Butterfly I
Transplanted 1 white butterfly ginger & 1 white vinca rosea
planted 3 white butterfly ginger tubers
Butterfly II
Completed build, dirt
Planted 1 Parsley plant & 3 tuberose
Citrus
Sprayed lemon & tangelo for bugs and fungus. Lemon looks very bad. Put in spikes for orange, lemon & tangelo.
Front
Sprayed roses and plumeria for bugs and fungus.
Garden Sights
3-Fritallary, 1-Red Admiral, 1-White (great southern white?), 1-Cloudless Sulphur, 1-Zebra Longwing (1st this year!), 1-??? Very Big, black & yellow, very zippy!!
at feeder
3-Blue Jay, Mr. & Mrs. Cardinal, 1 red-bellied woodpecker, buncha doves, 1 grackle, 3 squirrels
Sis not only visited and left a post, she actually READ some stuff!! Now, that's family loyalty!
Also on the upside, #1Son is actually looking into scholarships FINALLY!!!
On the downside, I asked Mom to come visit my blog. Mom said "no."
sigh.
Garden
Got more dirt last night, for butterfly II. Saw the red admiral yesterday and I'm real sure it's a red admiral. Butterfly book says they are very common, but it's the first one in my yard. May I never become so jaded that the sight of a butterfly can't soothe my soul.
I also got seeds for the veg garden. The books say it's too late to plant, but the seed packets say it's not, so I'm going to risk it.
Guns
I have not ordered a new S&W for Michael Moore Day. If I am not on 'the list,' I will order a month late.
La La La - Tuesday is Staff Meeting Day! 'tis an excellent method of wasting two hours for no apparent reason. I dunno - maybe if I didn't hate my job so much it might be slightly more interesting.
& I should be more careful, I know. As much as I bitch about my job, I will probably bitch twice as much when I lose it. . . . May 15 . . . We'll see what happens then.
Have gotten into a pissing contest with some dumb broad who wants access to a confidential database, but won't tell me why. Nimrod. Pretty funny because I can't give her access anyway. I could, however, tell someone who can authorize her access to go ahead and do it, but durned if I will - at least without a valid reason. So she sent me a pissy note, copied her manager, my manager, and my manager's manager. So I sent her back a pissy note with a 'reply all.' I expect my boss will call to tell me to 'play nice.' Better to provide some stray sales rep with customer-confidential information and access to unprotected legal documents than to offend anyone's sense of pomposity.
This co. will go down the tubes the minute Worldcom comes out of bankruptcy. I do not understand how it has survived this long. I am going to hear it for commiting the evil crime of attempting to protect the company's assets. It's even funnier when you realize the reason I can't provide access or direct assistance is because I can't acess this particular dbase because my boss was too cheap to continue paying for the ID.
10:46 a.m.: I'm in the meeting now. They're talking about rumors related to layoffs. I am doodling and wish I had a green pen to add stems to my flowers. Good thing I telecommute.
Garden
On the brighter side of life, the dark red daylillies are blooming today. They have finally started to fill out a bit, and bloom together. Probably it will be 2 more years before they really fill out. I did notice a few aphids, though - time to get ladybugs!!
Acidman at Gutrumbles discusses gardening. I wonder if I could get him or his mom to send me some tips? Sounds like she does some serious Georgia gardening, which would be close to Florida gardening.
WOO-HOO! Spotted a White Peacock, in addition to my fritallary. Haven't seen any Whites or Sulphurs yet today. There is also an itty-bitty butterfly that I can't find in books. It's smaller than my thumbnail, mainly white but with some pale green edging, and it likes the grass. Charming little fellow!
yes.
Is it because the executive, xxxx, formerly in charge of my group, has a hateful, antagonistic attitude towards his employees?
yes.
Is it because they have layoffs every six months, whether they need them or not?
yes.
Is it because their service sucks?
yes - I see my Internet access has dropped off AGAIN. It does that every few minutes now. Never ever happened before we were 'acquired' by this piece of shit company.
Is it because the corporate culture at this joint consistently wastes my time in pointless meetings?
Yes. If they can waste my time, I can waste theirs.
Is it because everything - & I do mean everything - that comes across my desk is an emergency? And not only an emergency, but the jerk who wants it 'right now' then proceeds to waste 20 minutes of my time telling me how important it is that I drop everything else and tend to his little crisis?
Yes. If it's truly that important, shut up, get off the phone, and let me get to work. Seeking information from these goobers - needed to complete the task - doesn't get a straightforward answer. It gets a 20-minute lecture on why it's important to rush it through.
I could live with any two of the above. No place is perfect. But the sheer quantity of ways in which I am treated like crap here have really got me down.
Actually, xxxx left the company. For a brief moment, I had hope that inspiration would return. Then they announced layoffs coming AGAIN! that killed it.
If the Good Lord's willin' and blogspot don't go down, I'll be posting chapters here, and adding an archive link on the side of the blog. I'm also posting the pre-chapter pages, because it's interesting (to me). Possibly it will be to you also.
Without further ado . .
P
This book has been produced in conformity with wartime economy standards.
The amount of reading matter has in no way been curtailed-when necessary more words per page are used.
Thinner books and smaller books will save paper, cloth, metals, transportation and storage space and will conserver manpower.
The publishers will do their utmost in meeting the objectives of the War Production Board towards the successful prosection of the war.
THE MIRACLE OF RAIN
They learn man's impotence, who long adrift
In loneliness of space find seas and skies
To charts unknown, where sullen dawns are swift
But bring no hope to aching, straining eyes;
Yet they found faith to ask for rain to heal
Their thirst, and saw how passing clouds were stayed
As if God stooped to heed their faint appeal
And the waters heard and the waves obeyed.
Father, we plead that peace may come like rain
In Thy good time to our beloved land;
Grant us the strength to work, and thus sustain
The faith to know a mighty, unseen hand
Still guides our destiny; and as we pray
May rain's soft mercy bring a better day.
By Lieutanant James C. Whittaker
U. S. Army Air Corps Transport Command
Sketches and map by Gary Sheahan
1943 E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. New York
Copyright, 1943
By E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S.A.
. . . 14 hours SSW Oahu. May have overshot island. Hour's fuel."
RICKENBACKER
Thousands of Americans laid aside their newspapers on Oct. 22, 1942, and abandoned hope for Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker and his seven companions after reading this last message, radioed from their Flying Fortress on the afternoon of Oct. 11.
Practically none of those who that day resigned themselves to Rickbacker's death could grasp or visualize the vastness and the empty loneliness of the ocean into which he had disappeared. They could understand only dimly the problems of distance, climate, weather, and currents which faced the rescue parties who would search for him with aircrafts and surface vessels in the days and weeks to come.
