The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (60 page)

Both rafts had drifted about fifty yards from the B-17, which was submerging but still afloat, when somebody in Cherry’s raft shouted, “Who has the water?” No one had it, Rickenbacker said. And in the shock of the crash and the scramble to get out of the plane, no one had the rations either. They argued for and against going back inside the B-17, which was rapidly filling with water, and decided it was too dangerous. Eddie was bailing water with his hat when somebody shouted, “There she goes!” The tail of the plane rose upright, hesitated for a moment, and then the B-17 slid beneath the waves. By Eddie’s watch it was 2:26 p.m., Honolulu time, October 21, 1942. They were on their own.

O
N THE HIGH SEAS
the three rafts drifted apart and Rickenbacker found a use for the rope he’d wrapped around his waist. They paddled against the wind with small aluminum oars until they drew together, then fastened the boats in a line about ten feet apart—Cherry’s raft first, “because he was the captain,” then Rickenbacker, with De Angelis and Alex bringing up the rear. Eddie believed that if they drifted away from one another “few if any” would survive.

When they tallied up their belongings, they seemed meager indeed. The only food they had was four oranges that Cherry had stashed in his pockets right before they went down. A couple of men had candy bars but they disintegrated in the water. Some of the crew had taken off their clothing in anticipation of having to swim. There was a first aid kit, a flare gun and eighteen flares, two hand pumps for both bailing and refilling the rafts with air, two sheath knives, pliers, a small compass, two bailing buckets, two rubber patching kits, three pencils, and a map of the Pacific that Rickenbacker had stuck in his jacket before the crash. There were two fishing lines with hooks that Sergeant Reynolds had found in a parachute kit; they had no bait. They also had two revolvers, belonging to Cherry and Adamson.

As the afternoon wore on the men tried to adjust to their circumstances. Several became violently seasick from being tossed about in the twelve-foot swells, which would lift the rafts up on a crest, then dash them down into the trough. This was made all the worse by being lashed together because, as the rafts rose and fell unevenly, the occupants were jerked around as if in a carnival ride, making rest impossible.
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There was scarcely room enough in the yellow-colored five-man rafts for three men—the inside was about the size of an average bathtub—and the two-man raft, occupied by Lieutenant De Angelis and Sergeant Alex, was hardly larger than a truck inner tube. The only way to get comfortable, or even stay in it, was for the two men to put their legs on each other’s shoulders. They called it the “doughnut.” Alex, already weakened because of his operation, couldn’t seem to stop vomiting. As sundown came and went, and the rafts continued to lurch fiercely in the darkness, the euphoria of surviving the crash gave way to a sober appraisal of their situation; the small talk faded as each man in his own way tried to comprehend the fix they were in.

Like good soldiers they established a watch, which everyone would stand for two hours a day. To lighten the tension, Eddie offered $100 to the first man who saw land, a ship, or a plane. Nobody slept that night, as waves incessantly slopped into the rafts, soaking the men and making them miserable; it felt like “being doused with buckets of ice water.” As if there wasn’t enough to worry about, the sharks had followed them from the plane wreckage and circled ominously in the pale moonlight. There seemed to be dozens of them.

The faint rosy glow of false dawn gave way to grays and pinks, and then the red rim of the sun appeared on the eastern horizon. As it climbed throughout the morning this sun seemed to beam like a giant pulsing ray aimed directly at their little spot of ocean, as it would every morning, as the days went by. De Angelis had calculated they were about twelve degrees south of the equator. They took out Rickenbacker’s map of the Pacific and the pocket compass, and Eddie estimated they were drifting south-southwest about four hundred miles from the Fiji Island group, where they were sure to run into land—or, with any luck, Tahiti! Rickenbacker calculated they’d be there in twenty-five days at raft speed, though of course a plane could come to rescue them before this day was out. What Rickenbacker did
not
tell them was that they could just as well be drifting in a westerly direction, in which case they would run into the Gilbert or Marshall Islands, which were now part of the empire of Japan.

Rickenbacker had somehow retained the battered old gray fedora that he always wore—and Adelaide swore she was going to throw it out—but the others had nothing to cover their heads and in many cases their arms and legs.

