by Tod Olson
In 1942, millions of people had to live with the news that someone close to them had been stolen away. In twenty-two days, seven men had survived on rafts in the Pacific. In that same twenty-two days, more than 2,000 Americans died in battle. On the USS Juneau alone, 90 men were left to die in the ocean while Rickenbacker and the B-17 crew drank soup and fruit juice on Funafuti. And the fighting stretched across the globe, from Guadalcanal to China to Eastern Europe to North Africa. On average, in every three-week period of the war, more than 500,000 people died. Each one of those deaths led to an announcement—a letter, a phone call, a knock at the door. And each announcement left a person at home to wonder why their son, their daughter, their husband had been killed while others survived.
At least some of those people read the New York Times on November 24, two weeks after the rescue of Rickenbacker and the crew. They might have seen a small article at the bottom of page 24 that puzzled over the meaning of the crew’s survival: “We do not know why [Death] sometimes comes so close and then goes away. Often he takes the very bravest—this we know. He takes the generous, who give up their places in the lifeboat. He takes the compassionate, who will not let a wounded man suffer unaided between the lines. He takes those who love liberty so much that they will not bow to the oppressor.
“We shall never pierce this mystery,” the article went on. “We can only rejoice that brave men sometimes come safely home from desperate peril.”
Safe at Last: Bartek, Cherry, DeAngelis, and Whittaker (with the crew members of a Catalina seaplane) are all smiles, reunited after their rescue.
GLOSSARY
altimeter: a tool that measures how high something—such as an airplane—is off the ground
bulkhead: a wall that separates two different compartments in a ship or a plane
ditch: to make an emergency landing in water
fuselage: the main body of an airplane, where the passengers, crew, and cargo are carried
hangar: a large, typically enclosed building used to store aircraft
leave: a vacation, for military personnel
leeward: the side that’s sheltered from the wind
magazine: a room or compartment where ammunition and explosives are stored
octant: a device you can use to determine your position by measuring your relationship to the sun or the stars
Pygmy: name for a person of an ethnic group whose members are unusually short
raise: to connect with someone by radio
Zero: model name of a famous, highly maneuverable fighter plane used by the Japanese during World War II
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In some ways, this story was easy to retell because nearly everyone, at the time, had something to say about it. Rickenbacker isn’t exactly a household name now, but ask your grandfather about him and he’ll probably say something like, “Eddie? Sure, I remember him.”
When the B-17 crew came back to the States, the men were in high demand. Newspaper reporters mobbed them. Editors were desperate for a hopeful story to run next to all the frightening news from around the globe.
Because everyone wanted to hear the story, there are plenty of sources available now. In addition to the newspaper accounts, three of the men were interviewed at length for a feature film about Rickenbacker’s life. Four of them wrote books with varying degrees of help from ghost writers.
I decided not to quote or refer to any of the accounts directly. Survival stories are driven by suspense—who’s going to make it and who is not? Once you know that someone wrote about his ordeal after the fact, you have the answer. Instead I used the accounts to reconstruct what happened, and to try to get inside each man’s thoughts and feelings while he was stranded on the rafts.
I did include conversations that the men remember having taken place during the ordeal. Read them the way you should read most dialogue in nonfiction—as an educated reconstruction. Only in rare cases—say, a space flight recorded by NASA—does a historian have a word-for-word transcription of what people actually said. Otherwise, you have only memory, which tends to make everyone wittier and more eloquent as time goes on. I stuck to conversations that either were echoed closely in more than one source or rang true to me, given what I had learned about each man in my research for this book.
The five men who left detailed accounts behind—Rickenbacker, Whittaker, Bartek, Adamson, and DeAngelis—each had slightly different stories to tell. They disagreed about when things happened and how. They had varying opinions of one another and especially of Rickenbacker. To write nonfiction is to dig through the contradictions and tell the story you think is closest to the truth.
Most of the factual discrepancies were small. Did the bird land on Rickenbacker’s head on the sixth day, the seventh, or the eighth? Did Rickenbacker carve up the oranges, or did Adamson? When I couldn’t answer those questions, I left my account vague. But often I felt confident making a call based on the evidence. I gave more credibility to the accounts that were written within months after the rescue: Rickenbacker’s, Whittaker’s, and Bartek’s. Adamson wrote his four years later in an adoring biography of Rickenbacker, and he’s noticeably less specific about the day-to-day details of the ordeal. The mental state of the author mattered to me, too. Whittaker and Rickenbacker were in the best shape in the rafts, and it shows in the sharpness of their accounts. In many cases, logic dictated my narrative choices. By the middle of the first week, for instance, Adamson’s back was in such bad shape that he couldn’t pull a magazine out of his pocket. I don’t think he was the one chosen to carve oranges and fish into precisely equal pieces for eight starving men.
