by Tod Olson
Around the fourteenth day, another storm overtook them, and they collected water with practiced skill. Rickenbacker transferred their hoard in his mouth from bucket to vest, and he could feel his raft mates watching to make sure he didn’t swallow. Someone grumbled that the process was taking way too long.
After the storm, the weather grew dead calm.
When DeAngelis joined Cherry and Whittaker, it put the three strongest men in one raft. That gave Cherry an idea: He and his raft mates, he announced, were going to cut loose from the others. The current, at this point, seemed to be pushing them steadily north. If the three of them put all their remaining strength into the oars, they might be able to get back on a southwest course. And that would carry them away from the Japanese, toward the Ellice Islands, Fiji, and survival. In any case, Cherry insisted, spreading out would give the search planes—assuming they were still up there—a better chance of finding them.
Rickenbacker was furious. Their best hope lay in staying together, he was convinced of it. They’d be easier to see from the sky. They needed one another for support. And besides, without Cherry and Whittaker, no one had the strength to pull a man back in the raft if someone went overboard.
When Cherry refused to bend, Rickenbacker tried to pull rank. “I forbid you to go,” he said.
“Under what circumstances?” Cherry said.
“I’m a colonel,” Rickenbacker shot back. “I’m ordering you not to go.”
Cherry and Whittaker reminded Rickenbacker that his rank made no difference, because he wasn’t in the army. He was a civilian acting under orders from the secretary of war.
Adamson mustered enough strength to insist that he was an acting colonel, which put him in charge. He was ordering them not to go.
“I am in charge of the airplane,” Cherry shot back. “That means I’m in charge of this trip until we get back to land.”
The entire argument seemed ridiculous to DeAngelis. They weren’t getting back to land—not now, not tomorrow, not next week. Rickenbacker and Adamson were fighting with their last ounces of strength to call themselves captains of a sinking ship.
Rickenbacker finally gave in and watched while Cherry, Whittaker, and DeAngelis drifted into the distance. The three men pointed themselves toward the southwest and took turns with the oars, two people rowing while one rested. Several hours later, they were still visible, maybe a mile away.
Exhausted from the effort, all three men fell sound asleep. When they awoke, they paddled slowly back and tied onto the other two rafts. The argument, and the effort, had all come to nothing.
In the brutal calm, time slipped past like the sea, with no milestone or benchmark. There was only the relentless cycle of blinding sun and terrifying darkness, scorching heat and bone-chilling cold.
Simple tasks now required superhuman effort. Blowing up the sidewalls of a raft now took two of them more than two hours. Every now and then, they would try again to paddle toward the southwest. No one had the strength to keep at it. After a few minutes they would collapse against the sides of the rafts and give in to the still water.
Occasionally, they stumbled onto a paltry ration of food. At one point, two silvery fish jumped into one of the rafts to escape a shark, and the men were on them in seconds. On another day, thousands of fingerlings—juvenile fish the size of a finger—swept past the boat in sheets. The water was so dense with fish that the men were able to grab a few with their bare hands. The unlucky fingerlings were swallowed whole while they were still alive.
After the last storm, they had nearly a gallon of water stored in the life vests. It felt good to have a reserve, but they still doled it out in 1- or 2-ounce portions twice a day. The tiny amount barely freed the tongue from the roof of the mouth for a few minutes. It was nowhere near enough to stave off the ravages of dehydration.
Under normal conditions, blood feeds the brain with the oxygen it needs to function. Now, with such a paltry supply of water, the amount of blood in each man’s body dwindled. Their veins shrank, and their brains began to starve for oxygen.
Dehydration sent the men into bouts of delirium. Day and night, they drifted in and out of a dream state, the line between sleep and wakefulness vanishing fast. Hallucinations crept into the hours when they were fully awake.
One night, before he moved into Rickenbacker’s boat, Reynolds sat up and whispered to Whittaker: “Say, I guess you know about DeAngelis and Cherry. They land on a secret island and get themselves a quart of water and then they come back and sit in the boat again. Shhhh, don’t let the captain hear that.”
