Lost in the Pacific, 1942

by Tod Olson

  But that wasn’t Rickenbacker’s way. If you travel when there’s a war on, he believed, you have to be willing to take risks. The enemy doesn’t wait for engineers to check everything and check it again. There was no time for “prissy safeguards” in the army.

  And so here they were, stranded somewhere in the central Pacific. DeAngelis had taken readings on the stars the night before. Now, with Whittaker’s watch, he checked the exact time of the sunset. Five minutes earlier than the night before, he claimed, meant they had drifted 50 miles during the day. In fact, they had traveled about 25 or 30, probably west and a little south.

  Lost: The B-17 went down somewhere west of Canton Island, in 150,000 square miles of open ocean.

  But where had they started? Rickenbacker pulled out the map of the Pacific, which had so far stayed dry enough to read. He and Cherry thought they had gone down west and north of Canton, which put them dangerously close to enemy waters. The Japanese-held Gilbert Islands lay five or six hundred miles west and a little north of Canton. If they were right, they could easily be within range of Japanese planes.

  DeAngelis believed they were south of Canton. If he was right, they might be beyond the enemy’s reach. But it also meant they were floating in a large triangle of empty ocean. Canton—the only inhabited land in the Phoenix Islands—lay at the northeast point of the triangle. The Gilberts occupied the northwest point. Another 600 miles to the south lay the Ellice Islands.

  They were lost in a vast no-man’s-land. In the entire triangle, not a single tiny crest of land broke the surface of the ocean. No regular shipping lanes crossed anywhere near their position. The supply route to Australia ran through Fiji and Samoa, another 500 miles south of the Ellices.

  One by one the men confronted a grim possibility: They could be completely on their own. There might be planes up there searching for them. But inside that triangle lay 150,000 square miles of empty ocean. They hadn’t been able to find an entire island when they were circling up there. Would the search planes really be able to spot three tiny rafts?

  They began to calculate their chances of finding land. If they were headed southwest, they might run into the Ellice Islands. But that entire island chain made up only 10 square miles of land. It would take a miracle to wash up on 10 square miles of sand and coral in 68 million square miles of water.

  Rickenbacker spoke up with his own calculations. He claimed they could make it to Fiji, a much larger target, in eighteen to twenty-five days. He didn’t really believe it himself, and eighteen days with no food, water, or shelter seemed like an eternity. But Rickenbacker felt that the men needed something to hope for. Fiji would have to do.

  As darkness fell, conversation trailed off. Bartek had stashed a Bible with a zippered cover in his pocket before they left the plane. Now he dug it out and read to himself. Captain Cherry pulled out the Very pistol to send up a different kind of prayer. He stuck a flare in the barrel and aimed at the sky. The first one went nowhere. The second rose and burned for a few seconds before dropping into the sea. The third rose high, floated on its parachute, and turned the sky bright red for a minute and a half. For several minutes after it burned out they peered into the darkness, hoping that a star might turn into the taillight of a plane.

  Finally, they settled in for another sleepless night. Adamson took out a pencil and scratched the date on the sidewall of the raft: Thursday, October 22.

  The nearest piece of the mainland United States lay at least 4,000 miles away, and the men could only wonder what their families were doing. It would have been midnight in California. Whittaker’s daughter, Shirley, would be in bed. What would his son, Thomas, be up to at the navy base in San Francisco? In Texas it was 2 a.m., and Cherry’s five-year-old daughter, Paula, was surely asleep. What about Rickenbacker’s wife, Adelaide, in New York? And Bartek’s parents in their New Jersey house, where his sister’s bed now lay empty? Did they know yet what had happened to the B-17? The men hoped it hadn’t made the newspapers, because the headlines would surely declare them dead. But had their families gotten a phone call from the army? A telegram? Or the most ominous messenger of all: a man in uniform knocking at the front door?

  CHAPTER 6

  DEAD CALM

  For Adelaide Rickenbacker, the news came on Friday, October 23, in a phone call. It was General “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Forces. He was calling to say her husband was lost.

