by Tod Olson
Thanks to Captain Cherry’s skills, the navigator was spared. The high-speed ride came to a smooth stop, and Rickenbacker complimented Cherry on the maneuver.
A tow truck hauled the bomber back to the hangar, and the men began unloading their equipment into another B-17.
The crew were surprised to find they were taking off again as soon as they could transfer the gear. Normally, they’d take a new plane up for a trial run. As engineer, Bartek would spend a couple of hours inspecting it to make sure everything was flight worthy. DeAngelis would get to check his navigation instruments.
Captain Cherry objected to the quick turnaround time, which Bartek was happy to see. That was just like their pilot, always looking out for his crew. But the general in charge said that if the captain was afraid to take on the mission, they would just get another pilot. Cherry was too proud to back down from a challenge, so they all got ready to fly. Whatever this mission was, Bartek figured, it must be important to somebody.
As the cots and mailbags and provisions exited the original plane, Whittaker noticed DeAngelis inspecting a piece of equipment. It was an octant—an instrument used to measure latitude and longitude from thousands of feet in the air. The octant had taken a beating during the ground loop, DeAngelis said.
“Anything wrong with it?” Whittaker asked.
“Doesn’t seem to be,” the navigator replied.
DeAngelis cradled the octant in his hand and carried it aboard their new plane. By 1:30 a.m., when the nose of the B-17 rose successfully into the sky, he had settled the instrument in place on his new table. There, as the sun rose over the Pacific, he would use it to chart a course for their first refueling stop, Canton Island.
CHAPTER 2
ISLAND EYES
As the plane rumbled into the night, Rickenbacker and Adamson went aft. Two cots had been set up for them in the back—the B-17 version of VIP treatment. They lay down and tried to sleep.
Rickenbacker tossed and turned while he listened to Adamson snore. It had been twenty months since the crash of the passenger plane that had nearly killed him. But his body still ached from the beating it had taken. It was hard to get comfortable in a plush bed, much less an army cot in a rattling bomber. At 10,000 feet, the air outside was below freezing, even in the tropics. He wore a leather flight jacket over his business suit and huddled under an expensive designer coat. Still, he couldn’t stop shivering.
It was a demanding, two-day trip across the Pacific, and Rickenbacker wasn’t thrilled with the crew he’d been stuck with. Whittaker was broad-shouldered and rugged. But this was a young man’s war. Why, Rickenbacker wondered, had they given him a copilot in his forties? And the pilot, Cherry, seemed like a hick, with his cowboy boots and his goatee. His attitude was way too casual for Rickenbacker. A war demanded discipline, not one-liners delivered in a Texas drawl.
Rickenbacker’s B-17 had been stripped of its guns and ammunition. But when it was fully equipped, the “Flying Fortress” went into battle with 2 tons of bombs and a crew of ten.
As for the rest of them, they were green. DeAngelis, a wiry guy with a pencil mustache, didn’t have much experience navigating long flights. Bartek, who had barely opened his mouth so far, only had four months of training as an engineer and precious few flights on a four-engine plane. Kaczmarczyk, the second engineer, had been added to the crew to help Bartek. But he had just spent weeks in the hospital with jaundice and appendicitis. He had a pale, sickly look to him. Reynolds, the radio operator, was the one crew member who seemed to know what he was doing. But a radio operator didn’t have much to do on flights near Japanese lines. The enemy had radiomen scanning the airwaves, hoping to pick up news of a vulnerable plane or ship. Silence was the best policy.
In the months since Pearl Harbor, the entire Pacific Ocean had become a war zone. After the surprise attack, Japanese ships and aircraft carriers swept south from the home island and bases in Southeast Asia. Guam fell under Axis control, then Wake Island and Hong Kong. The Dutch East Indies were next, and then the Philippines. American troops manning the last line of defense on the Philippine peninsula of Bataan chalked “V”s on their helmets—not for “victory” but for “victim.” One British general summed up the result of the onslaught: “It means that from Africa eastwards to America, through the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, we have lost control of the sea.”