As president of Eastern Air Lines, Rickenbacker had been in on all sorts of survival conversations with pilots and crews and fancied himself an authority, which he probably was. Bill Cherry, however, captain of the airship, remained in charge, and Eddie became a self-appointed morale officer.

The sharks began rising up and hitting the bottoms of the rubber boats with their bodies—a “vicious jolt,” Rickenbacker said, that would lift the rafts several inches out of the water. Whether it was because they scented food or to rub leeches or barnacles off of their backs the men did not know. Whittaker identified them as tiger sharks, which he understood would not attack humans. It was probably just as well that Whittaker remained unaware that tiger sharks are among the most ferocious man-eaters in the ocean.

Next day the high seas subsided and the ocean became flat calm and no wind blew, not the faintest breeze, and they entered a period of doldrums, which frequently occur near the equator. Everyone listened for the drone of a plane, but the air was silent, except for the occasional gurgle created by a shark fin or tail. The sun beat down.

Eddie became the overseer of the oranges and, using one of the sheath knives, carefully divided one of them for that day’s meal by cutting it into eight slices. Each man would receive a slice every other day. Instead of eating the rind, Eddie and Cherry used theirs for bait, but no fish were interested, and the orange was itself unsatisfying. “Except for the pleasant taste we might as well had not had anything,” Whittaker recalled.

The rafts drifted lazily on the glassy water, the lines between them slack. Within a day every inch of exposed skin was burned. Soon they had blisters, which burst and burned again; the skin cracked and peeled and turned raw. It became excruciating when the saltwater got to it, as it frequently did because the sharks had formed the disagreeable habit of coming near the surface and slapping the sides of the raft with their tails, spraying water on the occupants. The cut on Reynolds’s nose wouldn’t heal and remained an open, oozing gash that Rickenbacker called “a horrible sight.” These effects of sun and saltwater also caused intense pain for Bartek, with his fingers cut to the bone. In the boats, the men sprawled all over each other, with little to say, especially from ten in the morning until four o’clock every afternoon, when the sun raged down in its most pitiless intensity and sapped what remained of their fading energy.

Whittaker and De Angelis over time developed a tan, while “the rest of us cooked day after day,” Rickenbacker said. Their hands and feet swelled and became covered with running sores, as did their mouths, from some kind of ulcers.

Having recently undergone his ordeal in Atlanta, Rickenbacker was uniquely equipped to provide a relative evaluation of their distress, and to him there was barely a comparison. While pinned in the plane’s wreckage, his pain had been blunted by delirium, he said, but ultimately he knew that help was near because he heard people moving and talking. Here in the raft on the empty ocean, Rickenbacker said, “I was something being turned on a spit.”

A
T THE HEIGHT OF THE DAY
, Rickenbacker filled his hat with seawater and jammed it on his head to create a brief, cooling relief. He distributed several silk handkerchiefs, on which Adelaide had embroidered his initials, to the others, who would wet them and put them over their heads or “fold them bandit-fashion, over their nose.” Captain Cherry scanned the skies in vain for a seabird that might come close enough for him to kill with his revolver. Occasionally he would break the pistol down and rub the metal with oil from his nose, but the saltwater corrosion was getting ahead of him.

After dark they tried to shoot off the flares. They had planned to fire three each night, but most of the flares were duds. Once a flare went off but the parachute failed to open, and the hissing potassium nitrate threatened to fall back and ignite one of the rafts. Instead, it fell into the water where it provided a ghostly tableau as it flickered beneath the surface, sinking slowly toward abysmal depths, illuminating and disturbing the sharks, which twitched and shied away from it.

The rafts were so small that when one man needed to turn over, everyone had to turn over, which was always accompanied by groaning and profanity as raw skin was disturbed. “Many things said in the night had best be forgotten,” declared Rickenbacker, who consoled himself with the notion that “someday I shall meet the man who decided these rafts could hold five men each.”

Almost all the men fantasized about food and drink. Ice cream, pies, cakes were high on the list; so were sodas, strawberry soda in particular, for some reason, and “a big ole pitcher full of ice water, with ice cubes floating on top.” Sometimes they talked about food with each other in animated conversations, but inevitably after a while somebody would growl “knock it off.” Adamson suffered intensely from back pain and also there was the unknown fact that he had diabetes, which doctors had failed to diagnose in his yearly physicals.