The toughest issue to sort out was Rickenbacker’s relationship with the rest of the men on the rafts. Rickenbacker himself doesn’t downplay how harshly he treated his raft mates. But it’s all part of a portrait of himself as a can-do man of action who saved his comrades by driving them mercilessly to keep their spirits up. That may be close to the truth. People who study the survivors of long ordeals say that it helps tremendously to have one person who takes charge and gives the group a clear direction. But was it really a strategy on Rickenbacker’s part? Or was he just a hot-tempered old crank who couldn’t stand it when men didn’t live up to his tough-guy ideal?
In public, the crew pretty much stuck to Rickenbacker’s version of the story. It was wartime, after all; they were soldiers, and Rickenbacker was a national hero. But when Bartek and DeAngelis were interviewed by the film producers, you can hear them let their guard down. Bartek says Rickenbacker barely did any work himself; instead he ordered Bartek to do all the bailing and the pumping. Both Bartek and DeAngelis are ambivalent about whether Rickenbacker really helped them survive. Fifty years later, in another interview, Bartek said the entire crew blamed Rickenbacker for putting them in danger in the first place. According to Rickenbacker’s biographer, W. David Lewis, Cherry refused to talk about Rickenbacker for the rest of his life.
I hope this extra background helps to explain why I find this story so interesting. It’s a great, nail-biting tale of survival. But it’s also a behind-the-scenes look at how heroes are made. Do we want to believe that six people survived because they had Eddie Rickenbacker on board? Or were they just lucky not to have gone into the ordeal in a weakened state like Alex? Do hunger, thirst, and desperation really lead to great acts of heroism? Or do they expose us for what we really are—simply human?
SOURCES
First-Person Accounts
The ordeal as told by the men who were on the rafts.
Adamson, Hans Christian. Eddie Rickenbacker. New York: Macmillan, 1946.
Bartek, Johnny. Life Out There: A Story of Faith and Courage. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943.
Interview with David Lewis and Dwayne Cox, Nov. 20, 1998. Auburn University Special Collections.
Speech About the Rickenbacker Rescue, Nov. 19, 1998. Auburn University Special Collections.
Interview with representatives of Twentieth Century Fox Film Co
mpany, July 21, 1943. Auburn University Special Collections.
DeAngelis, John J. Interview with representatives of Twentieth Century Fox Film Company, July 8, 1943. Auburn University Special Collections.
Rickenbacker, Edward V. Seven Came Through. New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1943.
“Pacific Mission: As Related by Captain Edward V. Rickenbacker.” Statement prepared for Eureka Pictures, December 1942.
Rickenbacker: An Autobiography. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
United States Marine Corps. “Report of Rescue of Captain Rickenbacker and Party, 11–12 November, 1942,” Nov. 15, 1942. Auburn University Special Collections.
Whittaker, James C. We Thought We Heard the Angels Sing. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1943.
Background
Books that helped me understand the physiology and psychology of survival, the war going on around the B-17 crew, and more.
Allen, Thomas B. Shark Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2001.
Bennet, Glin. Beyond Endurance: Survival at the Extremes. New York: St. Martin’s/Mare, 1983.
Frank, Richard B. Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Gonzales, Laurence. Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.
Kurzman, Dan. Left to Die: The Tragedy of the USS Juneau. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Leach, John. Survival Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994.
Leckie, Robert. Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War. New York: Bantam Books, 2010.
Leslie, Edward E. Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
Lewis, W. David. Eddie Rickenbacker: An American Hero in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. New York: Penguin, 2000.
Ross, John F. Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014.
Toll, Ian W. Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012.
Trumbull, Robert. The Raft. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1942.
Newspapers and Magazines
Thanks in part to Rickenbacker, who kept scrapbooks documenting his life in detail, it’s not difficult to follow coverage of the ordeal day-by-day in the press. There were too many articles written to list them all here, but many are cited throughout the book.
For your reference, the page numbers that appear in the print version of this book are listed below. They do not match the page numbers in your eBook. Please use the “Search” function on your eReading device to find items of interest.
Photos ©: i plane: Ivan Cholakov/Shutterstock, Inc.; i water: CG Textures; vi-vii background: Ivan Cholakov/Shutterstock, Inc.; vi and vii all: Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and Archives; 2: Russ Heinl, BC, Canada/Commemorative Air Force Airbase Arizona; 5: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; 13: Naval History and Heritage Command; 15: FDR Library; 16: Office for Emergency Management-War Production Board/National Archives and Records Administration; 37: Pacific Wrecks.com; 44: Jim Abernethy/Getty Images; 48 top, 48 bottom: Al Fenn/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images; 51: Naluphoto/Dreamstime; 53, 65: Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and Archives; 76: Library of Congress; 82: TopFoto/The Image Works; 84: Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and Archives; 94-95: meawnamacat/Shutterstock, Inc.; 108: Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; 114: National Archives and Records Administration; 123: National Naval Aviation Museum; 129: Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago/Getty Images; 138: Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and Archives; 141: The Granger Collection; 144: Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and Archives; 146: Naval History and Heritage Command; 149, 153: Auburn University Libraries Special Collections and Archive.
