The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

  Whittaker, a handsome, rugged, muscular man who had flown small planes for twenty years, went to the tail and returned with more coffee and pressed ham sandwiches. At about nine-thirty Cherry, a former copilot for American Airlines, began “turning up the radio and tinkering with the DF [directional finder] to get a fix on the radio compass.” It was then they discovered the thing didn’t work. Cherry took the controls and began to descend to 2,000 feet while Whittaker continued to fiddle with the DF. They broke through clouds with no island in sight.

  Shortly afterward, De Angelis came up “looking worried.” They were past their ETA, or estimated time of arrival. Whittaker was certain they could not have overshot it, because they had kept a careful check on their airspeed along with an estimated ten-knot tailwind. Rickenbacker, however, had a gut reaction that told him the tailwind was stronger than that, perhaps as much as three times. He admitted that he “had no way of telling,” but “inside me the feeling grew that we had overshot the mark and were moving away from it, into the open Pacific.”

  “We’re lost,” Cherry said.

  Sergeant Reynolds had been in radio contact with the wireless operator on Canton; there was no voice communication between them, only telegraph keys. Cherry told Reynolds to set up a “lost plane” procedure with the wireless operator on Canton.

  In this process, the plane sends out two radio signals fifteen minutes apart and the ground station takes bearings on those, which gives a cross bearing or “fix” on the plane’s course. Then the controller at the station or tower draws two lines on his plotting board with compass bearings that intersect on the station and project beyond it, which lets the station plot the plane’s position. It was a time-tested method with only one hitch: the wireless station on Canton wasn’t yet set up with the necessary equipment to accomplish it.

  “That’s cute,” Cherry remarked when informed of this.

  Reynolds told Cherry he’d just picked up another station on Palmyra Island that was in fact equipped for the lost plane procedure.

  Rickenbacker asked Cherry how much fuel was left.

  “About four hours” was the solemn reply. A quick calculation showed that Palmyra was about a thousand miles distant and the B-17 had only six hundred miles’ worth of gas left in its tanks. Unfortunately, the lost plane procedure works only with the station you are communicating with.

  “What do you expect to do now?” Eddie asked.

  “Try the box procedure,” Cherry said. Known also as “boxing the compass,” this involved flying a square, one hour to a leg, at 5,000 feet, which allows the crew to scan a huge area both inside and outside the square. It wasn’t much, considering the vast size of the ocean, but at least it was something. Rickenbacker suggested contacting the station on Canton and requesting someone fire off an antiaircraft gun, timing the bursts at 8,000 feet. It was an old First World War trick that Rickenbacker had used in France when planes were lost. They climbed back to 10,000 feet to be above the blasts.

  The minutes, then the hours droned on, all eyes looking for islands, looking for puffs of flak, but there was nothing to see but clouds and endless ocean. At one point Eddie asked Sergeant Reynolds to send a message: PLANE LOST. ONE HOUR’S FUEL—RICKENBACKER. It was the B-17’s last message.

  During that last hour Cherry cut the two outboard engines to save gas, and to lighten the plane the others opened the tail hatch and threw out everything that wasn’t bolted down—the sleeping cots, bedding, toolbox, empty thermoses, all the baggage including Eddie’s new Burberry coat he’d just bought in London and fifteen postal bags of high-priority mail that had been put aboard for the South Pacific theater.

  It was clear they were going to have to put the ship down in the sea. Below they could see the big rollers, headed east. As far as anyone knew, no four-engine plane had ever been put down on a high-wave ocean with survivors. Hitting water in a plane is roughly the same as hitting a brick wall. If a plane lands into the wind and hits a wave crest too hard it will break in two and sink. If it noses through a crest and hits the next crest the nose will dive beneath the water or be caved in. Whittaker suggested to Cherry that they go in sideways and land in a trough between two waves. Cherry agreed and added that he intended to go in with gas in the tanks and the engines running on the theory that a power landing is always better than an uncontrolled one.7

  Everyone put on life vests, also known as “Mae Wests.” Sergeant Reynolds pounded furiously at the telegraph key with the SOS call but there was no response. Adamson, using a kind of code because of the presence of the crew, reminded Rickenbacker that if it was Japanese territory they put down in, because of what they knew about the upcoming North Africa invasion, they can’t afford to be taken prisoners. Adamson whispered that during his intelligence training he’d learned the Japanese had acquired some kind of “truth serum” drug from the Germans. Rickenbacker acknowledged that “if the Japs find us on the rafts you and I have only one way to go, and that’s down.”8

  There were three life rafts in compartments on either side of the plane; two were “five-man” rafts and one was a “two-man” raft in the radio compartment. These could be released and inflated by pulling a lever in the cabin. The B-17 was more than twice as heavy as the B-25s that Doolittle’s raiders flew; if the landing was successful, they could count on the plane surviving on the surface for no more than one minute. The emergency equipment also contained water and some rations, and these were stored near the escape hatch. Eddie wrapped about sixty feet of rope he’d found around his waist.

  Word came back that Cherry was starting down. Everyone braced themselves best he could, some strapping in, others with mattresses or parachutes to protect them. Rickenbacker could see out of a window, and he began calling out “one hundred feet, fifty feet, twenty feet, ten feet, five feet.” One of the engines sputtered and died and Eddie shouted, “Hold on!”

  Rickenbacker had heard the “violent jumble of sounds and motions” once before—at Atlanta. “Pieces of radio equipment bolted to the bulkhead flew about like shrapnel,” he said. The tail struck the water first to slow the plane down, a furious jerk, then a stupendous lurch forward as the belly hit and the plane went from 90 miles per hour—stall speed—to a dead stop in less than fifty feet, by Eddie’s estimate. “It was a wonderful landing, timed to the second … If [Cherry] had miscalculated by two seconds and hit the crest … the Fortress would have gone straight to the bottom of the sea.”9

  Green seawater poured in through a broken window port. Everyone was terribly shaken up. Adamson “staggered to his feet,” Eddie said, “moaning about his back.” De Angelis and Alex appeared to be all right, but Reynolds had a great gash on his nose from which blood was pouring through his fingers as he held his hand to his face. Eddie and Adamson went first through the escape hatch and out onto the wing where they had trouble keeping their footing as the plane heaved and surged in twelve-foot swells. The life rafts were already inflated and expelled and were bobbing in the waves. John Bartek, the mechanic, had cut his fingers terribly on some sharp edge trying to unfoul a line to the raft. Eddie helped Adamson, who was in “great pain” from his injured back, into one of the five-man rafts, which looked very small against the angry sea. Then Bartek got in, and then Eddie, who remarked, “There wasn’t enough room left for a midget.”

  Captain Cherry, Lieutenant Whittaker, and Sergeant Reynolds were already in their raft on the other side of the plane and had drifted clear of it. De Angelis and Alex were in the water trying to right the small two-man raft, which had overturned. The situation was dangerous; a big crested wave slammed Eddie’s raft against the plane’s tail and nearly overturned them before filling it with water. Black shark fins began to appear around the plane, and the men saw many long, dark shapes cruising ominously under the water.

  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.

  ON 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.10

  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.”

  AT 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 flar
e 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.