Rickenbacker woke up in a stupor and overheard Reynolds. “Well, I’ll be damned!” Rickenbacker yelled. “If anybody has an island, they better take me!”
Every night, Rickenbacker had his own island dreams. Usually, they just happened to land in a place where an old friend had a beautiful house. The friend took him in, gave him a comfortable bed, and served him fruit juice. In the morning all he’d have to do is wake up, reach for the phone, and call Secretary of War Stimson, who would dispatch a plane to fly him home to Adelaide.
Instead he woke up in three inches of salt water, wedged between two starving men and floating in the middle of the Pacific.
Bartek thought he was truly going crazy. The clouds transformed into people and animals, hovering over the raft: a chicken, a giant bird, a woman with a dog in her lap. Under the menagerie, he drifted in and out of daydreams. In the strange space between asleep and awake, Bartek’s family visited him in the raft. His mother appeared and told him he would have to rely on God. His sister Ruth, who had died six weeks ago, told him she was okay and he would be, too.
CHAPTER 13
CONTACT
The eighteenth day dawned in a furnace. Jim Whittaker cursed out loud at the sun before it appeared above the horizon. He had grown to hate the sun and the sea as though they had made a conscious choice to torture him.
The flare cartridge made its way around to him with the morning’s ration—a paltry inch of piss-warm water in the bottom. It tasted awful and only served to remind him how thirsty he was.
By noon, the daily chorus of delirium rose from the rafts. There was random shouting in parched voices. Someone sang a line of an unrecognizable song before trailing off. Everyone took turns talking to people who weren’t there.
Whittaker had been carrying on a running conversation with Davy Jones, the mythical evil spirit of the sea. Today, he heard a new voice—one that left him shaken and scared. It was his son, Tom; he was sure of it. Tom had been training for the navy in California when they left two and half weeks ago.
“What are you doing out here, Tom?” he asked, speaking into the air. “When did you leave San Francisco?”
His son’s voice replied: “I was sent to sea over two weeks ago, Dad. You see—we were sunk. And seeing I was out here I thought I’d just drop in and see how you are getting along.”
Whittaker called out to him and called out again, but the voice was gone. He settled back into the raft, wondering if his son could be dead and speaking to him from beyond the grave.
He was still agonizing over the thought when he saw Bill Cherry sit up straight in the raft. Cherry’s eyes looked wild in their bony sockets.
“I hear an engine!” he yelled. “Hear it?!”
Whittaker looked around at the gaunt faces of his raft mates. No one, with the possible exception of Rickenbacker, believed it was anything but a hallucination.
Another moment passed in silence. Suddenly, seven men sat bolt upright, staring into the sky. There was no mistaking it—a low, muffled roar in the distance, unlike any sound made by the sea or sky. Cherry and Rickenbacker saw the plane first, emerging from a cloud bank about five miles to the west. It looked like it was headed straight for the rafts.
Contact: An OS2U Kingfisher on patrol for the navy.
Bartek thought it was American—a navy Kingfisher with pontoons and a single engine. But at this point, no one cared if it was Emperor Toj
o of Japan himself. They yelled as loud as they could. Cherry flapped his undershirt sail in the air. Bartek somehow found the strength to stand. He waved his arms wildly while Rickenbacker held him by the waist.
Whittaker’s first instinct was to reach for the flares. Then he realized they were long gone. In the next instant he knew that without them, the rafts were completely invisible to a plane that far away.
The plane teased them for a couple of minutes before disappearing into the clouds three miles off. The promising hum of the engine faded seconds later, and with it went every shred of hope. The men collapsed, exhausted from the effort. They sat in silence, throats burning, spirits crushed.
They had been out here eighteen days without a single sign that other people inhabited the globe. Now a pilot had entered their world—and left just as quickly, with no idea they existed. How could they possibly make it till they got another chance? DeAngelis and Bartek had been drinking salt water, just like Alex had before he died. Reynolds was a human skeleton; he looked like he wouldn’t make it another day. It felt to Whittaker like the cruelest moment of the whole ordeal—to have the promise of rescue dangled nearly within reach, and then snatched away.