  “… 14 hours SSW of Oahu. May have overshot island. Hour’s fuel.”

  That was the last the world had heard from Eddie.

  Adelaide spent that day and the next sitting by the phone in her New York City apartment, feeling useless. She called her sons, David and William, at boarding school to give them the news. Friends called and visited, and sometimes she let herself cry. For newspaper reporters she tried to sound upbeat. “Eddie will turn up,” she said. “He’s too old a hand to get lost in any airplane now.”

  Adelaide eyes a famous portrait showing Eddie in better days, as a WWI hero.

  On Saturday, the rest of America woke to the headlines. In New York City: “Rickenbacker Missing in Pacific On Flight Southwest of Hawaii.” In Stockton, California: “American Ace of Aces Missing.” In Doylestown, Pennsylvania: “Famed Ace Has Again Crossed Path of Fate.” There was no mention anywhere of Bartek or Whittaker or the rest of the crew. The army hadn’t named them, or even said how many people were aboard the plane.

  For the time being, Rickenbacker was the man in the spotlight. He was “Captain Eddie,” or just plain “Eddie” in many of the articles, as though he’d been an old friend to everyone. But Eddie was no ordinary friend. He was a “daredevil of the skies,” a “living legend,” “the idol of millions,” a “great and far-seeing man in the best of our pioneer tradition.”

  No one was ready to give up on him yet. Over morning coffee, people read about the rafts with their bright yellow coloring and their emergency supplies. Supposedly, downed fliers had stayed alive for weeks at sea—though none of those survivors were named. And maybe it didn’t matter, the papers speculated, because Eddie was in a class by himself. He had cheated death so many times before. Why should this time be any different?

  “May His Luck Continue to Hold!” proclaimed the Mobile Register in Alabama. “Those who loved Captain Rickenbacker and enjoyed his zest for living, and fearless courage,” the writer went on, “will never be able to believe him dead, no matter how long he may be missing.”

  Most of the articles, however, reminded everyone that another famous flier had gone down five years earlier in the same part of the Pacific. This pilot had been attempting the last leg of a round-the-world flight when she lost contact with Howland Island, about 400 miles northwest of Canton. “We must be on you, but cannot see you—but gas is running low” was one of her final radio transmissions.

  Her name was Amelia Earhart, and she was never heard from again.

  Back at sea, the third day dawned in a dead calm. The ocean flattened into a gleaming mirror, broken only by the occasional shark fin.

  In a way, the change came as a relief. The 12-foot swells had turned the last two days into constant turmoil, salt spray flying and rafts banging into one another. The crazy ride made it impossible for the men to get their bearings on the world. Climb to the crest of a wave, and you commanded the entire ocean. Drop into a trough and you couldn’t see the next raft on the end of a twenty-foot tether. Now water stretched on all sides to the horizon, where it blended with the blue of the sky.

  Beautiful.

  Restful.

  But it was getting them no closer to land.

  Cherry’s T-shirt was a poor excuse for a sail in a stiff breeze. With no wind at all it was useless. Rowing was exhausting and didn’t seem to get them anywhere. At this rate, they wouldn’t make five miles a day; Fiji was nothing but a prayer.

  As the sun climbed and the mist evaporated, the men fought off the heat however they could. Rickenbacker passed around a few handkerchiefs that he had grabbed f
rom his suitcase before the plane went down. The men tied them around their faces like bandits.

  No matter what they did, the sun roasted every inch of exposed skin. Whittaker and DeAngelis had dark complexions that kept them from burning too badly. But the rest of the crew began to look like lobsters—especially Reynolds, who had stripped to his shorts and thrown away his clothes. Rickenbacker actually thought he could smell flesh burning.

  As the day wore on, conversation dropped off. The men slumped deep in the rafts. From time to time someone baited a hook with an orange peel and let it dangle in the water. Everyone had stopped insisting they were about to be rescued.

  With nothing to do, boredom set in. Occasionally someone would ask Whittaker what time it was. He would check his watch and announce the hour: 12:15 … 1:35 … 3:22. Rickenbacker would growl, “Well, there it is. Are you going somewhere?”