Yet Rickenbacker's fate was a foregone conclusion to the average American because he remembered clearly the epic search five years previously for Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred J. Noonan, who were lost near the Phoenix Islands. It was a searcyh in which the ships of four nations took part for nearly three weeks and it ended in mystery and failure. Many remembered the last message from the Earhart plant.
We are circling, but cannot see island. Fuel for 30 minutes. Must land soon. Cannot hear you."
Some recalled the disastrous Dole flight of 1927 in which eight lives were lost. They remembered the last message from the plane "Dallas Spirit" as it searched for survivors in the Pacific betwen California and Hawaii.
9:02 P.M. we went into a tailspin - S O S - relay that - we came out of it, but were scared. It was close call . . . We are in a spin . . S O S . . ."
In the Earhart search the United States, Holland, Australia, and Japan sent ships and planes into the trackless desert of water in the New Guinea area. The gallant aircraft carrier Lexington, since sunk by the Japs, combed every atoll and dot in the hope of finding the intrepid aviatrix and her "flying laboratory," in which she was circling the globe at the equator.
The search for Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, who blazed the air trail from the Unites States to Australia, lasted many week in 1935 before it was given up. Two years later an airplane wheel and tire, found floating in the Andaman Sea off Burma, were identified as having been part of his plane, the "Lady Southern Cross." No message had come from his radio to tell the world of his last moments over a storm swept sea. He simply disappeared out there in an ocean which even now, more than four centuries since its discovery by white men, has uncharted reaches and unplumbed depths.
It is small wonder that Rickenbacker was mourned as lost. the average American's smattering knowledge of the Pacific in a micrscopic conception of the full truth, but it is pregnant with implication.
It is a large order to ask that the armchair geographer visualize a body of water as vast as the Pacific Ocean. It is a watery waste that extends 9,620.9 miles from the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Asia, to Antartica, near the South Pole. It stretches 10,879.6 miles from the Panama Canal to Mindanao, in the Philippine Islands. Near Mindanao it is almost seven miles deep and its average depth is more than two miles.
This sheet of water has a total area of 68,634,000 square miles and covers more than a third of the globe. It is half again as big as the Atlantic and more than twice the size of the Indian Ocean, the earth's third greatest body of water. The Pacific Ocean accounts for half the world's water surface and is 11 million square miles greater than the total land surface of 57,510,000 square miles.
Impressive though these figures are, they do not create a picture of this ocean's vastness, even if they are borne in mind while the Pacific is examined on a globe or a map of the world. It is possible they are too impressive.
A modern explorer has said that to truly visualize distance one must cover it first afoot, then by automobile or train, and finally by air. If this is true it is unlikely any one person ever will truly visualize the magnitude of the Pacific. Twenty-five to 50 years ago men still lived who had covered it by slow sailing vessels and fast ocean liners. But it is doubtful that anyone now lives who has covered the Pacific by windjammer, liner, and airplane.
If, as the scientists say, time is distance and distance is a variant of time, it is possible that some conception of the ocean's size may be gained by records left by mariners of the last century.
The early explorers, wandering uncertainly across the Pacific, stopping to explore, crossing and recrossing their own courses, made few clear cut voyages whose records would be helpful now in visualizing distance throughtime. Capt. James Cook, R.N., whose explorations were the greatest contribution to world knowledge of the Pacific until late in the last centurty, used up years in his meanderings.
The same was true of Marco Polo and Sir Frances Drake. Magellan, who is credited with circumnavigating the globe, was three years in his travels; that is, his ships were. Magellan himself was killed when he foolishly led one island tribe in a local war against natives of another island.
Early in the 19th century, packet ships were following regular schedules from New York to the Orient, traveling around Cape Horn and following a northwesterly course to Canton and Hong Kong. Not until the gold rush days of 1849 did San Francisco become an important port of call.
The packet ships, carrying both passengers and freight and considered fast for their day, covered the 14,300 miles from New York to Canton in from five to seven months, depending on the weather. Two thirds of this distance was traveled through the Pacific. The American clipper ships entered the race for the China trade in 1832 and from then almost until the American Civil War they set new records almost yearly.
In 1846, the Sea Witch hung up the sailing vessel record that still stands - 52 days for the New York - Hong Kong run. Her best 24 hours' sailing was 358 miles, much faster than the steamships which eventually drove the clippers from the seas. The Sea Witch made the eastern crossing from Canton and the round the Horn return to New York in 77 days.
Another clipper, the Golden City, set a record of 36 days from San Francisco to Woosung, China, in 1854. This was whittled down rapidly by competing steamships until, at the start of World War II, the time ranged from 18 to 22 days from the Pacific coast to the Orient, distances ranging from 7,000 to 9,000 miles between the principal ports.
Meanwhile, in 1936 regular air passenger service was inaugurated and the crossing time was lopped to 3 1/2 days, heightening the modern tendency to sneer at distance. So it is that, less than 10 years later, the inexpert and the uninformed are likely to tell you that distance no longer means anything. And this is true if you are in a multimotored airplane with plenty of fuel.
If, on the other hand, you are in a rubber life raft, or even a ship's boat equipped with sails, you will find that the Pacific Ocean is vase beyond conception. Lieut. (later Admiral) William bligh learned this in the weeks that followed the mutiny of April 28, 1789 aboard H.M.S. Bounty, which he commanded. Bligh and 18 loyal members of the ship's company were set adrift in an open boat near Tahiti. Propelled by oars and sail, they covered 4,000 miles before touching at Batavia in the East Indies.
This voyage, a third again the distance across the continental United States, has amazed historians. It seems incredible that Bligh and his men could have sailed such a distance without encountering any of the thousands of islands, islets, and atolls that dots the Pacific.
Yet Magellan's blundering voyage is even more amazing. From the strait near the southern tip of South America - which bears his name - Magellan sailed almost 12,000 miles to the Philippines without seeing island, islet or atoll. His course took him through Polynesia which contains, in addition to the Society, Cook, Tokelay, Manahiki, and Tubai groups, many hundreds of atolls.
From there he passed through the fringes of Melanesia, whose many islands and islets include the Phoenix group, where Earhart was lost, and mountainous Samoa, where the Rickenbacker party was to be given medical attention after the rescue.
With his crew dying of starvation, Magellan pounded on through most of Micronesia before he finally blundered into the Philippines group, which he is given credit for discovering.
