by Tod Olson
Fifty yards downwind of the plane, the men gathered as close as they could with the constant surge of the swells underneath. The air filled with voices, amped by adrenaline.
“Who’s got the water?”
No one had taken the water.
“How about the food?”
No one had the food.
All their careful preparation had been wiped from memory by the force of the impact. In their haste to get out, no one had grabbed the supplies they had stacked by the hatch.
The plane, by now, lay heavy in the water. It rose one moment at the crest of a swell, then vanished into a trough, then rose and vanished and rose again. Most likely, the food and the thermoses were floating in several feet of water. Someone suggested a trip back into the plane to find them, but they all agreed it would be too risky.
Rickenbacker unspooled a length of rope he had wrapped around his waist before they ditched. The men rowed close and started tying the rafts in a line. The ocean was a vast and lonely place. Better to face it together than apart.
Whittaker kept one eye on the giant metal Fortress as she struggled against the waves. The wings had disappeared under the water. The nose lingered above the surface as if it were straining for a few final gasps of air.
Jim Whittaker had been a pilot for fifteen years. He was trained to trust his life to the planes he flew. At 10,000 feet above the earth, a bond developed between man and machine. In the air, the B-17 was sturdy and capable. It was sad to see her thrust into an element she wasn’t made for.
He turned his attention to the rope for a moment. When he looked up, the plane was gone. He kept his gaze trained on the spot until a few swells had passed. All he could see, from the raft to the horizon, was ocean.
Six minutes had passed since they plunged from the sky.
CHAPTER 4
STRANDED
The ocean carried the rafts as if they were cars on a roller coaster: 12 feet up to the crest of a swell, 12 feet down to the base of a trough. The men strained at the ropes that bound the rafts together and huddled in tight formation.
They bobbed on the waves, packed like sardines marinating in salt water. Blood had begun to dry in a brown crust across Reynolds’s face. Bartek was still bleeding from his hand. Adamson could barely move in the corner of his raft.
And yet, they were alive. For the moment, nothing else mattered. As the plane headed for its meeting with the ocean, each member of the crew had lived with the probability that he would be dead in a few minutes. But here they were, still breathing the air. And that was enough to fill each of them with pure joy. The simple fact of survival made the world look hopeful.
And then the retching began.
As the churning of the current took its toll, seasickness set in. One by one the men joined Alex at the sides of the rafts, vomiting into the water. Rickenbacker claimed he felt fine. But Whittaker was sure he saw three heads, not just two, bent over the side of the colonel’s raft.
Whittaker was enjoying a moment of relief when a sudden movement in the water caught his eye. Since they landed he’d been focused on either the plane in the distance or the raft beneath him. Now he scanned the water around them, and what he saw made him recoil in terror. The ocean was not as lonely as he had thought.
Everywhere he looked, triangular fins sliced the surface. Sharks, long, sleek, and silent, surrounded the rafts. When a wave crested just right, Whittaker got a good look at them. They were gray on top, white on the bottom. Some were at least ten or twelve feet long—even longer than the rafts. They circled the group like vultures waiting for an easy victim.
It was suddenly clear to Whittaker just how vulnerable he and the rest of the crew were. If the sharks decided to attack, the rafts would give way in a second. The rubberized canvas was tough, but it was no match for a set of shark teeth. One good bite and the men would have more holes to patch than they could manage.
The Predators: Whittaker thought some of the sharks circling the rafts resembled tiger sharks.
Even fully inflated, the rafts were barely any protection at all. The side tubes were little more than a foot tall and a foot wide. The two-person raft was so small that DeAngelis and Alex had trouble keeping their elbows from dangling over the side.
The men pulled their limbs in tight and kept a wary eye on the waters around them. The predators seemed willing to keep their distance—for now.
As their stomachs settled, the men regrouped to discuss their prospects. Still flush with adrenaline from the narrow escape, everyone felt sure they would be home soon. The occasional seabird swooped and squawked in the sky overhead. They all agreed that gulls didn’t stray far from land; there had to be an island nearby. Besides, they had been in contact with Canton till the very end. The radio operator there had assured them that planes had already been sent to look for them. Then there was the SOS signal Reynolds had banged out till the very last moment. Rickenbacker insisted that someone must have heard it and gotten a read on their position.
