The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (62 page)

The next morning, Cherry climbed into the small “doughnut” raft and said he was going to cut loose by himself, adding that if everyone cut loose there’d be a three-to-one better chance of being sighted. Somehow, Adamson perked up, pulled rank, and ordered them not to do it, but he was half out of his mind and no one paid him any attention.
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Rickenbacker too tried to talk Cherry out of going, but again he relented and wished him luck. Whittaker, now in the boat with De Angelis and Reynolds, also cast off his lines and said goodbye. By sundown they all lost sight of one another. That night in Whittaker’s raft no one got much sleep. It was as though something important was missing. In fact they were lonesome for the men in the other rafts. Whittaker, however, was overcome with a feeling of anticipation, a feeling “that something big was ahead.”

Eddie was worried that they might have drifted through a string of islands. If that were so, their chances of holding out much longer were “damn poor.” Next morning Bartek came out of his coma long enough to mumble, “Have the planes come back?” Rickenbacker had to tell him no. When he tried to give Bartek his water ration it merely dribbled down his chin. “They won’t come back,” Bartek said. “I know they won’t come back.”

Whittaker finally drifted to sleep about an hour before dawn, and right after daybreak he felt a strong grip on his shoulder. It was De Angelis, saying, “Jim, I think you better take a look. It may be a mirage, but I think I see something.” Whittaker rose up and beheld on the eastern horizon “a line of palm trees 10 miles long.” Hearts pounding, the two men gaped for a few moments, then Whittaker, who at forty-two was by far the strongest and fittest of any of them, grabbed the oars. The land appeared to be about ten to twelve miles distant. He was rowing as hard as his strength allowed. Asprawl on the bottom of the raft poor Sergeant Reynolds was “near the finish,” Whittaker said. “His resemblance to a death’s head was startling.”

Meantime, the men all had a helping hand ten thousand miles away in the form of Rickenbacker’s wife, Adelaide, who had refused to give up searching for her husband, declaring, “He’s too old a hand to get lost in any airplane.” After the search for Eddie and the other airmen had proceeded for two weeks with no results, and the newspapers had given Rickenbacker up for dead, Hap Arnold wrote Adelaide what amounted to a letter of condolence. She took off on a train to Washington, where she barged into Arnold’s office and “practically tore the decorations off his jacket,” until he agreed to extend the search. Arnold consented to prolong it for another week, and orders from Washington went out, down to and including the tiny naval base on Funafuti atoll.
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The base on Funafuti consisted of five Kingfisher single-engine floatplanes, four PT (motor torpedo patrol) boats, and a PT boat tender named the
Hilo
. These vessels and the aircraft conducted daily patrols, scouting for any signs of Japanese, but were also alerted that there were possibly downed fliers in their search area.

Sure enough, at about four-thirty in the afternoon on the day after Captain Cherry had paddled away from the others, the radio operator of one of the Kingfishers spotted “an irregular object bobbing on the waves,” about sixty miles west of Funafuti. This proved to be Cherry’s yellow “doughnut”; the seas were too rough for landing but the pilot directed one of the PT boats to pick him up.
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About that same time, after a grueling seven-hour ordeal, the three souls in Whittaker’s raft had approached to within two hundred and fifty yards of the “line of palm trees,” only to be swept back out to sea by a terrific current that spun them around and shot them nearly a mile offshore and down island, so that it appeared they might be carried past the island entirely. With his last reserves of strength—which he attributed to God—Whittaker managed to overcome the current and make way for the island once more. He was almost there in enormous swells when he felt something jerk an oar. Below in the green water he saw a “dirty gray form 12 feet long”—a shark. In fact there were several, “not the droll dullards that had plagued us earlier. These were man-eaters.” They kept snapping at the aluminum oars as if they were spinners on a casting line. As if that were not enough to worry about, up ahead, with breakers crashing over it, loomed a coral reef that ringed the island, sharp enough to puncture and sink the raft.