Rickenbacker let them stew in despair for a few minutes while he gathered his strength. Then he launched into another lecture. That plane, he said, meant they had drifted within range of a base. If that was true, they were moving in the right direction and would keep drifting closer. That meant there would be more planes and more chances to be seen. “A man,” he told the crew, would have the courage, the patience, and the faith to swallow his disappointment, hang on, and wait.
And so they did.
The next morning, another plane appeared, and yet another in the afternoon. Each time the scene from the day before repeated itself. Stick-figure arms waved in the air. Ruined voices shouted into the sky. The plane disappeared. The men collapsed. Rickenbacker growled at his raft mates until they wanted to survive, if for no other reason than to see him put in his grave.
The following day—their twentieth at sea—Rickenbacker was sitting listlessly in the sun when he heard voices arguing. DeAngelis was now alone in the small raft, and Cherry was asking him to trade places.
“Why?” DeAngelis asked.
“I’m going to try to make land,” Cherry said. “Staying together’s no good. They’ll never see us this way.”
Rickenbacker couldn’t believe Cherry wanted to go off on his own again. It had been two days since they first saw the planes, and the men felt like time was running out. But splitting up could mean death for all of them, and Rickenbacker let Cherry know it. If the planes couldn’t see all three rafts bunched together, how were they going to catch sight of one? And how would Cherry know which way to row? The planes had come from all directions of the compass. There was land somewhere nearby, but no one knew where it was.
Cherry and Rickenbacker argued back and forth, locked in another power struggle. Finally Cherry put an end to it. “I was captain and commanding officer of the plane,” he insisted. “I am the commanding officer of this party. I’m leaving.”
DeAngelis paddled up to Cherry’s raft. The two men switched places, and Cherry rowed off in the doughnut. The rest of the crew watched as their captain drifted away on the waves.
The copilot and the navigator weren’t far behind. Before Cherry disappeared over the horizon, Whittaker and DeAngelis announced that they were leaving, too.
Rickenbacker was furious now. He did not want to be left alone with Adamson and Bartek, both of whom were so weak they could barely lift their heads. “What about Reynolds?” he said. “You haven’t asked him.”
Reynolds was too far gone to ask.
Whittaker didn’t bother to argue with Rickenbacker. He untied his line and dropped it in the ocean. The three rafts, together for nearly three weeks, gradually drifted apart.
CHAPTER 14
RACE AGAINST TIME
Jim Whittaker finally fell asleep just before dawn the next morning. It had been a fitful night, not because of the pain or the miserable jumble of legs and arms in the raft. For once, he was excited. Yesterday, he had seen the evening patrol pass closer than it had the last three days. The rafts had drifted two, maybe three miles apart. Surely this time the Kingfisher had flown right over one of them. Whittaker was convinced that something good was about to happen.
He hadn’t been asleep long when he felt DeAngelis shaking him by the shoulder and yelling his name.
Whittaker was groggy from lack of sleep. “Cut that out!” he croaked. “What’s the matter with you!”
“Jim, you’d better take a look,” DeAngelis said. “It may be a mirage, but I think I see something.”
Whittaker propped himself up in the raft and looked toward the horizon. It was no mirage. Ten or twelve miles out, the line where the sea met the sky bristled with the faint outline of trees.
The sight was more than enough to rouse Whittaker. He set the oars, gathered his strength, and started rowing. DeAngelis took over from time to time, but he could only pull for a few minutes before collapsing.
Reynolds lay behind Whittaker, too weak to sit up all the way. “I feel all right,” he would say. “Just tired. I’ll get up in a minute and help you, Jim.” When the sun rose high, he filled flare cartridges with seawater and poured them over Whittaker’s head.
Seven and a half hours later, they fought their way through a riptide and a storm and eased themselves over a shallow reef. DeAngelis lay across the bow, guiding the raft with his hands so it didn’t rip on the sharp coral. Finally, they ran aground forty feet from shore.