  At some point Adamson remembered that he had stuck a Reader’s Digest in his hip pocket before they ditched. He couldn’t get in position to extract it himself, so Bartek did it for him. Salt water had turned the entire magazine into a lump of sodden paper, but one article was still readable.

  The salvaged page told the story of a balloon flight over France by the famous aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont. Dumont, apparently, had packed a fine meal for his flight, and the writer was fascinated by it. There was chicken, lobster, ice cream, and champagne, each described in mouthwatering detail.

  Adamson tortured himself for a minute or two. Then he thrust the magazine at Rickenbacker, who tore off a small piece, baited a hook with it, and threw it to the fish.

  For the second day in a row, no one caught a thing.

  Mostly the men lay around in a stupor. Occasionally someone would drift off, start to slide into the ocean, and jolt awake, grabbing frantically at a raft mate to stay in the boat. Then he would settle in again, tired from the effort.

  All day, limbs felt too heavy to move. Minds drifted, lazy and vague. But little by little, one gnawing obsession crowded out all other thoughts. Every one of the men—Rickenbacker and Adamson, Bartek and Reynolds, Whittaker and Cherry, DeAngelis and Sergeant Alex—began to think compulsively about food.

  That was only natural. They had begun the long, slow process of starving to death.

  CHAPTER 7

  TO CATCH A FISH

  On the morning of the fourth day at sea, Rickenbacker divided the second orange and passed the meager sections around. By this time Bartek, DeAngelis, Reynolds, and Alex had gone close to ninety-six hours with nothing but an eighth of an orange to eat. Under normal circumstances they took in 2,500 calories a day. In the last four days, they had consumed 20.

  Under their reddening skin, blood and liver, muscles and brain waged a battle against starvation. On a normal diet, the body converts food into glucose, a form of sugar, and consumes it for energy. The men had exhausted the supply of food in their bodies three days ago. Since then, their cells had been burning stored fat for energy instead of glucose. Already their faces had begun to thin. Bones looked a little more prominent. Now their bodies dug deeper for fuel. Their vital organs harvested protein from muscle tissue in order to keep functioning. Without a new supply of fuel, each man’s body was literally consuming itself to stay alive.

  Rickenbacker’s speech to the men took on a different tone this morning. “You might as well sit down and prepare for a long ride,” he told them. They would end up on an island somewhere if they drifted long enough; there was no question in his mind about that. The challenge would be to survive until they did.

  The men were fast discovering the cruel irony behind being stranded in the ocean: They were starving, and yet they were surrounded by food. The water teemed with sleek, silvery fish—from tiny fingerlings to foot-long jack mackerel and plump-looking dolphins. Sea birds circled overhead, diving occasionally to catch their lunch. The men seemed to have attracted their own traveling ecosystem. But all of it lay just beyond their reach.

  They had fishhooks and line, but without food they had no bait; and without bait they had no food. The orange peels held no interest at all for the fish. Rickenbacker tried adding Adamson’s shiny key chain as a lure. Whittaker tied his ring to a line and sunk it. Sometimes a fish would get curious and hover near a hook—so close the men could almost taste it. Each time, it would lose interest and dart away.

  They debated trying to turn the tables on the sharks and convert the fearsome predators into prey. Cherry could probably put a bullet into one of them at close range. But if he didn’t kill it, what would happen? The wounded creature would flail around, trailing blood in the water. Imagine the twelve-foot monsters thrashing around the rafts, whipped into a frenzy by the scent of blood.

  They decided it was best to let the sharks be.

  The sea birds were another source of frustration. At first they had seemed a surefire sign that land was near. Now it was clear the men had misunderstood the habits of sea birds. These creatures were perfectly at home many miles from land. They taunted the men, darting and hovering in sight but well out of reach. It’s not as though the scrawny birds would be much of a meal. But if they could just get their hands on one, they might be able to use the meat for bait. Cherry kept his .45-caliber pistol in his lap during the day. Every now and then he’d take a shot, but he never came close to hitting a bird.

