by Tod Olson
The excitement of the night before still hung in the air—the mad dash for the storm; the scramble to save Cherry, Whittaker, and Reynolds; the first taste of freshwater in more than a week.
But each ray of hope seemed to dim as soon as it appeared. And like the empty sky after a flare burned through its powder, their prospects for survival looked darker than before.
Rickenbacker carved up the one remaining fish and doled out each portion. Now they had no food and a paltry ration of water to show for their efforts in the night. Despite their initial success using the bird intestines as bait, they hadn’t caught another fish since.
One day, Whittaker decided to go shark hunting. He got out the pliers and set to work making a weapon out of an aluminum oar. He bent the corners of the paddle end back and forth until they broke off. After some painstaking work, he had something resembling a large, clumsy arrowhead at the tip of a spear. He knelt at the side of the raft, waited for a shark to surface within reach, and stabbed at it as hard as he could. The oar bounced harmlessly off the shark’s hide. After a few more tries, Whittaker gave up in disgust.
Shortly after they consumed the second fish, Cherry tried to tempt a two-foot shark with an empty hook. To everyone’s surprise, the shark bit. Cherry wrestled it onto his lap and stabbed at it with a sheath knife. The shark bucked and writhed, and the raft nearly capsized. Whittaker and Reynolds clung to the side rope. Finally, Cherry drove the knife through the shark’s head, and the fight was over.
When they carved the fish up, the meat was so rubbery and foul-tasting that most of the men threw their portions overboard. Cherry, Whittaker, and Reynolds were left with a hole in the floor of their raft where the knife had punctured it during the struggle. They plugged it as best they could with a leftover shell from the .45.
Not long after, a shark carried away the last of their fishhooks.
Midway through their second week at sea, a deep gloom settled over the rafts. The eight men had no gear to fish with and no guns to hunt with. They had no flares to signal a passing ship or plane. Everything except Whittaker’s watch had stopped working. The compass had frozen in place. Rickenbacker’s map was waterlogged and useless. His orders, which he had preserved in his pocket, were unreadable.
As for the rest of humanity, there had been no sign of them since the last radio contact on the afternoon of October 21.
Physically, the raft mates were failing fast. Each of them had lost more than twenty pounds. Reynolds, in particular, had begun to look like a skeleton. He and Colonel Adamson and Sergeant Alex were so weak they could barely move.
Sun and salt continued to torment them. Bartek’s eyes burned from the glare and the salt crust that clung to his eyelashes. His skin became a reddened minefield of salt ulcers. Whittaker escaped the angry sores for some reason, but everyone else was plagued by them. They started as a rash on the thighs and the butt after days of chafing in wet pants. Salt ground its way into the rash, and the ulcers appeared, filled with pus and tender to the touch. Eventually they broke open, leaving wounds that never healed. No one could shift positions without sending a raft mate into an angry tirade.
Whittaker tried to act as peacemaker, but there was no comfort to be found on the rafts. During the day, they lay in a stupor, hiding from the sun and praying for night to fall. At night they huddled together for warmth and wished for day to come. No matter how they arranged themselves in the rafts, there was no relief. Lie back-to-back and the salt spray lashed at your face. Huddle together in the center and you sank into the salt bilge on the floor of the raft.
For Rickenbacker, the nights brought on a loneliness deeper than anything he had felt. The other rafts disappeared in the dark. A groan or a prayer arose from the mist, but he couldn’t see anyone. On calm nights, he would awake from a nightmare to find the lines slack and no sound at all in the air. He would sit up and reel in the other rafts until he was sure they were still there.
The men all had good dreams, too, in which giant feasts appeared on their tables at home and they slept peacefully in their own beds. But those were a worse torment than the nightmares, because eventually they woke up. Once Rickenbacker awoke from a fitful sleep and turned to Adamson. “I just telephoned Adelaide, and she’s bringing the car right over,” he said with a broad grin on his face.
Then he realized where he was.