Whittaker made straight for the reef, up and over, and found himself in calmer, shallow water. Within minutes they grounded on a second coral reef only yards from a smooth white sandy beach. De Angelis stood up, stepped out, and fell flat. They got Reynolds up and out but he too fell flat. Whittaker tried it and did the same. The weeks afloat in the raft had completely disordered their sense of balance. They kept getting up and falling back down. Whittaker stumbled to the ground eight times—until he floundered back to the raft and got an oar to lean on.

At length they hauled the raft up onto the beach and hid it under dead palm leaves. There was no way of knowing whether this island was friendly or Japanese held. All of them remained discombobulated as to balance, as well as other things associated with their hunger. They opened some coconuts with a sheath knife and killed and ate—raw—some ratlike creatures, then slept in a deserted hut about two miles down the beach. The food was restorative but Reynolds remained at death’s door.

Next morning Whittaker looked out to the sea and thought he saw a line of destroyers, which soon morphed into a flotilla of native dugout canoes with outriggers, rushing straight toward them. The canoes rolled easily over the reefs and drew up in front of Whittaker, who had gone out to meet them. The other boats lingered slightly offshore while one boat beached. Whittaker’s appearance must have startled the man in the lead canoe, who looked him up and down as he stood there, wild-haired, burned black, barefoot, dressed in rags, and wearing a scraggly beard—a modern-day Robinson Crusoe.

“You Japanese?” Whittaker inquired.

The man frowned and shook his head and murmured disapprovingly. It was a tense moment; Whittaker and the others had all read stories about cannibals in the South Pacific.

The natives put the airmen into the lead canoe, tied the raft behind it, and took off paddling at such a rapid rate Whittaker marveled that it caused a wake. At the native village (they had landed on the speck island of Nukufetau, approximately fifty miles west of Funafuti) they were greeted by women “wearing only lava-lava’s and smiles” and the smell of cooking.
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The women began to cry when they saw the condition of the airmen. The man from the canoe told Whittaker the island belonged to the British,
^§
who operated a radio station there.

The airmen were placed on scented mats under swaying coconut palm trees and given fresh fruit juices and a hearty broth made from several village fowl that had been pecking around too close to the cooking pot. If this wasn’t heaven it was close enough. Presently two British officers arrived and said a U.S. Navy boat was on the way. Meantime, one of the Kingfishers alighted just offshore and a navy doctor stepped out to administer injections of glucose that ultimately saved Reynolds’s life.

Rickenbacker’s group was unaccounted for. Back home the country had been shocked and horrified and ultimately saddened at the news that Eddie Rickenbacker’s plane had gone down. People understood that the situation was dire from the outset. Daily updates about the search were published or sent out over the wires and airways, but hope faded with each passing day. After two weeks, the normal length for a search, obituaries of sorts began to appear in the papers and radio broadcasts. The New York
Daily News
carried an editorial cartoon by the famous C. D. Batchelor depicting Rickenbacker fading away on an ocean horizon, with the caption, “So long, Eddie.”

It was all premature. Cherry alerted the authorities at Funafuti about the other rafts, and word had already arrived about the deliverance of Whittaker’s group. The search plan was divided on charts and PT boats were sent to each area that night. In the morning, all five Kingfishers resumed the air search. The day passed without success but about four o’clock a pair of planes radioed that they had sighted a raft with three men in it. The Kingfishers dived down and flew straight at the raft right on the deck, which for a horrifying moment suggested to Rickenbacker a strafing run. But just as quickly the big U.S. Navy insignia on the wing became plainly visible, and Eddie—who was jumping and waving his hat with the others—could even see the broad smile of one of the pilots as they zoomed past.

