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

by Winston Groom

  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.

  AFTER 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.

  ONE 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.”

  At just that moment the most amazing thing happened. From an empty sky, and preceded by a loud fluttering of wings, a seagull alighted on Rickenbacker’s battered fedora.

  Everyone froze. Rickenbacker slowly and deliberately began to twist his right hand behind his head. He knew the bird was still there “from the hungry, famished, almost insane eyes in the other rafts.” After what must have seemed an eternity of adrenaline-fueled contortion, Rickenbacker seized the thing in his fingers and wrung its neck, to the wild cheers and applause of his starving companions.

  The bird was plucked and carved up with as much ceremony as a Thanksgiving turkey, with everyone receiving equal parts, including bones that were thoroughly sucked and chewed. The critical thing was that Rickenbacker thought to save the intestines for bait. After they had feasted all morning on raw gull, Eddie baited a hook on one of the fishing lines and handed it over to Whittaker, who weighted it with his class ring. The line had hardly been dropped into the water when a small mackerel struck it and it was hauled into the boat. Likewise, Cherry landed one about the same size. They were handed over for filleting, with the entrails again saved as bait.

  As if that provender wasn’t enough, when the sun was almost down the sky became dark and cloudy. There was the faintest hint of rain in the air, but they’d been so disappointed before that the men gave it little chance. They began their evening prayers with Cherry reading his favorite passage from the Book of Matthew:

  Therefore take ye no thought, saying: What shall we eat? What shall we drink? Or where withal shall we be clothed? For these are things the heathen seeketh. For your Heavenly Father knoweth that you have need of all these things. But seek you first the Kingdom of God … for the morrow shall take thought for the things.

  Then Cherry lapsed into his own idiom and began praying in a more normal voice, as though he were having a pleasant conversation with God: “Old Master, we know this isn’t a guarantee that we’ll eat in the morning. But we’re in an awful fix, as you know. We sure are counting on a little something by day after tomorrow, at least. See what you can do for us, Old Master.” It was the way they all came to say prayers, out loud, no thees, thys, or thous, just eight men in an awful fix talking turkey with God. As Whittaker put it, “Men don’t kid when the chips are down.”

  NEXT DAY, WHILE THE SUN TORMENTED them like some infernal blast furnace, Adamson suddenly raised up and slipped over the side of the raft. Rickenbacker immediately grabbed him and with help got him back aboard, then administered a tongue-lashing so severe it cannot be repeated here but Whittaker summed it up later by saying, “That man Rickenbacker has got a rough tongue in his head.” Adamson had actually done a brave thing, thinking he was a burden on the others and that there would be more food if he was gone. But Rickenbacker spared him not, and “woe betide the man about to turn quitter.”

  They began lingering anxiously at the part of the Lord’s Prayer that said, “And give us this day our daily bread.” Captain Cherry added in his quaint Texan drawl, “Old Master, we called on You for food, and You delivered. We ask You now for water. We’ve done the best we could. If You don’t make up Your mind to help us pretty soon, well, I guess that’s all there’ll be to it.”

  A small breeze blew up and Cherry hoisted his undershirt on two oars, which he had been doing whenever possible for a sail. Whittaker looked off and saw a cloud “that had been fleecy and white a while ago now was darkening by the second.” Within minutes the sky had become a storm of rain moving toward the rafts; the men could see big drops striking the waves. They began frantically paddling toward it.

  Cherry shouted, “Thanks, Old Master!” as the curtain of rain swept over them, soaking them to the skin, washing off the salt and sweat and bloody grime from their cuts and sores. They drank it greedily with cupped hands, then began to collect the rain. They’d discussed this before. Any rain that fell into the rafts would b
e tainted by the saltwater that always sloshed around in the bottoms, but they had two bailing buckets and the canvas covers for the flare cartridges. To collect the rain, they would take off their clothing, and when it became soaking wet, they’d wring it out into the vessels.