As the agony mounted, discipline on the rafts started to fall apart. DeAngelis gave up calculating how far they had drifted. Rickenbacker stopped trying to schedule the two-hour night watches. Bartek even freed himself from the constraints of military rank for a while. After all, Colonel Rickenbacker drank from the same Very cartridge that Private Bartek peed in. Bartek started calling the old man “Rick.”
Whether he was the Colonel or just Rick didn’t seem to matter to Rickenbacker. What he cared about was the morale in the rafts—and it was slipping fast. DeAngelis and Reynolds seemed to have given up all hope. From time to time Bartek heard DeAngelis mutter, “Well, I guess tomorrow we’ll go to meet our Maker.”
The complaints drew the same reaction from Rickenbacker every time: pure, blunt rage. The outbursts were shaped by the world Rickenbacker lived in—a world run by men. In his lifetime, the racetrack, the military, and the top ranks of the business world were mostly male territory. And to Rickenbacker, the important virtues—courage, determination, self-reliance—were male virtues. When his raft mates fell short of his standards, he thought they weren’t “man enough” for the task at hand.
“What’s that?!” he would say at the first sign of moaning. “Why, you damn quitter! When we get out of this, you better crawl home to the women where you belong. How did you get into the army, anyway?!”
On the tenth night, Rickenbacker heard someone praying that God would put him out of his misery.
“He answers MEN’S prayers,” the colonel barked out across the waves. “Not that stuff.”
To the rest of the men it wasn’t clear whether Rickenbacker’s outbursts were an act or just plain bullying. The old war hero acted as though he were in charge of the rafts. And when he spoke—or yelled—he did it with such conviction that it was impossible to argue with him.
Rickenbacker’s “tongue-lashings,” as Bartek called them, did have one effect. In the moment, they made each crew member in his turn hate the old man with a passion. And hatred, at least, was more likely to keep a man alive than despair.
Often, after tempers settled down, the men felt reflective. When you were in the middle of life—following orders, getting up for work every day—it was easy to take it all for granted. You assumed that your friends and family would be there forever, so they didn’t need special attention. What you did or failed to do each day didn’t matter all that much; there was always another day.
But out here, drifting 500 miles from nowhere, you saw life for what it really was: fragile as an egg. One miscalculation—a broken octant or a faulty wind-speed reading—and it could all be stolen away.
So in the relative comfort of dawn and dusk, they talked about their lives. They confessed sins from the past and resolved to do better in the future. Life, after all, was not to be wasted—if they ever got a second chance.
DeAngelis felt bad that he hadn’t bothered to do anything special with his wife after they got married. If he made it back, he pledged, he would take her to all the best nightclubs.
Adamson talked about the homeless people he used to see on the streets of New York City—people who didn’t have enough to eat. He vowed that if he survived, he’d do something to help them. He’d always thought he was so “big” and important back at home. Out here, he realized it was all false pride. He passed around a picture of his wife and asked the rest of the crew to make sure they gave it to her if he didn’t make it back.
Whittaker admitted that he’d been selfish all his life. He was way too quick to get into arguments and not quick enough to make up. He had a brother he hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years. If he made it back he was
going to get in touch with him and apologize.
Cherry confessed that he had a girlfriend in Australia whom he had met on an Air Transport mission. She looked just like the actress Olivia de Havilland, he said. But now his family at home was all he could think about—especially his little daughter, Paula. He had missed important parts of her life, and if he ever got back to Texas, she was going to be his priority.
At some point Sergeant Alex revealed to DeAngelis that before they left Hawaii, he had written a month’s worth of letters to his girlfriend, Snooks. He had given them to a friend with instructions to mail one a day.
While Alex daydreamed about Snooks, everyone else began to wonder how much longer he could last. By the tenth day, he thrashed miserably in the tiny doughnut, and DeAngelis struggled to keep him from plunging into the sea. His head burned with fever. He muttered and moaned and didn’t seem to recognize anyone. They increased his ration of water, but it didn’t seem to help.