In light of these events it becomes understandable that there are great reaches of the Pacific and doubtless hundreds of land specks within it that never have seen a white man or a white man's ship. There are other cul-de-sacs in this mighty ocean that may go years without seeing a ship or a plane/
It will be recalled that the mutineers from the Bounty settled on Pitcairn Island and lived there from 1789 to 1808 without seeing a sail.
And every school boy since the middle 18th century has read and reread the story of Alexander Selkirk, the unruly mate of a privateer commanded by William Dampier. After Selkirk had done something particularly vicious, Dampier marooned him on the island of Juan Fernandez, about 400 miles off the southwestern coast of South America. It was not until five years later that another ship touched there. And this was chiefly because Dampier was one of the navigators and was curious about the castaway.
Selkirk was picked up and taken back to England, where his experiences were chronicled by Daniel Defoe under the fanciful titles: "The Life and Strange Surpizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." There is no record of any other ship calling at Juan Fernandez, except by accident, until the Crusoe epic put the island on the map.
Many modern historians believe the pall of mystery is just beginning to lift from the Pacific and that another century may pass before it takes its rightful place in the life of the civilized world. Since Pearl Harbor, there has been more discovery and exploration in out of the way corners of the bast ocean than there had been since the turn of the century, they assert. American forces occupying nameless islets and atolls have supplied the deficiency with letters and numbers. There is no doubt that when the conflict ends, many of these will have a permanent place in the new Pacific scheme of things.
Nor is there any doubt that the coming of the airplane has started a new era of Pacific expansion, comparable only to that which followed perfection of the steamship, in the middle nineteenth century.
Vasco Nunez de Balboa, whose name is among the most prominent of those associated with the Pacific, probably did the least toward popularizing the ocean he had discovered. He stood on the heights at Darien and thought beautiful thoughts. An ungrateful government deprived Balboa of his head before he so much as learned what it was he had found. It is doubtful that in his most florid musings there at Darien he imagined the "Peaceful Sea" as one which stretched almost from pole to pole; an ocean so fantastically hute that its waters washed continents in two hemispheres.
Capt. Cook was impressed by the stirring beauty of the Pacific. The he was clubbed to death by the gentle Sandwich (Hawaiian) islanders. Magellan, an early enthusiast of the Pacific, met a fate already touched on here. Countless others, lured by the mystery and beauty of the great ocean, scattered their bones along its floor or ended in the cooking pots of tribesmen whose islands still perhaps are uncharted.
It is an entrancing ocean, whose beauties and vast distance are best - and most discreetly - viewed from the decks of a luxury liner or from the heights of Darien Those who would preserve their illusions of its gentleness and amiable charm should take care that they never have to view it 21 days at a stretch from a 7 foot, emergency life raft,
Charles Leavelle.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I want here to acknowledge my very great indebtedness to Mr. Charles Leavelle of the Chicago Tribune, not only for his generous cooperation but for his actual collaboration in the writing of this book.
The material is based on a series of stories first published by the Chicago Tribune, whose kindness in permitting them to be incorporated here is gratefully acknowledged.
O Christ! Whose voice the waters heard
And hushed their raging at Thy word,
Who walked'st on the foaming deep,
And calm amidst its rage didst sleep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea!
Most Holy Spirit! Who didst brood
Upon the chaos dark and rude,
And bid its angry tumult cease,
And give, for wild confusion peace;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea!
O Trinity of love and power!
Our brethern shield in danger's hour;
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoe'er they go;
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hyms of praise from land and sea.
----- Old Hymn
I took Capt. Rickenbacker's hand and introduced myself, then introduced Cherry. The man with Rickenbacker introduced himself. He is Col. Hans Adamson, of Washington, D.C., a friend from World War I days. Rickenbacker had chosen Col. Adamson after the War Department had requested that a military aide accompany him.
Cherry announced all in readiness. Our passengers seated themselves, Rickenbacker behind Cherry and Col. Adamson behind me. They strapped themselves in.
I fired up the four motors and two minutes later we were at the runway. To take advantage of the longest one it was necessary that we take off slightly cross wind. We therefore had to use the wheel brakes to hold us straight on the strip.
I ran up all four engines and we were on our way to the first of a series of baffling misadventures that were to dog us for three weeks. Halfway through the takeoff and rolling at about 60 miles an hour a brake expander tube let go, partially locking one wheel.
The big ship plunged off the runway and shot toward the hangars. To miss the buildings and also avoid running off the airfield, Cherry groundlooped her at about 50 miles an hour. This spins the plane in tight circles until momentum is lost.
It was a terrific strain on the tires, but they held. When we stopped rolling we were back on the runway. A masterful piece of work on the part of Bill Cherry.
Just before the groundloop and while we were bounding wildly toward the hangars, Rickenbacker half rose in his seat and appeared about to speak, but sat back again without saying anything.
When we came to a stop, Rickenbacker spoke to Cherry:
"Good job. Mighty fine job. But I thought for a minute the tires never would hold." Cherry laughed ruefully.
"You and me both," he said.
While a truck was towing us back to the hangars, Sergt. Kaczmarczyk was straightening up the confusion in the aft part of the plane. A brief inspection showed repairs that night were out of the question, so a second Fortress of much later type was rolled out and was started warming up.
The cots, Rickenbacker's and Adamson's luggage, several sacks of mail bound for our forces out in the Pacific, and our own gear were transferred over. During this I saw DeAngelis critically examining his octant.
The octant is an optical instrument, similar to the sextant, but provided with a graduated arc of 45 degrees. Like the sextant it is employed in navigation in the air and at sea to measure angles and angular distances and to observe altitudes to ascertain latitude and longitude.
"Anything wrong with the gadget?" I asked.
"Doesn't seem to be," DeAngelis replied. "It got an awful wallop, though. During the groundloop it shot across the table and banged the side of the plane. I couldn't do anything about it. I was holding on for all that's good."
He carried the octant aboard the new plane. I wouldn't have wanted Johnny's seat there in the nose during the groundloop. If a wheel had caved - which could easily have happened - Johnny would have been on the ground, the plane on top of him.
We fired up our engines at 1:29 A.M. of Oct 21 and one minute later were shooting down the runway.
I adjusted the DF (direction finding) set to the Honolulu tower's frequency for takeoff instructions. We climbed straight away from the field through a haze and cloud ceiling into clear air.
DeAngelis then came up from the nose compartment and gave Cherry and me the necessary navigation information. Cherry swung us on to our course.
Rickenbacker and the Colonel sat awhile and talked. It was a pleasant night, with a fair-sized moon. Eventually, Col. Adamson suggested turning in and Kaczmarczyk made them comfortable in the bomb bay.