Young Johnny Bartek, for one, was convinced it wouldn’t be more than three days before they were rescued. If they were nothing but no-name enlisted troops, they’d be on their own, he thought. But they had the VIP of all VIPs with them. The generals would send the whole army out to look for Rickenbacker. A stream of planes would be dispatched from California to Hawaii, Hawaii to Canton. From there the rescue parties would fan out over the ocean, spotters peering out the windows. The tops of the rafts were painted bright yellow to make them stand out against the waves. Before long, they would all be sitting under palm trees somewhere, sipping pineapple juice and trading stories about the ordeal. Bartek could get home to his grieving family.
In fact, with any luck, they’d be off the rafts before sundown. That way they wouldn’t have to spend a night at sea.
In the meantime, they took stock of their supplies. Before they ditched, DeAngelis had gone through all the parachutes on the plane and stripped them of anything useful. The haul consisted of several fishhooks and some line, a supply of quinine in case they got malaria, and a metal tin full of matches. The fishhooks, at least, might prove useful—if they could find bait. All they had for food, however, were four oranges and a handful of chocolate bars. The chocolate had been in Alex’s pocket when he took a dip in the ocean. The salt water had turned it into a vile green mush that no one was willing to touch.
Rounding out their worldly possessions were the following items: eight inflatable life vests; two sheath knives, a pen knife, and a pair of pliers; eighteen flares and a Very pistol to fire them; two .45 caliber pistols and some ammunition; three sets of aluminum oars; two collapsible rubber bailing buckets; two hand pumps and three patch kits to keep the rafts inflated; a few pencils; and, finally, a pocket compass and a map of the Pacific.
For the next few hours, a steady banter made its way across the waves. The men debated where in the world they might be—how close to the nearest land, how far from Japanese lines.
Their seating arrangements were good for a few laughs. The “large” rafts were supposedly made to fit five people. Five Pygmies maybe, Whittaker thought, but average-sized humans? Whoever made the puny things had scammed the army out of a good sum of money. The two large rafts measured four feet by seven feet on the outside. Inside the inflatable sidewalls, there was barely enough room for one man to lie lengthwise. Three men could wedge themselves in with an architecture so elaborate it was hard to tell which limbs belonged to whom.
The smaller raft produced even more amusement. They called it the “doughnut,” and that’s about how big it seemed. Alex and DeAngelis made themselves at home by sitting face-to-face and threading their legs over and under each other’s arms.
The Rafts: A demonstration of the cramped seating arrangements in the “large” raft (top) and the “doughnut” (bottom).
As the sun sank toward the horizon, the men shifted and squirmed and got ready for a night at sea. Rickenbacker suggested they keep watch in two-hour shifts. To keep sp
irits up, he offered $100 to the first man who spotted a ship, a plane, or an island.
The sun disappeared in the west, and a three-quarter moon rose in its place. The sharks vanished in the half-light. But they were still out there, silent, vigilant. One by one the men fell silent, too. To Rickenbacker, there was something about the vast darkness that made all conversation lose its meaning.
At some point, Cherry loaded a flare in the Very pistol, aimed at the heavens, and fired. For a moment, a bright, crimson light outshone the moon and the stars. Then it was gone, and no light from a rescue plane appeared to replace it. The night seemed even darker than it had before.
CHAPTER 5
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
The water turned an inky black that night, and Eddie Rickenbacker couldn’t sleep. An entire world throbbed beneath the three tiny rafts. At its average, the Pacific Ocean runs two and a half miles deep. In 1942, the Empire State Building stood as the tallest human-made structure in the world. Clouds sometimes obscured the tip of its spire. And yet, almost nine Empire State Buildings, stacked one atop the other, would fit between the rafts and the bottom of the ocean. There were creatures the size of buses down there. If a curious humpback whale decided to surface in the wrong place, the men would be scattered helpless on the waves.
Then, of course, there were the sharks.