Finally, Rickenbacker suggested they move him into one of the bigger rafts. They pulled the doughnut close and DeAngelis, Bartek, and Rickenbacker struggled to get Alex over the sidewalls and into Rickenbacker’s raft. Bartek climbed awkwardly into the doughnut and pretzeled himself in with DeAngelis.
Rickenbacker arranged Alex low in the raft and positioned himself to block the wind. He lay close and cradled him like a baby to help transfer body heat. Alex shivered uncontrollably and mumbled in a language that sounded to Rickenbacker like Polish. In about an hour, he relaxed and dropped into a fitful sleep.
CHAPTER 11
LETTERS TO SNOOKS
“Army planes en route to the Southwest Pacific have joined the search for Captain E.V. (‘Eddie’) Rickenbacker, War Department officials disclosed today, in the hope that the missing World War I ace might still be found.”
That was the news from Washington, D.C., on November 1, the twelfth day since the world had last heard from the B-17 crew. Unlike many newspaper editors, the U.S. military had not given up on the lost men. Planes headed for the battlefront in the Solomon Islands were to break formation and fan out to look for a stray raft on the waves below.
To the fliers peering out the windows of their warplanes, finding Eddie Rickenbacker was probably not the foremost thing on their minds. They were headed back into some of the most brutal fighting of the war.
Four of them had been trotted out to talk to reporters at Hickam Field just two days earlier. They had been on Guadalcanal, the tiny jungle island that figured heavily in Rickenbacker’s mission. Since October 12, the Japanese had been trying desperately to win back the island’s airstrip. It was “the site of a life-and-death struggle,” reported the New York Times. The outcome could decide the war in the Pacific for good.
A Life-and-Death Struggle: U.S. infantrymen on Guadalcanal regroup after defending a peak called the Grassy Knoll from a Japanese attack.
According to what the fliers told reporters, they had some things in common with the castaways on the rafts. They barely slept, thanks to relentless bombing runs by the Japanese. By 11 p.m. every night they were up and running for their foxholes. “The ground was shaking all the time like jelly,” said one of the men. They were also hungry most of the time, because Japanese warships surrounding the island made it hard for the Americans to land supplies. The men were stuck with two small meals a day—mostly rice left behind by the Japanese.
On October 24, about the time Rickenbacker had been scheduled to arrive in the area, the marines held off a massive attack by the Japanese on the outskirts of the airstrip. The fighting left a line of Japanese corpses stretching for half a mile along the edge of the jungle. It also left the Americans with fewer than thirty planes to fend off the bombings. Japanese ships were still massing in the waters around Guadalcanal. It was obvious they were preparing to land another wave of troops. The marines needed planes fast from bases in Hawaii and the mainland United States, and that meant that more pilots were in the sky with orders to look for eight men that most Americans had already given up on.
On the rafts, the men almost never mentioned the war. Rickenbacker was determined to get back and complete his mission, but he kept his thoughts to himself. The rest of the men had no idea what was happening in Guadalcanal or the Soviet Union or North Africa. Nor did they care. The newspapers and the generals and the politicians claimed they were fighting for freedom and democracy. But in the rafts, the men found it hard to get excited about noble causes when they’d had six ounces of water to drink in two weeks. DeAngelis, for one, was bitter that he had to die of dehydration “all because some guys made up their minds to have a war.”
Of the eight raft mates, however, DeAngelis was not the one closest to death.
When the sun rose on their twelfth day at sea, everyone was relieved to see that Alex’s condition had improved. He seemed to know where he was and who his raft mates were. As the day wore on, though, he sank into a familiar state. His forehead felt hot as the sun. When he tried to talk he made no sense.
Alex rallied again as the air cooled, and that evening he asked to go back to the small raft. This time, DeAngelis traded places with Alex. Bartek took his fellow engineer into the doughnut and tried to get comfortable. But Alex would not sit still. He squirmed and draped himself over the side of the raft. Bartek quickly realized he was trying to end it all by giving himself up to the ocean.