Our immediate destination was Island X, about 1,700 miles southwest of the Hawaiian group. We knew Rickenbacker's interest lay in our air combat units, so it was not hard to guess that we might go on to Guadalcanal and other island groups where there was action.
We droned along at from 8,000 to 10,000 feet, high above the cloud bank until 5 A.M. when Cherry said he guessed he would try for a little sleep. I took over the controls.
DeAngelis came up to say he had got some exceptional position shots just at half dawn, while the stars were still out. These had shown us to be directly on our course. He had found almost no variation in drift from his original plotting, he added.
In an hour or so Cherry returned from the tail, saying it was too cold to sleep. At 10,000 feet it makes little difference whether you are flying over the equator or over Chicago in January.
I remained until Rick - as I came to call him - returned to the cockpit. He asked how things were going and we told him all was well. He asked if we had spotted anything since daylight. We told him no; nothing but overcast.
"Would you like to take her awhile, Captain?" I asked. Rickenbacker holds a colonel's commission in the reserves, but I had heard somewhere that he prefers to be called "captain" if he is to be addressed by any title. He came out of World War I with this rank after shooting down 26 enemy aircraft. Rick grinned.
"I've probably forgotten how to fly by instruments," he said.
Rick took the controls, however, and held us dead on course. I went back to the tail and returned with some rolls, fruit juice, pressed ham sandwiches and hot coffee from the thermos jugs.
Rick and Bill Cherry were trying to compare the relative merits - if any - of the World War I bombing planes and our Flying Fortresses. But there wasn't much common ground. In the discussion of those flapping crates of 26 years ago Rick soon had Bill out of his depth.
"I give up," Cherry said with a laugh. "I wasn't there."
And he certainly wasn't. In the days of the Handley-Pages, the Caponis, the Gothas, and the others Bill was crawling around his family's home in Quail, Texas. Again it struck me as amazing and wonderful that a man who was in the thick of it then could be back in the air and on the job for his country in a new and more terrible war. I thought of those World War I bombs - mere eggs.
Then I looked back at the bomb bay of our Fortress - dark and yawning like a cavern in the morning light. And I thought of the monster cylinders of death she had been so lately launching upon the little monkey men of the Pacific - and traveling thousands of miles to do it. I was thankful not to be one of the little monkey men.
While I mused, Bill Cherry had been turning up the radio and tinkering with the DF control to get a bearing on the radio compass. This works as follows: A recognized station is tuned in and the hand of the instrument indicates the direction the station lies from the plane.
"Jim," he asked, looking puzzled, "did this thing work okay during the takeoff this morning?"
"Sure," I told him. "I connected with the Honolulu tower all right. What's the matter now?"
"It won't budge an inch now."
It should be explained that in order to locate stations, there is a directional loop, up outside the fuselage. This is turned by means of a crank which extends downward into the cockpit. I tried turning it and found it would move only a few degrees of the circle it was supposed to describe.
I continued to try while Cherry took the controls and started nosing us down from our 10,000 foot altitude. We were nearing our ETA (estimated time of arrival.) The crank still refused to turn.
This became a minor worry, however, when DeAngelis came up, looking worried. Our ETA actually had passed. We were down below the overcast now and there was no island in sight. It was impossible that we could have overshot it, because we had kept careful check on our speed and tailwind ever since the takeoff.
Only one explanation remained: We had missed the island, passing either northeast or southwest of it. Then we remember the octant which has smashed against the side of the plane during groundloop. Undoubtedly it had been thrown out of adjustment and consequently had showed us as being dead on course while actually we had been veering away to the right or the left.
There was nothing to do but face it and Bill Cherry put it into words, in his forthright Texas fashion.
"We're lost," he said - just like that.
When we thought we were drawing near Island X, Sergt. Reynolds had been in communication with the wireless station there. So, with Rickenbacker standing by, Cherry prepared to set up "lost plane" procedure.
That is done in this way: The ground station takes two bearings, 15 minutes apart, on the plane's sending. This gives a cross bearing on the plane's course and is known technically as a '"fix." On a map, lines are drawn to the station from the two bearing points on the course, then are projected beyond,enabling the station to plot the ship's true position and provide a new course for it.
This didn't happen in our case, however. In reply to Cherry's request, the island replied it did not yet have proper equipment for lost plane procedure.
"That's cute," Cherry remarked and told Reynolds to try for other stations. Several minutes passed. Reynolds said something to Bill and his face lighted. It seemed we had a station equipped to help us out.
Everyone felt better. In the days that followed I thought many times of the carefree interval that came then. Those were the last carefree moments I was to have for many a weary day.
I saw Cherry's face grow glum. He told Rickenbacker:
"That tears it. The station is about 1,000 miles away."
"How much fuel have you?" Rick asked.
"Enough for about four hours," Bill replied. This was enough to get us only a little more than three quarters of the distance we would have to go.
There now began a brief phase of our imminent ordeal that has left me with an admiration that will be lifelong for the the clear thinking and cold courage of two men - Bill Cherry and Eddie Rickenbacker. I put Bill first because it is to him we survivors owe our chief gratitude for being alive today.
Never have I seen any airman perform more masterfully than he did when the supreme moments came. And Rickenbacker's clear foresight and thorough preparations undoubtedly averted casualties.
For that matter, my admiration extends to all the other members of our crew. They behaved as a good bomber crew should. In bombing raids the men become part of the plane and, with the plane, they are a machine that is an impersonal, relentless team.
I like to think we performed that day as expertly and as smoothly as ever any crew did while dropping a load on Tokyo or Berlin. The responsibility for the safety of us all in our plight rested upon Bill Cherry, and he met it coolly, as one of his fellow Texans might eet a charging steer.
"What do you expect to do now?" Rickenbacker asked.
"We'll try the box procedure first," Cherry replied. "There are a couple of other things that may help also."
In the box procedure a lost plane flies a course that describes a square. This enables the crew to scan a vast area lying inside and outside the box. At 5,000 feet we were 2,000 above the overcast, hich now had broken about 50 percent, giving us a good view of the ocean below.
Cherry figured that if we should fly 45 minutes on each leg of the box, we still would have about an hour's fuel when we finished. As we went into the first leg, he ordered Reynolds to raise Island X aain.
When Reynolds got them, Cherry asked that they begin firing anti-aircraft shells timed to explode at 8,000 feet. We now climbed back to 10,000, both to see farther and to be above the bursting shells.
Island X replied that the firing would begin at once and that planes would clear as quickly as possible to search for us and to lead us in. Our men were posted at all windows and ports to watch for the bursts and planes. Rickenbacker and Col. Adamson assisted in this.