Rickenbacker felt the first impact shortly after dark. Something swept past from below and bumped the flexible canvas floor of the raft. Then it happened again. A tail or a head broke the surface of the water a few feet away. Then another bump from below.
One after another, the sharks that had been following them took turns scraping against the bottom of the rafts. When one hit just right, the men could feel the impact on the backs of their legs—just a fraction of an inch of rubberized canvas between human flesh and predator. Sometimes the sharks rocked the rafts with a flip of their tails before vanishing again in the dark.
Tiger sharks can grow up to 16 feet long and can weigh more than 1,500 pounds. Their jaws are powerful enough to crack a sea turtle’s shell.
It wasn’t clear whether they were looking for a meal, but no one wanted to find out. The rafts felt insubstantial next to 1,000 pounds of muscle and teeth. Rickenbacker worried that the rough, scaly hide of a particularly aggressive shark could shred the canvas, leaving nothing between him and a swarm of ravenous killers. And so he lay in the moonlight, wide awake, waiting for the next nudge from below.
Sleep would have been a welcome relief from the conditions in the raft. Rickenbacker’s bed was barely the size of a bathtub—and he was sharing it with two grown men. Colonel Adamson, whose back was in bad shape, lay curled in one end. Rickenbacker and Bartek tossed and turned in the other half, trying to find an alignment they could live with. Every move they made provoked a groan from Adamson. One badly placed elbow, and the groans turned into a foul-mouthed grumbling.
But even if Adamson hadn’t been there—if the raft had been as big as a bedroom and equipped with a mattress, if the sharks had merely been tropical fish splashing about in the waves—Rickenbacker still would not have slept. They had agreed on a schedule of watch duty. But what if Bartek or Reynolds or DeAngelis dozed off and slept through the hum of a passing plane? What if Sergeant Alex mistook the lights of a ship for a pair of stars on the horizon?
It didn’t come naturally to Eddie Rickenbacker to leave his fate in someone else’s hands. His parents had been dirt-poor when they arrived in Columbus, Ohio, from Switzerland. His mother cleaned other people’s laundry to pay back a $300 loan for their first house. By the time he was five, Eddie was hawking newspapers to help support the family. To heat the house, he and his brother scrounged for coal dropped from passing trains. He grew up believing that you survived in this world on your own strength, knowledge, and initiative. A race car driver had his pit crew. A pilot had expert mechanics. But when it came down to it, there was just the driver, the car, and the road; the pilot, the plane, and the sky.
Eddie as a kid in Columbus, Ohio. He grew up poor, often scrounging coal from the train yard to help heat the house.
Eddie Rickenbacker was convinced of one thing above all others: There was only one person he could rely on, and that was Eddie Rickenbacker.
Finally, dawn came and the world began to lighten. A gray mist hung over the rafts as the air began to warm. They had been shivering all night in the cold salt spray, but now their bodies slowly began to heat up.
The sharks, however, were still with them, circling like vultures. Shouting across the swells, the men tried to figure out whether their stalkers saw them as prey or just a curiosity. The U.S. Army taught its fliers that sharks aren’t a danger to humans. But maybe the generals were just trying to calm their nerves. After all, the newspapers had a habit of referring to the Pacific as “shark-infested waters.” In early August, Japanese ships had sunk three American cruisers and a destroyer off Guadalcanal. Rumor had it that many of the 1,500 men lost had been eaten by sharks.
Bartek, for one, was convinced the predators were looking for a chance to turn the men into dinner. Rickenbacker wasn’t so sure. He spotted a six-inch leech of some kind on one of the shark’s heads. He and Whittaker thought that when the sharks bumped the rafts from below they were simply trying to scrape the parasites off their backs.
As yet, no one was willing to jump in and test the theories. When an arm or a leg strayed close to the side of a raft, it was hastily yanked back in.
As the day brightened, Rickenbacker had the men pull the rafts close. No one mentioned it, but the old war hero had taken charge since they ditched the plane. His arrogance rubbed some of the men the wrong way. They were fiercely loyal to Cherry, and by the rules of the military the captain of the plane was in charge until the mission was over. But there was something about Rickenbacker that commanded attention. When he spoke there was no doubt in his voice. To seven men stranded in the middle of the ocean, certainty was a comforting thing.