Illustrations by: cover: Shane Rebenschied; maps, 26 and 60: Jim McMahon; 23: Richard Chasemore.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project would have been lost from the start without support from a lot of people. Jim Nolte and Taylor Davis-Van Atta at the Vermont College of the Fine Arts Library unearthed books from around the country. John Varner at Auburn University Archives sent stacks of photocopies of transcripts and scrapbooks from their exhaustive collection of Rickenbacker’s papers. At a time when you can no longer hold most correspondence in your hand, it was weirdly comforting to sit in my chair, weighted down by several pounds of paper.
Thanks to Laura Williams McCaffrey, Leda Schubert, and Daphne Kalmar, who are indispensible after-work confidantes for someone who works alone all day. I am particularly indebted to Laura, who has read pages wisely and warmly for more years than I can count.
Thanks to Vermont College of the Fine Arts for helping to give me the tools and the attitude of a writer—and especially to Tobin Anderson for sharing his genius with me as a teacher. Marc Aronson and John Glenn have given me a lot during years of collaboration, and thanks are due to Marc for the series title. Lauren Tarshis has modeled how to edit, write, and live all at once—and tell a mighty fine survival story at the same time. Elizabeth Ward has taught me more, and put up with me longer, than anyone.
Paige Hazzan at Scholastic believed in the idea for this series and devoted her time and expert eye to the text. Miriam Altshuler has been all one can ask for in an agent—tough and caring, pragmatic and humane.
Thanks, finally, to Jill for giving me the space, the time, and the encouragement to write; to Zoë and Finn for being exactly who they are; and to Richard Olson and Estie Lawrence, who surrounded me with books from the time I could walk.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOD OLSON is the author of the historical fiction series How to Get Rich. He works as an editor, holds an MFA from Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and lives in Vermont with his family, his mountain bike, and his electric reclining chair.
Get LOST in the next book in the Lost series by Tod Olson: Lost in Outer Space! Turn the page for a special sneak peek.
PROLOGUE
APRIL 13, 1970
It took a lot to make Captain Jim Lovell flinch. He’d flown navy fighter jets fresh off the assembly line to see if they would hold up in midair. He’d been blasted into orbit at 17,000 miles an hour. He had been all the way to the moon and circled it ten times when no one knew for sure it was possible.
Now he was on his way to the moon again—jammed into a tiny space capsule with two other astronauts. And every time Fred Haise turned that stupid repress valve, Lovell nearly jumped out of his skin.
It was a routine procedure designed to equalize the air pressure between the two main parts of the spacecraft. But when Haise hit the valve, it jolted the ship with a hiss and a thump.
Haise was a rookie astronaut, and he couldn’t resist a good practical joke. He’d already discovered that Velcro sounded a lot like the thrusters firing outside the ship. The astronauts wore pads of the stuff on the bottom of their shoes to help anchor them in zero gravity. Every now and then, Haise would stick a Velcro pad to something and snap it in and out. That was enough to startle Jack Swigert, the third crew member.
“What’s firing?” Swigert would say. “We’re not supposed to be firing.”
“That’s my foot firing,” Haise would respond.
He got just as good a reaction from the repress valve, and he obviously enjoyed it because he turned the valve more than he needed to.
For Lovell, the mission commander, the joke had gotten old. The night sky looked beautiful from the safety of Earth, but it was a different story when you were floating in the middle of it.
Space was one of the harshest environments you could imagine. In sunlight, a spacecraft’s outer shell could get as hot as an oven. In shadow it cooled to negative 100 degrees Fahrenheit. More importantly
, there was almost no air pressure outside the capsule’s 3-inch metal shell. If something tore a hole in the spacecraft—even one as small as a penny—air would rush from the compartment like water from a broken fish tank. Oxygen in the body would follow, probably bursting a lung on the way out. Fluid in the muscles and veins would expand into gas, causing body tissue to swell up like a balloon.
That would be it. No more mission. No chance to walk on the moon. Lovell, Haise, and Swigert would be unconscious in seconds. In two minutes, they’d be dead. The spacecraft would continue on its course, shoot around the moon, and hurtle into space like a discus at the Olympics. Only it would never come down.
When the stakes were that high, an unexpected hiss and thump could get your imagination working fast. And that was why the repress valve made even Jim Lovell’s nerves fray.
But 55 hours into Apollo 13, humankind’s third mission to the surface of the moon, everything was running smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that it was time to host a TV show. Lovell lay back on his seat at the base of the cone-shaped command module. He stabilized himself with his feet and worked the camera with his hands. Swigert sat next to him, off camera. Haise floated at the top of the capsule, ready to host the broadcast. In yet another miracle of the space program, a video signal would leave the spacecraft and be captured by giant radio dishes on Earth: Coming to you live—from space.
At the other end of that invisible relay, in Houston, Texas, Barbara Lovell waited patiently for her father’s show to begin. She sat in a private room overlooking the control center at NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Below her, on the other side of a large plate-glass window, platoons of engineers monitored Apollo 13 around the clock. Barbara’s mother, Marilyn, and her eleven-year-old sister, Susan, sat next to her. Fred Haise’s wife, Mary, was there too. She was seven months pregnant with their third kid.