In the cockpit, beside Bill Cherry, I strained my eyes for the grayish black bursts which might resolve themselves into planes.
I searched the far rims of the cloudbank, the blue vaults of sky above us, and the watery blue floor far below. Never have I seen a world so ominously empty.
We completed the first leg and the second. We drew to the end of the third. We banked into the fourth and final leg, still without seeing either shell burst or plane. Rickenbacker's countenance - what I could see of it - was inscrutable. The homefolks in Quail, Texas, would have been proud of Cherry's poker face.
As the last of our three hours ticked off, putting us back where we had started, Bill summoned Reynolds.
"Go on emergency frequency and start pounding out S O S" he said. "Someone will hear us and get a bearing on our course." Bill then gave Reynolds our direction and speed. Then he turned to me.
"Jim," he continued. "We will have to set her down in about an hour. Let's talk about how we are going to do it."
So far as either of us knew then, no four-motored land plane ever had been set down at sea without casualties. In many cases no member of the crew had lived to tell about it.
When a plane is put into the ocean against the wind, it meets the waves head on. If it touches on a crest, the nose will be plunged into the next wave and cave in. Further, the ship probably will not float an instant, but will continue its dive through the water.
If the plane hits the first crest too hard, it breaks in two and the parts disappear almost immediately. It is inevitable that the crew will be stunned for a few instants by crash landing and in such a case Davy Jones has ample time to snatch them down.
I suggested, therefore, that we come in cross wind and set the ship down in a trough - the valley between two waves. Bill said this sounded like sense and added:
"I think we ought to do it while we've still got gasoline in the tanks. A power landing is always better than an uncontrolled one."
This, in turn, seemed logical to me. Rickenbacker, who had sat in on part of this talk, then took over disposition of the crew and started making those arrangements I spoke of earlier; the preparations to which we owed our whole skins.
Rick led everyone except Reynolds to the compartment aft of the bomb bay and had them lie down, their heads toward the tail and their feet braced against the bulkhead. Mattresses from the cots were used as padding. Rickenbacker stationed himself at a port near the forward bomb bay.
Bill pushed the wheel orward and our big olive-drab warbird began nosing down toward her last landing. I made some preparations of my own. I took the cushions from the two seats behind us. Bill and I put them across our stomachs and fastened the safety belts over them. I turned to Cherry and stuck out my hand.
"It's sure been swell knowing you, Bill," I said. He gripped my hand briefly.
"You're going to know me a long time yet, Jim," he answered. "It's going to keep on being swell!" He looked at me an instant with those direct Texas eyes, then glued his attention to the water, which was leaping up swiftly now.
We didn't know how much fuel was left and, needing it all, we cut the two inboard motors at about 500 feet and feathered the propellers to prevent them turning in the wind. Meanwhile, Rick had got the aft deck trap open and, aided by the others, was dropping equipment and his luggage out to lighten the lane. This was for two reasons: (1) to lessen our weight, reducing the force of impact and (2) to lessen fuel consumption.
The cots went out also and I believe the mails sacks did. Most everything was gone when next I looked in that direction. Just now I was keeping my eyes on Cherry who was staring at the waves. In a rolling sea it would be his job to know just where our trough would be when we needed it. At this instant we heard the voice of DeAngelis who had come up behind us.
"Do you fellows mind," he asked, "if I pray?"
"What in the hell do you think we're doing?" Bill Cherry snapped without lifting his eyes. DeAngelis returned to the others and in a moment Rickenbacker's voice sang out, clear and calm:
"Fifty feet!" and almost immediately: "Thirty feet!"
I recall a feeling of intense irritation then at DeAngelis' suggestion of prayer. I thought what a hell of a
time to talk about praying when we needed all our wits to save our lives! How often and how ashamedly was I to remember those brash thoughts in the days to come.
"Twenty feet!"
It was strangely still in the plane. The muffled roar of the two outboard engines seemed far away. There was a faint whooshing of wind against the fuselage. The whine of Reynolds' radio rose above it, sharp and insistent.
Sharp and insistent, yes: but how thin and small it sounded in that vast and empty world, stretching out ahead, above, and on all sides of our cockpit windows. We were to learn in the blazing days to come that voices infinitely weaker can be heard if directed to God in adversity.
"Ten feet!"
Young Johnny Bartek raced forward from the stern and loosened the lugs holding down the escape hatch over the cockpit. The lid whipped off and was gone in an instant. Bartek paused in the bomb bay, freed the hatch there, then sped back to his station on the floor.
The wind was a roar now, howling into the open traps. We were coming in at 90 miles an hour with the landing flaps and wheels up so there would be nothing to snag in the water. You can't realize the will power it takes to put a plane into the sea with even a teacup of fuel in the tanks.
"Five feet!" Rickenbacker shouted. "Three feet! . . .One foot!"
"Cut it!" yelled Bill.
I pulled the mainline switch, killing every electrical connection in the plane. Bill hauled back on the wheel, hooking the tail into the water. The fuselage went down into the trough and lunged, but did not leave the surface. The waves rolled up about us. We were in. From 90 miles an hour we came to a full stop in a little over 30 feet - about 10 steps.
The shock and pressure of that landing is almost indescribable to a person who has never been through one. Despite the cushions, the safety belt seemed to be slicing me in two. A taste of bitter vinegar filled my mouth.
My eyes seemed to spin around like already taut springs winding up to the snapping point. I couldn't see. I thought I was losing consciousness.
A final slash of the safety belt and the pressure inside my head reduced swiftly. My bursting eyes began to unwind. I don't remember leaving my seat, but the next I knew I was up, yanking the rip cord that freed the forward one of two five-place rubber rafts above the fuselage. Rickenbacker was freeing the aft aft.
DeAngelis and Kaczmarczyk were shoving the tiny, three man raft up through the escape hatch over the bomb bay. Rick had assigned them together because they were the smallest and lightest of our company.
Bill Cherry was scrambling out of the pilot's seat unscathed. Blood was streaming from a cut across Reynold's nose. He had stayed at his key, pounding out S O S until Rickenbacker called: "Three
feet!" Reynolds doesn't know yet what he struck. I heard Col. Adamson calling out as though in great pain that his shoulder had been wrenched. I had a slight arm cut.
I don't know the order in which we left the ship. Uppermost in my mind was the knowledge that for probably the first time in history a four-motored land plane had been put down into the ocean without serious casualties. And I wanted to keep it that way.