By the time Rickenbacker was assigned to visit the war zone, the U.S. and their British allies had stopped the offensive. But half the Pacific Ocean belonged to Japan. That meant they were able to maintain a steady supply of rubber and oil and tin to keep the Japanese war machine humming. It also meant that Japan was dangerously close to shutting off the supply route between the U.S. and Australia. If that happened, the entire Eastern Hemisphere could fall under Japanese control.
In October 1942, the two sides, Allies versus Axis, sat balanced on a deadly seesaw. At the center stood an airstrip hacked out of the jungle on an island called Guadalcanal. Ten weeks earlier, 11,000 U.S. Marines had stormed the airfield in the early morning and seized it for the Allies. It was just a single dirt runway—choked with dust in dry weather, mired in mud when it rained. But if the Japanese took it back, that would put Samoa and Fiji and New Caledonia in range of their planes. The southern supply route from the U.S. would be chopped in two. Australia would be on its own.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Japanese navy launched a major offensive in the Pacific. When Rickenbacker and the B-17 crew took off on their mission, Allied forces were trying desperately to push the Japanese back and protect the supply route from the U.S. to Australia.
That was exactly the fate Rickenbacker was trying to help prevent. In his pocket, as he tossed and turned in the back of the bomber, were orders from the secretary of defense, Henry Stimson. Rickenbacker was to visit air bases in the war zone, and Guadalcanal was at the top of the list. He would inspect the operations and give pep talks to the exhausted airmen, who were wracked with fever and diarrhea and surviving on two rations of rice a day. Then he would report back to Washington on the best way to gain control of the skies over the Pacific.
At 6 a.m., Rickenbacker finally gave up on sleep. He got up, made his way forward, and ran into Kaczmarczyk. Like everyone else, Rickenbacker had given up on the kid’s last name and just called him “Alex.” Sergeant Alex looked exhausted, so Rickenbacker offered up his cot and continued on.
In the nose of the plane, DeAngelis had been using his octant to take positional readings on the stars. Everything looked good, he said. They were on course to hit Canton Island at 9:30 a.m.
In the cockpit, the mood was upbeat. Rickenbacker took a turn at the controls. He and Captain Cherry compared the B-17 to the rickety planes of World War I. When Rickenbacker fought, he had gone aloft in wood-frame fighters with cotton fabric for a shell. If a pilot dove too fast, the wing fabric shredded in midair. With nothing but a wood skeleton for wings, those planes would plunge for a head-on meeting with the ground. The B-17, with its aluminum shell, felt pretty solid by contrast.
Colonel Adamson came up from the tail, and the four men tried to keep themselves alert with coffee and sweet rolls. At about 8:30, Cherry pointed the plane downward. At 1,000 feet, he leveled off to start looking for Canton Island.
They were still looking an hour later, when DeAngelis popped up from the nose compartment. Under normal circumstances, he had the wiry, nervous energy of a dog on a hunt. Now he was even more agitated. He beckoned Cherry into the navigator’s area, and when the two emerged, they both looked worried. DeAngelis had been taking readings on the sun with his octant, and something wasn’t right. He felt it had probably been damaged during the failed takeoff the night before. If the octant was off by just 1 degree, they could have missed the island by 20 miles.
Rickenbacker started to feel uneasy. They had been told they had a 10-mile-per-hour tailwind. But down below, angry whitecaps crowned the waves, and 10-mile-per-hour winds don’t make seas like that
. Suppose the winds were double or triple what they’d been told. They could be 180 miles beyond Canton Island by now.
Cherry sat back down and tried another way to locate their position. He found a radio signal from Canton. Then he asked Whittaker to turn the direction finder antenna fastened to the roof outside the cockpit. The direction finder rotates to pinpoint the position of a station by determining when the signal is weakest and strongest. If they could find where Canton’s signal was coming from, they could set a course for it.
Whittaker tugged at the crank inside the cockpit, but it was broken. The antenna wouldn’t budge.
Cherry was the first one to say it out loud, and he did it in the way his crew had come to expect. Not a word wasted. No one left guessing what he really meant.
“We’re lost,” he said.