Strangely, however, these planes continued on until they were out of sight, and the quiet of the Pacific closed in once more upon the raft. The castaways had no way of knowing it, but the Kingfishers had been searching for them all day and were now low on fuel and had to return to Funafuti, about forty miles distant. However, they sent a radio message that turned the island base into a hive of feverish activity, resulting in the crew of one Kingfisher volunteering to fly out to the position where Eddie’s raft had been reported and stand by until a PT boat could rescue them. Even though the Kingfisher could land on the surface, it did not have the power to take off again carrying the added weight even of these three emaciated survivors. It became a race against nightfall. No one wanted to take the chance that some unknown current would carry Eddie Rickenbacker and his companions off in the dark and they would never be found.

The Kingfisher’s volunteer crew consisted of pilot Lieutenant (J.G.) William Eadie and radioman Lester Boutte. They spotted the raft just after sundown by illuminating the search area with flares. Eadie landed on the water, taxied up to the raft, killed his engine, and shouted: “Well, Captain Rickenbacker, here we are!”
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“And thank God for that,” Eddie answered. At some point they had drifted across the international date line; it was now Friday, the thirteenth, their lucky day.

It was quickly becoming dark, and the pilot came up with a plan to get the airmen to Funafuti as soon as possible. Adamson, being the worst off, could lie in the radioman’s cockpit, while Eddie and Bartek would be strapped to the leading edges of the wings. Then, even if they could not take off, they could taxi the plane across the rolling surface of forty miles of dark ocean to the safety of the marine base. It wasn’t the best accommodation but it would do in a pinch, and Rickenbacker’s bunch had been in a pinch for a long time. They taxied along in the swells in the pitch dark for half an hour, with Eddie strapped down on one wing and Bartek on the other, until they encountered one of the PT boats and were transferred aboard. At last the ordeal was ended. They had been in the lifeboats for twenty-four days. Eddie’s parting words were, “God bless the navy!”

N
AVY AUTHORITIES HAD HASTILY BUILT
a small hospital at the Funafuti base just for Eddie and the castaways. There they recuperated for a few days and took stock. Rickenbacker was still covered with sores and burns and had lost forty pounds. Adamson and Cherry had lost fifty pounds each.

After several days a flying boat arrived from Samoa with two navy doctors who examined the group and decided they should return with them, where there was better care. Reynolds and Bartek, however, were too sick to be moved and were left in the care of medical personnel on Funafuti. They nearly left Adamson there also, because of his frail condition, but decided to bring him along, which Eddie always believed saved his life.

The flight took all day but they arrived in Samoa that evening, where Eddie sent a military communication to Secretary Stimson saying that he expected to be able to continue his mission in ten days or so, which to some people at the Pentagon seemed insane. Nevertheless, Hap Arnold next day sent word that he would order a special transport as soon as Rickenbacker was up to it. Arnold had already called Adelaide. At a loss for words, all she had said was a tearful “God bless you.”
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During the next two weeks Rickenbacker and the others swilled gallons of fruit juices and ice cream and feasted gluttonously on everything under the sun until the doctors worried they would do harm to the size and shape of their stomachs. Eddie regained twenty of the pounds he had lost and gathered strength every day. Adamson eventually recovered, and word came that Bartek and Reynolds were out of danger. Toward the end of November, dressed in new army clothing, Rickenbacker boarded a new Consolidated B-24 bomber that had been converted as a transport—a luxury of a sort. This was the type of airplane he had wished for back in Pearl Harbor instead of the B-17.

Rickenbacker hopped from air bases in the Fiji islands, Nouméa, and Viti Levu and arrived at Brisbane, Australia, on December 4. A message waited from MacArthur saying that due to the almost daily Japanese air attacks he could not permit Rickenbacker to come to New Guinea in an unarmed B-24. Instead he had warmed up for him a fully armed B-17 with all machine guns working for the seven-hour trip across the Coral Sea. MacArthur was waiting on the tarmac when the plane put down at Port Moresby, and as Eddie limped toward him MacArthur wrapped him in his arms and, in that wonderfully theatrical voice of his, said, “God, Eddie, I’m glad to see you.”