We got out fast. Water already was gushing into the plane from broken windows and also, I suppose, from breaks in the fuselage. I noticed only that Bill Cherry was the last one out. And this was proper and typical of the man. You'll remember, Bill Cherry was our captain. He conducted himself accordingly.
When I had hoisted myself into the brilliant sunlight I saw that Rick and Bartek were on one wing and Col. Adamson was on the other. The Colonel's face was twisted in pain and I wondered if he had been injured internally.
One or two others were on the fuselage when I emerged from the escape hatch over the cockpit. My first thoughts were of the rafts - and for good reason.
This ocean, which from 5 and 10 thousand feet had looked as smooth as a ballroom floor, actually was a heaving waste of rolling blue hummocks, 8 to 12 feet high. And they were giving our plane hell. She was rolling from side to side, skidding into and off crests, and being washed by deluges of blue water. I wondered how long she could last.
Everyone was having difficulty keeping his footing, Adamson most of all, because he was handicapped by pain. The two larger rafts were inflated and floating. As I glanced around, DeAngelis and Kaczmarczyk blew theirs up.
And now, since those rafts from here on are to be as much a part of the story as ourselves, I will tell you something about them, their good point and their bad ones. To dispose of the good point first: I will say they were serviceable and rugged. They held up well; better than the men riding them. And now for the rest.
When the ripcords are pulled inside the plane, the two rafts carried beneath the fuselage hatches are ejected and fall usually on the wings, uninflated. They are kept from floating away by stout cords that moor them into the compartment from which they came.
The men emerging to the top of the plane break these lines, then give a sharp jerk.
The jerk opens a valve in the neck of a metal flask containing compressed carbon dioxide gas, which inflates the raft. The cord is retained in the hand, keeping the raft near the plane until the men are aboard.
The smaller raft, carried inside the ship, is inflated when the carbon dioxide flask valve is turned by hand. The small craft must also be launched by hand from the top of the fuselage.
Bulwarks or gunwales of all the rafts are of rubberized canvas and when inflated are about 1 1/2 feet thick. Inside these are two rubber innertubes. The decking - flooring - is three ply rubberized canvas, one-eighth inch thick. In the larger ones there are two pneumatic seats of rubberized canvas, containing innertubes. These do not inflate with the gunwales of the rafts, but must be inflated by hand. Pumps are part of the equipment and must be used daily as the air seeps slowly out of the gunwale innertubes.
It's like a slow leak in a tire except it is faster. In the days that followed, incidentally, those pumps grew stronger and stronger, it seemed. At first, one man could do the job in 15 minutes. Then it took 30 or 40. Finally, it was all two men could do to master those things in two hours. There is other equipment that will be listed in its proper order.
The rafts' undersides are painted blue to blend with the sea and not startle the larger fish, which might attack and puncture them. The gunwales, inside and out, and the floor surfae are painted a brilliant yellow so that as seen from the air they are conspicuous against the sea.
The characteristic which contributed most to our misery during our stay in these rubber boats was size - or lack of it. Outside measurements are 4 by 7 feet; inside 2 1/2 by 5 1/2 feet. The smaller rafts are INFINITELY smaller.
The designer was evidently thinking of pygmies when he specified that the larger boats were for five men. I am not regarded as a big man. I stand 5 feet 9 inches and weigh 185 pounds. Cherry is practically the same height and build. We can wear each other's clothing. Jimmy Reynolds is much lighter and an inch shorter than either of us. Yet only by wrapping ourselves around one another could we get into our boat.
The little raft, which we called "The Doughnut," was too small for one man. Yet it was designed for two.
As I have said, DeAngelis and Kaczmarczyk blew up their doughnut almost immediately after I emerged from the plane. One of them got in and the other upset it trying to get aboard. That put them both in the water.
Rickenbacker and Bartek were having their troubles, also. Col. Adamson was to ride with them, but he could be of no assistance because of pain and difficulty staying on the wing. They got in at last, however, and picked up the Colonel.
DeAngelis and Alex Kaczmarczyk still were in the water as Cherry, Reynolds and I boarded our tub without mishap and started to their assistance. Alex looked weak and almost helpless as he clutched at the raft amid the rolling swells. I was thankful that our own had not upset. I was the only member of the party who could not swim a stroke. I had removed my shoes because I had heard somewhere that it was the thing to do. This I had cause to regret more than once, later on.
It had been just 4:30 P.M., Honolulu time, when Bill Cherry had set the big bomber down. As we all shoved away from the derelict plane my watch showed it was 4:32. It had been good, fast going from the moment we hit until the moment we got free.
My watch, incidentally, was the only one still running at the end of our three weeks' ordeal. This and one other survived the landing. Two of those that stopped had broken mainsprings. Rick's watch stopped in a day or two.
When we were clear of the plane, we unshipped our aluminum oars and got the rafts together. Rick had some line, which we used to fasten them together, it being the consensus it would be wise to stay together, for the time being at least.
As we lined them up, our raft was put in the lead, because Bill as captain of the plane was still in command. As co-pilot I was second in command. Jimmy Reynolds helped make fast the line to our boat.
In those seas, however, the arrangement worked both ways. The little raft at the far end might as well have been the lead one. When this was pointed out, someone said:
"Well, Captain Eddie, one thing's certain; you're in the middle."
"I think we're all in the middle, for the moment," Rick replied.
Having strung our craft together, we took stock of ourselves. We were eight men in three rafts. Our equipment included airpumps for the rafts, two sheath knives, three Very pistols with 18 flares - half of which were duds - two .45 caliber pistols belonging to Adamson and Cherry, the sets of aluminum oars, and some fish hooks and lines. These last were brought off the plane by Johnny DeAngelis who had salvaged them from the cushion kit of a parachute.
We also had our Mae Wests, those bulbous life jackets. There were personal possessions also. Besides my watch I had my diary and pencils. Our cigarettes had been ruined by the water. There was money of course and this later caused a number of sourly humorous remarks.
The things we lacked, however, were food and water. One of our party had been assigned to bring our some provisions that had been assembles, but in the excitement he had forgotten them. And he can't be blamed for that.
The only food was four anemic oranges which someone had brought off the plane in his pockets and which we found floating in the water. There was nothing else. After taking stock of our other worldly goods, we handed these over to Col. Adamson after deciding on a ration of one-eighth of an orange a day per man.
Then, suddenly, all of us were violently ill. I often have wondered about that. It could hardly have been seasickness because no one was sick again during the entire cruise. I have come to the conclusion that the shock of our crash landing must have done it.
Rick maintained with a perfectly straight face that he was not in the least upset. I am under the distinct impression, however, that I saw three heads bent over the gunwale of the raft occupied by Rick, Col. Adamson, and Bartek.
