yellow life rafts and jackets, water breakers, and a “Gibson Girl,” a portable emergency radio. Then as Worthington climbed, his radioman hopped to and began a continuous transmission to Leyte.
• • •
Seaman Harold Bray, the sailor who hadn’t believed the quartermaster, Frenchy, when he said Indy would sink, was floating on the fringes of the Gibson floater net group when he saw objects falling from Gwinn’s Ventura. One of them splashed down nearby and Bray swam to it, charged with hope. It was a sonobuoy, but having been at sea for all of two weeks, he had never seen one before.
Bray shook it, listening for the slosh of drinking water. Hearing none, he inspected it more closely. Was it s
ome new kind of lifesaving gear? Did it contain food? Finally, he decided he didn’t know what to do with the damned thing and cast it away. If it wasn’t water, food, or a raft, it was useless.
Bray stared up again at the plane in the sky. It seemed to be flying away. Don’t leave us! he screamed in his mind, or maybe even out loud.
• • •
Adrenaline burst forth in Ed Harrell’s body as if from a geyser.
“I hear a plane!” he cried, heart pounding.
“So do I!” McKissick yelled.
Chuck Gwinn’s Ventura had finally reached the part of the twenty-five-mile oil slick where McKissick and Harrell floated in the muck. Harrell began to wave his arms, to cry, to splash, to pray. McKissick joined in as thoughts sped through Harrell’s mind, a chorus of hope. Just as it seemed the aircraft would pass over their heads and fly on, the pilot made a dive.
The plane was a PV-1 Ventura, and it flew low over the two screaming men, who were now triumphant. They’d been seen!
The Ventura circled back in a low oval and shoved out a life raft. It tumbled from the sky and splashed down about a hundred yards from McKissick. Before flying off, the pilot ratified their joy by rocking his wings, a universal aviation sign used to acknowledge a friendly.
McKissick made his way to the raft, followed by Harrell, who paused on the way to say a farewell benediction over the dead sailor who’d been traveling with them.