  Bartek tormented himself by watching the birds fish. They’d flap low, scanning for prey, and then drop with a splash. An instant later they rose with a meal—just like that. Bartek wasn’t normally much of a philosopher. But his sister’s death, and now his own close encounter with the end, had pushed his mind to a dark place. All around them, creatures with brains no bigger than the tip of Bartek’s little finger found food with ease. Here they were, eight members of the smartest species on Earth. Between them they had decades of education and specialized training. Bartek himself knew how to fix some of the most complex machines ever made.

  But out here it was all meaningless.

  All they could do was pray that a careless bird might drop a fish in their laps.

  Day four turned to five and five to six. Adamson could barely move his arms, but each day he scratched the date onto the side of the raft: October 24 … October 25 … October 26. The men started passing Bartek’s Bible around and choosing passages to read. Whittaker mostly kept his mouth shut when they did. He wasn’t a believer. What good was praying going to do? They were on their own out here.

  Each night they sent up flares until they got one to work. When it burned out and left them in darkness, it made them feel like the only people left in the world.

  On the fifth morning they gave up on Rickenbacker’s rationing plan and ate the third orange. It was dry as the inside of their mouths. The last one started to rot, and they devoured it on the sixth day.

  Now the real torture set in. For the first few days they had at least been able to look forward to something—even if it was a tasteless piece of orange they could eat in one bite. By the time the sun baked off the chill of the fifth night and began to roast them alive, they had nothing left but a relentless need for food. They were desperately thirsty, too. But right now, it was hunger that held them captive every waking minute of the day.

  As if they could lay out their fantasies on a table and carve them up, the men dreamed up five-course meals in their heads and shared them with one another. Captain Cherry posed as a waiter at one of San Francisco’s finest restaurants. He went around the rafts “taking orders.” There was always fruit juice to start, then steaks and roasts and chops and turkey. Everyone wanted lemon, their bodies starving for vitamin C. The milkshakes from the officer’s club at Hickam Field were in high demand, and strawberry was the flavor of choice.

  Back at home, civilians were living on war rations that would have seemed like a king’s feast to the men on the rafts.

  If they ever got off the rafts, they agreed, they’d all have one another over for dinner. Bartek offered up his mother’s Polish meatballs and cabb
age, with apple pie for dessert. DeAngelis said his mother would make spaghetti. Reynolds invited everyone to his parents’ ranch in northern California, where they’d feast on fried chicken, followed by cake and pie.

  Bartek managed to keep his sense of humor for a while. When the men in the Air Transport Command traveled, they collected $6 a day from the army for expenses. One thing about being lost at sea, Bartek said—the expenses were pretty light. He ended every day by tallying up their earnings.

  “Well,” he’d say, “that’s another six dollars for us.”

  It was good for a few laughs. But nothing could keep their minds off food for long.

  Rickenbacker watched with irritation as hunger and exhaustion tore away at the morale of the crew. Simple tasks took almost heroic effort—and the rafts required constant attention. Between the sea spray and tiny leaks in the canvas, water collected incessantly at their feet. To stay afloat, everyone had to help bail out the rafts. They used the collapsible rubber buckets and sometimes their hats to shovel water back into the sea, only to watch it fill the bottom of the rafts again.

  When they weren’t bailing, someone was laboring over the hand pump, trying to keep invisible leaks from deflating the rafts. During the first couple of days, it was a fifteen-minute task to get the side tubes fully blown up. Now, one man had trouble finishing it without handing the pump over to a raft mate and collapsing from fatigue.

  It was hard work just staying afloat, and the men were beginning to wonder if there was any point in doing it. Despite Rickenbacker’s pep talks, DeAngelis had decided after the third day that they were pretty much doomed. Pain had turned Adamson into a bitter, grumbling lump in the corner of Rickenbacker’s raft. Radioman Jim Reynolds, who was thin to begin with, had started to waste away. He barely said a word and looked like he wouldn’t last long without food.