I had no time to think it over just then, as it turned out. A swift movement beside our raft caught my eye and I turned for a better look. I saw something that had so far escaped the notice of us all and the shock I got was almost as severe as the one during our crash landing.
The water about the raft fleet was alive with the triangular, dorsal fins of sharks.
They were all about us. Mostly they kept their distance, but they were there all the same. I had a good look at some of them and when a wave would break just right I could see they were greyish on top, white underneath, with greenish-yellow stripes down the front of the head. This established that some of them at least were tiger sharks which I had heard would not attack a living person.
There were others I wasn't sure about. But most all the sharks were longer than our rafts, some measuring up to 10 feet and 12 feet. Any one of these could upset us if he chose. And even if there were no man eaters nearby, there were plenty of other little playmates in those waters that could cause plenty of misery to a man overboard.
The sharks didn't choose to attack, yet at least, so for the time being I relaxed. We were to get better acquainted with these fellows later.
There was some talk now about going back to the plane for our food and water jugs, but it was decided that the sea water in her probably had ruined everything. There was danger, too, that the man who re-entered her would ride her to the bottom of the ocean.
She was still afloat after five minutes, so perfectly had Bill Cherry set her down. But she was sitting very low in the water with the wings under.
As the rafts drifted away I watched the big Fortress riding the waves in all her war plumage, the stars in circles on the wings and fuselage glistening with water. I was seized by a fit of melancholy that was almost physical as she struggled with an element for which she never had been intended. I thought the old gal deserved better than this.
Our raft plunged into a deep trough. When we came up I was busy for a minute with our line. When I looked up again our plane was gone. I am glad I didn't see her go.
Those giant swells hadn't looked so bad from high up in the air, but down among them they were mountainous. When we were down in a trough we were cut off from the world, even from the other rafts, our taut line disappearing into the heart of a wave. From up on the crest we could see the other boats, stringing deeply downhill into the next trough.
And it was good to see them. With the Fortress gone we all realized how alone we were and how empty and desolate an ocean can be. Our minds were kept from dwelling too much on this thought for the present by the spray which dashed annoyingly against our faces and bodies. And annoyance was our chief reaction just then. We wanted the planes to hurry to our rescue so we wouldn't have to spend a night in those pesky, undersized rafts.
"I'll give $100 to the first man to sight the plane or ship that rescues us," Rickenbacker yelled. The younger fellows cheered and we all began searching the sky anew. Most of us stared at the sun which was setting like a crimson ball.
"Red sun at night, sailors' delight," someone quoted. But no planes flew out of the west.
In a few minutes the sun had disappeared. It was as if an electric light had been snapped off, so quickly did the equatorial dusk descend. The three quarter moon appeared and we could see from one raft to another quite easily.
It was apparent now to all that we could not expect rescue that night. We played one long shot, however. Bill Cherry fired off a flare and we watched it rise high, a dazzling crimson that momentarily blotted out the stars and paled the moon.
When it had burned out we tried to make ourselves comfortable for the night. We hadn't looked forward to too much comfort and that is well because what actually occurred would have been an even greater trial.
In Rickenbacker's raft, Col. Adamson was given one end to himself. Rick and Bartek lay fore and aft in the other with their arms about each other to keep from falling out. This arrangement also utilized space to a good advantage and enabled the two to keep warmer than they would have otherwise.
In our boat we started out with me in the stern, leaning back against the seat; Cherry on the bottom, leaning back against me, and Jimmy Reynolds in the bow, curled around the seat.
The arrangement in the doughnut made us all laugh at first, but it became an agonizing ordeal for DeAngelis and Kaczmarczk before it was over. There was only one possibility. They had to sit facing each other, each with his legs over the other's shoulders. This was during the day as well as the night.
We found very quickly that we were not going to get much sleep. To avoid the spray, one had to lie in the bottom of the raft - in five inches of water. There always was that much, no matter how much we bailed.
We tried a different arrangement in our raft after a time. We all lay fore and aft. And that was no better. One man had to be in the middle, in the water. the chilling spray splashed down the backs of the two lying along the bulwarks and they were grabbing constantly at the middle man to keep from falling off the raft to waiting sharks. I don't know why the cold didn't affect us as much that night as it did later. Probably because we still had food in our bodies. Nevertheless, we didn't sleep.
Dawn of the second day broke clear. We stretched as best we could in our cramped positions to work off our grogginess. We soon found that, in addition, we had been working up terrific appetites. And there was no food. The entire party began scanning the sky, the younger fellows hopeful of winning Rick's $100. Cherry fired a flare in the hope it might be seen by a plane on dawn patrol.
"We'll be picked up today, I'm sure," Rick told us. "They couldn't have missed hearing our S O S. And if they heard it they got a cross bearing on our course. It's just a matter of time. The planes probably are taking off right now and that $100 is still up.
As the sun rose higher, Rick gave some good advice to us all. The first thing was to protect our heads from the direct rays. This we did with undergarments - those of us who had no hats or caps. Rick advised us to move around as little as possible, thus conserving energy. We talked as little as possible to avoid drying our mouths.
It now was time for breakfast. Col. Adamson served both as chef and waiter. He took out one of the four little oranges and peeled it. Each man got a segment. Except for the pleasant taste, we might as well have not had anything.
The value of Rick's advice became obvious about 11 A.M. when the sun neared the zenith. We were in equatorial waters and the rays beat almost straight down. They felt like molten metal.
We had been using our undershirts and shorts as sunbonnets. Now we wet them in the salt sea water and draped them over our heads. This made us sweat and Rick warned that we were losing valuable body salt through perspiration. After that we held the garments up like sunshades. The salt water felt good at the time and we continued to wet our heads and necks with it, not knowing how we were to suffer later for this brief respite.
While the heat was at its worst, between 11 A.M. and 4 P.M. the wind began banging the rafts together, bringing out the first displays of temper. They may have been justified, because those sharp aluminum oars could easily have punctured a raft air chamber.
After the snapping had gone on a while, Cherry said:
"Oh, pipe down, you fellows. Let me see if I can't fix it."
He ripped his undershirt down the back and rigged a sail, using the two oars as masts. He sat with his back to the bow, so that his body held the oars upright. There was enough wind to send our raft out ahead, stringing the others behind us in a line.
"That's fine, Bill," I said. "Now see what you can do about the heat."
I shall not quote his reply.
When the terrible heat had passed, we sat about in a sort of daze. So great was the relief that we almost forgot our hunger. Our craving for water, however, was becoming more and more insistent.