With the rafts clustered tight, Rickenbacker launched into a pep talk. He was convinced they would be rescued soon.
“The planes are probably taking off right now, and that $100 is still up,” he said.
In the meantime, he warned, they had to conserve energy: move around as little as possible; don’t speak too much; try to protect themselves from the sun. Most of all, don’t drink the seawater, no matter how thirsty they got. Seawater is a lot saltier than the fluids in the human body. Drink it, and the body actually loses liquid trying to flush out the excess salt. The men would dehydrate faster drinking salt water than drinking nothing at all.
They had to be disciplined about everything, Rickenbacker said, including food. It had been twenty-four hours since Rickenbacker, Adamson, Cherry, and Whittaker sat in the cockpit feasting on sweet rolls and coffee. The other men hadn’t eaten since before they took off from Hawaii.
Captain Cherry dragged out their supplies, and they did the math, simple and grim: Four oranges, eight people; half an orange per person.
Rickenbacker proposed that they eat one orange every other day, dividing each one evenly eight ways. Reynolds and DeAngelis grumbled that they hadn’t had breakfast the day before like the men in the cockpit.
“If we’d known that before we went down, we’d have taken care of you,” Rickenbacker replied. “But now it’s too late.”
The protest died away. They’d be rescued before they got to the second orange anyway. Wouldn’t they?
Cherry handed the supplies to Rickenbacker. Seven men watched while the colonel pulled out a sheath knife, bent over an orange, and carved it like a jeweler into eight precisely equal pieces.
Most of the men ate their entire ration, peel and all. Rickenbacker and Cherry thought of another use for the peel. They pulled out the hooks and line that DeAngelis had salvaged from the parachute sacks. Each man baited a hook with a small piece of peel and threw it overboard.
They watched while the lines trailed the raft, dangling the brigh
t orange bait in the waves. The peel did not attract a single fish.
Whittaker’s watch, which miraculously still worked, ticked away the hours. The sun burned off the mist, and by 11 a.m. its glow ruled the sky. Four hours ago, they had welcomed the warmth. Now the heat was unbearable. Whittaker stripped off his undershirt and soaked it in the ocean. He draped it over his head and felt the cool water run down his face. Moments later he was sweating under the makeshift canopy, losing precious liquid with each bead that appeared on his face. He tried holding the shirt inches above his head to let the breeze blow through.
As the heat bore down, the wind picked up. The rafts rode the waves at an uneven pace. One minute Whittaker’s raft pulled ahead, jerking the rafts on the other end of the line. A minute later, it lagged, banging into Rickenbacker, Adamson, and Bartek. That brought the doughnut rocketing in from behind, with DeAngelis and Alex clinging to its flimsy sidewalls.
Every bump nudged tempers closer to the edge. Knees were forced into backs and elbows into heads. Skin already raw with salt water chafed against canvas. Adamson growled in pain. Bartek complained that he didn’t have enough space. Someone else moaned about the heat. Before long angry sniping filled the air between the rafts.
Captain Cherry made a makeshift sail with his T-shirt and two oars. It seemed to help keep the rafts apart. But it didn’t solve the real problem. The men were getting anxious, and it wasn’t just the close quarters or the heat. More than anything, it was the empty sky above them.
As sunset approached they had been drifting for more than twenty-four hours without a plane or boat in sight. The scorching heat receded, and in its place came the nagging feeling that they had been cavalier about their chances of being rescued. The base at Canton had no idea where they were. What if no one else had picked up their SOS?
The men couldn’t help replaying the sequence of events that had dropped them into the sea. Captain Cherry, DeAngelis, and Bartek felt it all could have been avoided if they had taken their time after the first plane failed. The octant could have been replaced, the new plane inspected, and the direction finder fixed. There was no point in saying it, but the thought was in the air like the whine of a mosquito: If Rickenbacker hadn’t been in such a hurry, they would be safely en route from Canton to the western Pacific right now.