Bartek checked the readings on the fuel tanks and announced they had about four hours left. Reynolds raised Canton’s station on the radio and asked them to use the plane’s signal to calculate its position. But Canton didn’t have the equipment to trace a radio signal. Reynolds tried a few more wireless stations. But the only island he was able to contact was at least 1,000 miles to the northeast. Their fuel reserve would only get them three-quarters of the way there, and they’d be left no closer to civilization than they were right now.
With less than four hours of flying time left, Cherry started “boxing the compass.” He climbed to 5,000 feet and put the bomber on a course to fly forty-five minutes in each direction of the compass. It was standard procedure for a lost plane, and it allowed the crew to scan as wide an area as possible in a limited amount of time. Cherry took care to turn south first. Five hundred miles to the west and north of Canton lay the Gilbert Islands, where the Japanese had established a base. North of that was nothing but enemy waters.
Whittaker, Bartek, Adamson, and Alex scanned the sea for signs of land. DeAngelis relayed messages back and forth between Reynolds in the radio room and Cherry in his pilot’s seat. Before long, Rickenbacker suggested a trick he recalled from World War I. Reynolds instructed Canton to fire their antiaircraft guns with the shells set to detonate at 8,000 feet. Cherry nosed the B-17 up to 10,000 feet, where they looked for the telltale bursts of smoke. If they could spot smoke, they would find the island below it.
There was nothing but blue sky and clouds as far as they could see.
As he gazed out the tiny portal, looking for any sign of civilization, Whittaker thought this must be the loneliest, emptiest place in the world. The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the globe’s surface. Take all the land in the world, plunk it down in the Pacific, and you would still have room for another piece the size of North America. Canton Island was just a thin ribbon of coral with a lagoon in the middle. It was eight miles long by four miles wide. They were looking for a 32-square-mile patch in 68,000,000 square miles of ocean. Imagine trying to find a quarter in the middle of a football field from the top of the stands.
As they finished the final leg of the box, there was little hope left of finding land. It was time for plan B: ditching the plane in the ocean. Inessentials went out the hatch in the bomb bay. The bulkheads were padded for impact. Emergency supplies were collected by the rear hatch. Cherry and Whittaker planned the landing. DeAngelis prayed. They all put on standard-issue inflatable life vests. Alex grabbed a special thermos to make sure he had cream for his coffee.
They assigned themselves places in the three rafts. Rickenbacker, Adamson, and Bartek would share one of the large rafts; Cherry, Whittaker, and Reynolds would take the other. DeAngelis and Sergeant Alex, the smallest guys aboard, would take the tiny two-man raft they had stashed in the rear.
As they took their places, Bartek noticed that Adamson was braced against the bulkhead in an awkward position, and he was tempted to say something. But Bartek had never even spoken to anyone ranked higher than a major. He wasn’t about to give advice to a colonel.
At some point, as Cherry nosed the plane toward the sea, Rickenbacker and Adamson huddled in the back, already thinking past the landing. If they had missed Canton to the north, they could easily be within range of Japanese planes based in the Gilberts. Army intelligence had told Adamson about a truth serum the Germans had supposedly given to the Japanese. One shot in the arm and a prisoner spilled everything he knew. At least, that was the story.
Rickenbacker knew more than a few Allied secrets—not just about Pacific bases, but about plans for one of the biggest surprise attacks of the war. The Americans and their British allies were secretly preparing an invasion of North Africa, where the Germans and British had been battling in the desert for more than two years. Rickenbacker knew exactly when and where the invasion was going to happen. If that information fell into Japanese hands, the results could be disastrous. He knew he couldn’t risk becoming a prisoner of war.
As the plane drew nearer to the water’s surface, Adamson and Rickenbacker made a pact. If a Japanese plane found them, drifting in their rafts, they would throw themselves overboard and dive until they drowned. But even that grim plan was based on an optimistic guess: that they would first survive the impact with the unforgiving ocean.
CHAPTER 3
IMPACT
The shock from the crash landing did not last long. In the copilot’s seat, seconds after the plane hit the water, Jim Whittaker tore off his safety belt. He turned to see how the rest of the crew had fared. Johnny Bartek had released one of the forward life rafts and was struggling with the other. Whittaker grabbed the pull cord and yanked. The package dislodged from its compartment. A carbon dioxide canister was supposed to uncork automatically and inflate the raft with a whoosh. Whittaker could only hope that when he got outside the raft would be floating on the waves, held fast to the plane by a length of cord.