Bartek maneuvered Alex’s legs under his and sat on them. When the wretched kid complained, Bartek let him squat on the floor of the raft. He spread his own legs out on the sidewalls so Alex would have to climb over them to get out. At one point during the night he had to grab Alex just before he slipped into the ocean.
In the darkness, Bartek could hear his raft mate mumbling to no one in particular. For several days, Alex hadn’t spoken much at all. Now he sounded more coherent than he had the entire trip. He prayed that he would see his mother; his sister; and his girlfriend, Snooks, again. Somewhere around two or three in the morning, he mumbled what sounded like a familiar prayer:
“Holy Mother Mary. Mary Mother of God, pray for us.”
He ended with an “Amen.”
And then he stopped moving.
Bartek knew what had happened, but he willed himself to check. In the darkness, he found Alex’s arm and felt for a pulse.
Nothing.
He leaned forward and put his hand over Alex’s heart.
Nothing.
Twenty feet away in the middle raft, Rickenbacker woke up. He thought he heard a long sigh. Maybe Bartek had called to him and he heard the words in a half-conscious state. Maybe he simply knew.
“Did he die?” he called out across the waves.
“I think so,” Bartek said.
They pulled the rafts close. Rickenbacker, Cherry, and Whittaker examined Alex as well as they could in the dark. There was no question he was dead, but they agreed they should wait till first light to do anything else.
“Well,” someone said, “his sufferings are over.”
They let the rafts drift apart. The wind had come up strong, and the sea churned around them. Rickenbacker had heard that sharks can sense death even before it arrives. He thought the fins around the rafts had already multiplied.
The predators circled in the dark. Clouds raced across the sky in the moonlight. The familiar loneliness of night set in, and this time it was accompanied by fear.
In the doughnut, Bartek began the long wait till morning with Alex’s legs slowly stiffening in his lap.
In Connecticut, Coreen Bond, known as “Snooks” to her boyfriend, had already woken up to a Monday morning. Before long, she would be checking her mailbox to find yet another letter, postmarked “Hawaii” and signed by Alex Kaczmarczyk.
CHAPTER 12
DAYDREAMS
On the morning of November 2, the thirteenth day at sea, they brought the rafts close again and dug in Alex’s pockets for his wallet. They took his identification tag from around his neck. Cherry held on to both in the hope that he would
be able to return them to Alex’s family. Bartek asked if he could have Alex’s leather jacket to help keep him warm at night. Rigor mortis had set in, and Alex’s limbs were rigid. It took Bartek several minutes to wrestle the jacket free of the body.
No one discussed the prospect of using the corpse for food.
DeAngelis murmured what he remembered of the Catholic burial service. “I consign your body to the sea and your soul to the Lord,” he said in conclusion.
Then they rolled Alex’s body over the side and into the ocean. He floated facedown for some time before the men lost sight of him.
Burial at Sea: Two navy men killed in battle get a formal ceremony near the Gilbert Islands, later in the war.
With Alex gone, a new kind of gloom settled over the rafts. For two weeks, they had imagined their own deaths. Now the prospect was real. Alex had been the weakest of the group from the start, but could the rest of them be far behind? Reynolds had probably lost a third of his body weight and looked more dead than alive. Bartek was a skeletal mass of salt ulcers and roasted skin. Rickenbacker seemed to be running on bile alone.
DeAngelis was in better shape than everyone except Whittaker and Cherry, but he took Alex’s death especially hard. He had only known the kid for two weeks, but he’d spent the better part of that time virtually sitting in his lap and watching while he wasted away. Now DeAngelis lost all faith in their chances—and that made him a terrible raft mate for Rickenbacker. The two of them started arguing almost as soon as DeAngelis climbed in, and DeAngelis didn’t have the patience for it. He asked to trade places with Reynolds. If it was all going to end soon, he wanted to be with his captain, Bill Cherry.