  While they were doing this, the storm intensified with wind, lightning, and rough waves and at its height came a cry for help. The two-man raft with Alex and De Angelis had broken free and was drifting into the darkness. Eddie and the others paddled furiously after them and at length overtook the “doughnut,” but no sooner had they made it fast when a sudden jerk on the bowline revealed that Cherry’s raft had been overturned by a rogue wave and its three men were floundering in the sea. When at last the men in Rickenbacker’s boat righted Cherry’s raft they found the flare gun and the flares were lost, as was his bailing bucket and the water therein. They’d managed to save the oars.

  Within half an hour the storm had moved on. The men attributed the rain to Cherry’s prayers. When the seas abated they all pulled in close and held a meeting. Eddie judged that they had collected two and a half quarts of water. Because no one knew when there’d be another squall, they decided to limit their water ration to one half jigger per man per day. The next day, the sea began to roughen again but there was no rain.

  After a few days Rickenbacker became concerned that the water in the bailing buckets was evaporating too quickly and was always in danger of being spilled. So he convened a conference that resulted in a novel, if distasteful, transfer of the water into the tiny air hole in one of their Mae West life jackets. The hole was so small that the only way to move the water safely was for Eddie to take a mouthful and then slowly spit it into the hole. This time-consuming transfer was closely watched by the others in order to make sure he actually spit and did not swallow, but in the end they had conserved several quarts of the precious water safely inside the Mae West.

  For drinking vessels they had only the empty brass shell casings of the flares, which were about six inches long and an inch or so wide. To indicate the depth of their degradation, since it was nearly impossible to stand up in the rafts, they had to use these same shell tubes to urinate in—what there was of it—which they then dumped over the side. Afterward the tubes were washed in the saltwater.

  Meantime, Eddie became increasingly worried about young Alex. He asked Bartek to change places with him, and once aboard Eddie’s raft Alex was able to stretch out a bit more. Eddie put his arm around him, “as one cuddles a child,” hoping to transfer his own body heat to the boy. Sure enough, an hour later Alex’s shivering stopped, and he seemed to sleep, though he murmured all night in Polish. Next day he asked to be put back into the little raft with De Angelis, and Rickenbacker gave the okay. He sensed that Alex was dying and decided to let him die as he wished.

  Sometime around three that morning Eddie woke up with a premonition and the vague recollection of the sound of a loud sigh. He called over to De Angelis, “Has he died?”

  There was a pause, and then “I think so” came the reply.

  Eddie’s and Cherry’s rafts pulled close and they each checked Alex’s pulse. There wasn’t any. Eddie asked Bartek if he could stick it out till morning.

  When daybreak came they checked Alex once more to make sure he had expired, then took his wallet and dog tags to return to his family if they themselves ever got back. De Angelis said his recollection of the Catholic burial service, then they rolled Sergeant Alex over the side and he floated off facedown—a burial at sea—such as it was. They had been marooned in the Pacific for thirteen days. The sharks circled. The sun beat down.

  EACH MORNING WHEN IT BECAME LIGHT Rickenbacker would count heads in the rafts; there had always been seven excluding his own. It gave him a jar now to count only six, but he got used to it. After the men had drunk up all the water from the storm, they went for forty-eight hours without another drop, and some almost went mad with thirst and began to rave. They had quit fantasizing about food, or at least if they did they kept it to themselves. It became a waiting game until the next rain shower or chance encounter with a fish. One day Cherry caught a small shark, about two feet long, which came into the boat snapping its jaws at everyone. Cherry managed to stab it to death with a knife but not before stabbing a hole in the bottom of the raft. They divided up the shark but the flesh was so disagreeable it made them gag; no one could stomach it, which must have been saying a lot. They tried using it for bait, but no fish would touch it, and finally they threw it overboard.

  They tried using the patch kit to repair the rubberized canvas where Cherry had missed stabbing the shark. To do this they had to get out of the boat and into the water with the big sharks and turn it over to work from the bottom. In the end the patch failed and they had to live with the result—a leak that kept a constant inch or two of water in the bottom of the raft. Especially at night, it was enough to make them miserable.