Whittaker and Cherry moved aft to check on the others. Miraculously, everyone behind them was alive. How long they would stay that way was unclear. The tail of the plane had cracked on impact and listed noticeably toward the ocean floor. Water was shin deep and rising in the main compartment. If they didn’t move fast, the plane that had held them aloft for fifteen hours would bury them alive two miles beneath the surface of the sea. They had five minutes—maybe less—to escape the wreckage, get into the rafts, and cut themselves free.
The next moments passed in a blur, each move less a choice than an instinct. Adamson had wrenched his back, as Bartek had feared he would. He was moaning in pain while he struggled to his feet. Reynolds had stayed at the radio till the last second, tapping out the SOS. Blood poured from a gash in his nose as he waded aft toward the hatch. Rickenbacker prodded Adamson through the topside hatch into the light and then followed him out. Alex and DeAngelis shoved the small life raft out and climbed after it. Whittaker and Bartek went out the cockpit hatch. Cherry, the plane’s captain till its final moments, emerged last.
A crashed B-17 after ditching in the waters off New Guinea in 1942.
Bartek found himself on the right wing, wrestling with one of the forward rafts. Rickenbacker and Adamson made their way toward him along the top of the plane. The sun threw a blinding light off the ocean. Waves twice the height of a man beat against the side of the plane. The ocean had turned the 25-ton bomber into a toy bobbing and weaving at the whim of the water. Bartek fought to keep his balance. Somehow it had fallen to him, a mere private, to get the two colonels safely in the raft.
He strained at the rope that kept the raft tethered to the plane, trying to pull it close to the wing. It was no easy job, playing tug-of-war with one hundred pounds of rubberized canvas against an entire ocean. Adamson and Rickenbacker climbed down to the wing. Bartek muscled the raft close, and the injured colonel slid in. He collapsed on the floor of the raft, paralyzed with pain.
Adamson’s weight jerked the raft away from the wing and pulled Bartek off his feet. Bartek landed hard and clung to the wing, his legs dangling in the water. Scrambling back to safety, he wrapped the rope around one hand, found a hold on the plane with the other, and held
the raft close. Rickenbacker climbed in, and finally, Bartek fell in on top of him.
A moment of relief followed in the tiny raft as they shifted to find a stable arrangement of legs and arms. As soon as Bartek got himself upright he found the rope that still held them fast to the plane. That quarter-inch tether had been their lifeline a moment ago. Now, if they didn’t find a way to sever it before the plane went under, the line would drag their only means of survival to the bottom of the sea. Bartek grabbed the line and tried to tear it with his bare hands. This was exactly the kind of life-or-death situation that was supposed to give a person superhuman strength, he thought. Wasn’t it?
Thankfully, someone produced a penknife. Bartek cut the line, and they floated free of the sinking plane. Somewhere along the way, grappling with the sharp edges of the B-17, he had sliced the palm of his hand nearly to the bone. The raft had taken on several inches of water. But for the moment they had what they needed—something between them and the bottom of the ocean. They pieced together the aluminum oars stashed under the inflatable sidewalls of the raft. Rickenbacker took off his hat and bailed salt water mixed with Bartek’s blood into the sea.
As Bartek, Rickenbacker, and Adamson paddled beyond the tail of the plane, they noticed a frenzy of activity on the other side. Captain Cherry, Whittaker, and Reynolds were settled in the other large raft. But DeAngelis and Sergeant Alex had been dumped in the sea by their much smaller craft. Their oars were floating away on the swells.
DeAngelis clung to the raft. He wrestled it upright and pulled himself over the side. Alex thrashed and spluttered, trying to keep his head above water. But with DeAngelis’s help he managed to get aboard. After a minute of furious rowing, Cherry and Whittaker corralled the missing oars and returned them to the small raft. Alex promptly leaned over the side and vomited into the ocean.