They had been at sea for twenty-one days—three weeks of constant motion. And now they had come to rest. They had each at various times given up all hope of seeing land again, all hope of hugging friends and family, all hope of living to see their grandchildren. Now they had found their way back—to somewhere, anyway.
One by one they tried to stand up in the shallow water. The island tilted and swayed under their feet, as though they were still at sea. All three of them collapsed to their knees. Reynolds could not get up. He crawled toward the beach. Whittaker and DeAngelis each leaned on an oar and hobbled like old men to shore.
At 3:45 that afternoon, on the island of Funafuti, Radioman Second Class Lester Boutte took his seat in the rear of an OS2U Kingfisher seaplane. The plane was an awkward-looking thing, with a bloated cigar of a pontoon suspended from the middle of the fuselage. Boutte’s pilot, Lieutenant Frederick Woodward, taxied toward the middle of Funafuti’s Te Namo lagoon and opened the throttle. The plane picked up speed, skidded across the salt water, and lifted into the air.
The Kingfisher flew scouting missions for the navy. It could take off and land at sea.
It was just another evening patrol for Boutte and Woodward. The marines had occupied Funafuti six weeks ago, and they’d been flying patrols ever since. The Japanese base in the Gilberts lay 500 miles north. The idea was to keep the enemy from moving south to threaten the shipping route to Australia. From the air over Funafuti, you could already see antiaircraft guns guarding the beach, giant searchlights marking both ends of the island, an airfield taking shape among the palm trees.
Woodward and Boutte started their usual circuit, looking for signs of Japanese planes, ships, or subs. Fifty minutes into the patrol, Boutte spotted a speck of yellow on the waves below. Woodward banked and dropped low over the water. The two fliers got close enough to make out an emaciated man with rags for clothes. Boutte’s pulse quickened. What else could the ragged figure be but a survivor from the lost B-17 that had gone down with Eddie Rickenbacker aboard?
All American forces in the area were operating under strict radio silence to keep Japanese intelligence in the dark. But Woodward and Boutte sped back to Funafuti and dropped a message to their commander. The commander dispatched a PT (Patrol Torpedo) boat with orders to rush to the area, find the survivor, and pick him up.
By 9:30 p.m., Captain Bill Cherry had been li
fted from the doughnut by the crew of the PT boat and was sitting aboard the USS Hilo. His body was covered in salt-water ulcers. His skin was red and raw to the touch. He weighed 45 pounds less than he did when he left Hickam Field three weeks earlier. But he was healthy enough to tell his rescuers that there were two more rafts floating not far from where he was found. In them were six more men, each of them alive—for now.
Whittaker, DeAngelis, and Reynolds slept that night on land with the raft over them for shelter. They had made their way to the other side of the island, where the trees blocked the wind and sun. They seemed to have landed at the very end of a peninsula, where the island was only a few hundred yards across. So far there were no signs of other inhabitants, American or Japanese.
On the way across the island they collected coconuts that had fallen to the ground, but they were so weak it took them forty minutes to cut through a single shell. When they set up camp, a swarm of rodents came to investigate. Whittaker managed to club two of them to death. Then he went back to the beach, where pockets of coral poked above the surface of the ocean. Rainwater had puddled in the coral, and he painstakingly filled a life vest. He brought his stash back to the men. They feasted on dry, overripe coconut pulp, raw rodent meat, and freshwater.
After the meal, Reynolds only looked worse. His eyes had sunk a half-inch into his skull. He had gone from 130 to about 90 pounds. If they didn’t find help soon, he wasn’t going to make it.
When they lay down and pulled the raft over them, the ground seemed to sway more violently than the ocean had on their worst nights at sea.
The next morning, at first light, all five Kingfisher seaplanes based on Funafuti took to the air. Four PT boats fanned out across the sea. The planes flew in formation, searching area A, one of three zones they had mapped out the night before. By mid-morning they had found nothing.