  One day an atrocious red rash broke out among the men, all over their thighs and rears and legs. The rash turned into horrid pus-filled abscesses that looked like boils and soon burst into running sores that never healed. The saltwater made them sting and burn until they seemed to pulsate. “Our bodies, our minds, the few things that we had with us were slowly rotting away,” Rickenbacker said. It was too true. Their clothes were rags, saltwater corrosion had frozen the compass needle, watches had rusted and stopped, and Eddie’s crucifix, which had been given to him in 1917 by a ten-year-old girl before he went to war, was starting to disintegrate. He had carried it all these years, through the air battles of the war, through the crash in Atlanta, and now the crash of the B-17. To Rickenbacker, it was more than just a lucky charm, and he despaired of its ruination.

  They drifted on for days in a semiconscious stupor. The strain had begun to wear on everyone, and after the sun went down there were cross words and profanity, sometimes pointed accusations. Somebody called Rickenbacker a mean son of a bitch. He didn’t deny it. “It does us no dishonor,” he said, “to say that we were all becoming a little unhinged.” As for himself, he had a single recurring dream of coming to an island where an old friend had a wonderful home and where there was “an abundance of fruit juices,” and then after breakfast he could telephone Mr. Stimson, the secretary of war, “and [tell] him where we were.” Awaking from the dream and seeing only ocean became his low point.

  Rickenbacker and Cherry both estimated that they were to the northwest of the regular air and sea-lane traffic, and occasionally they would try to paddle to the southwest, and sometimes Cherry used his sail. But in the end they found they were too frail for it and gave up, saving their strength to paddle toward rain squalls when they arose. Cherry was for splitting up the party with the idea they’d have a better chance of being spotted. Rickenbacker was against it on grounds that they all had a better chance of survival if they stuck together, and that it was a lot easier to spot three rafts out on the ocean than one. But Cherry remained determined and Rickenbacker relented. So Cherry cast off and paddled away one midafternoon; Rickenbacker watched them in the distance until it became dark. Next morning he was startled to see Cherry’s raft bobbing close by on the flat sea, with the men inside sleeping. Cherry said it was impossible to paddle against the current so they roped up again.

  After this, the mood of the men returned to dismal. They began to hallucinate and, as Whittaker put it, “At noon the daily round of delirious shouts began. By this time nearly all of us were holding conversations with people who weren’t there.” Whittaker found himself talking to Davy Jones, the mythical guardian of sailors’ souls, who lived at the bottom of the ocean. Jones persisted with every argument to lure Whittaker out of the raft and down to his famous “locker,” but to no avail.

  On about the sixteenth or seventeenth day, after a sleepless night of ferocious squalls, Rickenbacker was idly gazing at the eternal sea when his eye caught a sudden movement in the direction of Cherry’s raft. He turned his head and saw the captain frozen in a forward-leaning posi
tion with his hand cupped to his ear. “Plane!,” Cherry exclaimed. “I hear a plane. Listen!”

  They all heard it, a “deep-toned roar”—at least those still fully conscious heard it; Adamson, Bartek, and Reynolds were barely skin and bones and had sunk into near comas. Then off to their left they saw it, coming out of a squall, flying low about five miles away, a single-engine floatplane. Those who could stood up and waved and yelled themselves hoarse but to no avail. It had been too far away for them to see its marking but someone said the U.S. Navy had a plane like that, the Kingfisher. So, however, did the Japanese. Someone shouted, “Get the flares!” but there were no flares, and soon no plane.

  It was a terrible blow, perhaps the worst yet. All they could do was groan. Rickenbacker, however, blued the air with a flood of horrible profanity that became “the masterpiece of his career,” according to one of the castaways. In between the profanity, Eddie told them if the plane had come once, it would come again. If there was one plane there would be many planes; they were obviously near its base. At last good things were coming. And, he added, “A MAN would have the courage, the patience, the faith, to wait for them.”

  “It didn’t improve his personal popularity,” Whittaker remarked, “but the psychological effect was just what he’d been hoping for.” As if to punctuate this, a brisk breeze sprang up, cooling everything down, and Cherry ran up his undershirt sail on the two oars—Rickenbacker had so fouled the air with his cursing that apparently it stirred up a wind.11