For the better part of a week, during the worst parts of the day, most everyone went into a stupor that somehow dulled their thirst. The oranges helped, but not much. Afterward, as the sun sank, the men assumed a kind of mild daze, enjoying the relief from the heat until the sun disappeared, and then the chilling night was upon them again. Even though the temperature was in the seventies, being always wet and exposed felt like “Chicago in December.” Nightmares vexed most of the men. During the daytime they often saw mirages, but now the moon was full and the clouds also played tricks of the eye on them. Eddie slept fitfully, if only because he “kept one eye half open and one ear cocked” for the drone of a rescue plane.

As airmen, they had been trained to know the celestial sky, but being on the equator all the customary stars were out of their familiar places. At one point in his career Adamson had been in charge of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, and he now provided feeble lectures on the constellations and movements of heavenly bodies. This kept the men entertained and alert and Eddie encouraged more of it, because of “the good it did for all of us.” Night and day, the sharks continued to circle.

A
FTER EIGHT DAYS THE LAST OF THE ORANGES
were gone. The final two had shrunken and begun to rot, but now there was not even that to anticipate. It became obvious that unless they soon had food or water, “some of us were bound to die.” Rickenbacker was especially worried about Alex who, being the youngest, nevertheless seemed to weaken more than the others and “cried continually” for water. Rickenbacker at one point pulled up to his raft and “asked him why the hell he couldn’t take it?” admitting later that “it was a brutal thing to do.” This, however, was only the beginning of Eddie’s reign of terror on any crew member who showed signs of giving up. Some of the men came to hate Rickenbacker so much they refused to die just to spite him, and in fact wanted to live to see him die. He didn’t care, he said, so long as it saved lives.

On Thursday, October 30, Adamson wrote in his journal, “We are still hanging on.”

In the case of Alex, however, Rickenbacker laid off after he found out he was just three weeks out of the hospital and was suffering from some sort of infection in his mouth. But steadily the boy grew weaker and moaned and said the Hail Mary in the night; he seemed to have given up. At other times he took a picture of the girl he was engaged to marry from his wallet and talked to it. De Angelis tried to shield him from the sun but when it was high there wasn’t much he could do. Except for wanting water, Alex never really complained. Adamson also began growing listless, and Reynolds “was fading to skin and bones.”

Rickenbacker was concerned that if the men lost faith in being rescued they would cease to cooperate, which would lead to dire consequences for all. He had noticed that every day Bartek read from a miniature copy of the New Testament and he called for evening prayers. Eddie was the first to admit that while he was “conscious of God,” he was not a religious person, but he believed in the Golden Rule and had some vague notion of God. He knew the Lord’s Prayer from his upbringing in Sunday school and decided that was a start. It might pull the men closer and give them spirit. If nothing else, it would help pass the time.

As the days went by the prayer period became more intimate and complex, with one of them reading a passage from Bartek’s New Testament. Then they recited familiar prayers, such as the Twenty-third Psalm. These were followed by informal confessions, in which the men would talk about themselves in a completely uninhibited fashion—“their hopes, fears, ambitions, and mistakes.” The talk was “entirely frank and honest,” according to Eddie, who also participated, and it went without saying these conversations would never be revealed. Some initially scoffed at the practice, including Whittaker, who said he had lost whatever religion he’d been exposed to in childhood and hadn’t “the least notion that this open-air hallelujah meeting was going to do any good.” But in time he came to change his mind and turned out to be one of the group’s most avid participants—there was no place left to go but God.

O
NE MORNING
,
ABOUT TEN DAYS IN
, as they drifted aimlessly, some of the men engaged in an appalling conversation about self-mutilation in the interest of baiting a hook. Their inability to catch fish was most frustrating. They could see the fish, but they just didn’t have any bait. They tried to catch small sharks with their hands but they were too slippery. Bartek advocated slicing off the lobe of an ear, which he said people didn’t need. Whittaker offered to cut off the ball of his little finger, arguing that it would be less painful and less likely to become infected. Reynolds suggested that part of a toe would probably not be missed. They went to Rickenbacker for advice, and he concurred that it might become necessary, but demurred as to “the form the butchery might take.”