The sun now was slipping rapidly down the slope of the western sky. During those weeks I often thought of the sun as the car on a roller coaster. In the mornings it started into the sky at a great rate, reaching the 11 o'clock heat wave mark almost before we knew it - just as the coaster car is pulled rapidly up the incline by a power cable.
Nearing the zenith, the great copper ball would move ever more slowly, almost stopping at the top. Its descent toward 4 o'clock and relief was not much faster. It seemed it never would gain speed. But when it did it plunged toward the horizon. You could almost see it drop. And when it disappeared, our relief was at an end; the chilling night was upon us.
As I sat there that evening of our second day adrift, I noticed that Johnny Bartek was reading his Testament. Something - I didn't know what it was then - kept me from heckling him.
It was almost like a premonition. Too, it was strangely comforting. We all saw Johnny reading his Bible that night, his freckled face solemn as an owl's and the sun glinting on his red hair. No one kidded him. Maybe we all had a prescience of how much that little book was to mean to us.
It was pocket sized, khaki bound, and had a zipper arrangement that made it waterproof. That last feature saved the little book for us through many a watery day and night to come. I think it would be a great thing if every soldier and sailor boy could be provided with one of those indestructible little volumes. Thousands of our youngsters have pocket Testaments, but war conditions make it difficult to keep them readable. And there are times in this war - in any war - when those kids need something more than just themselves to hang on to.
Whatever consolation Johnny got that evening he was to need it when night came on. At dusk the wind blew hard, roughening the sea and drenching us all. And it was cold.
This amazed us. In daylight the wind, the sea, and the spray were too warm. Now we were chilled. We huddled together with teeth chattering. The gale grew so strong there was real danger of upsetting among the sharks, which seemed to mind neither heat nor cold and were much too fond of our company.
Sleep was out of the question. Jimmy Reynolds shot off the night's flare. It was a dud. This angered, then depressed us and we settled down to make the best of a miserable night. None of us as yet, however, felt any apprehension.
We welcomed the rising siun of October 23 - our third day afloat - even though we knew it soon would be roasting us alive. Our shark escorts seemed to welcome it, too. They were out in force. During the entire three weeks there wasn't a time when at least one dorsal fin wasn't cutting the water about the rafts.
They were good-humored beasts in their uncouth way and as playful as a pasture full of calves. We thought then it was their anticipation of a food meal that made them so frisky. We didn't mind the little ones, but the big 12 foot fellows had a disturbing habit of scraping the barnacles off their backs on the bottoms of our boats. They would start at the end raft and make all three.
After a dash to gain momentum they scooted under us, rubbing their backs and giving a flip of the tail as they left each boat. The man sitting on the canvas floor got a wallop that jarred him to the teeth.
We thought once of killing a few with our sharp oars. Then we speculated that quantities of blood in the water might excite the survivors and provoke them to attack and upset us.
It was a passing and fairly listless discussion. Our thoughts of water and food had a way of blotting out everything else at quickly recurring intervals. Col. Adamson dealt out our ration that day with fingers that trembled. Poor Alex Kaczmarczyk appeared to be drooping. I had the thought he might have left the hospital too soon.
None of us felt any too well, however. We were red and were sunburning despite our efforts to protect our skins. The reflected glare from the water was partially responsible. Windburn had a share in it too, I suppose. And the salt depositied upon us by spray was beginning to sting us.
In our weakening condition we felt the sun's heat that day more than on the day previous. We sat with lowered eyelids and baked from 10:30 A.M. until 4 in the afternoon, then we sagged in a stuporish state until sundown.
I remember the sunset of that evening because the sweep of colors was so fantastic no one would have believed it on canvas. But sunsets are not edible nor drinkable, no matter how magnificent. I remembered the expression:
"He drank in the sunset."
I wondered how it had tasted. The red could be strawberry, the yellow would be lemon - or grapefruit. I decided I would take lemon. The orange, of course, was obvious. The purple could be either grape or raspberry. I decided that if ever I should drink a sunset I would have plenty of ice in it. And on second thought if anyone would hand me a few cubes of ice he could have the sunset.
That night we got some sleep, in snatches. I say sleep; it could have been mere stupor. Such was our exhaustion.
The fourth day found our hunger agonizing. The fish hooks Johnny DeAngelis had brought along were useless because we had no bait. The fish could not be tempted with bare hooks.
Those hooks were all that remained of the jungle packs we should have had. All bombers in that region carry these packs, zippered into the cushions of parachutes. Each is supposed to contain a flashlight, jungle knife, fish hooks and lines, hard biscuit, and chocolate. Mechanics and others around airfields are always pilfering them, however. I remember hoping that whoever had taken our hardtack and chocolate might someday be as hungry as we were then.
When we had stretched ourselves, Col. Adamson produced our next to last orange. We got no physical benefit from our tiny segments, but they moistened the mouth and we had come to look forward to the daily dole.
As I considered that tomorrow we would have our last one, I began to weigh the possibility that our situation might be desparate. We had seen no sign of ship or plane. This indicated to me that we must be literally hundreds of miles from any America military installations, because patrol planes cover vast areas, alert for Japanese submarines and surface craft. The younger fellow still watched for them daily, their hopes high each morning.
Rickenbacker and Cherry were noncommittal. I definitely was uneasy. Col. Adamson appeared to have lost hope, but kept his own counsel. Alex by this time was sick beyond caring. There had been some speculation about whether Cherry's undershirt sail would take us to an island. I thought not; not soon, anyway. Our progress was obviously very slow. And we had seen during our box flight that there was no land in the area covered. I estimated this as being about 165 miles square, based on our speed and the distance we could see on either side of our line of flight on each of the four legs of the box course.
These thoughts were interrupted by the start of a discussion as amazing as any I ever had sat in. Bill Cherry had baited a hook with a bit of orange peel, but the fish still were not interested.
"Do you suppose," he asked, "that we could use fingernail parings or something like that for bait?" Johnny Bartek overheard and replied:
"Naw. The only thing we've got for bait is our own hides." This presented a startling possibility.
"What part would you use?" I asked.
"The lobe of the ear," he said promptly. "You don't need it and you wouldn't miss it."
"How about the ball of the little finger?" I suggested. "A quick slice wouldn't cause much pain and there would be very little chance of infection."
"I think a piece of toe would do it," Jimmy Reynolds cut in. "That way nobody would ever know you'd been disfigured."
Remember, we were deadly serious, grotesque as this talk may seem now. We were growing weaker and all realized there would have to be food soon. Someone asked Rickenbacker's opinion.
"Flesh would serve as bait if it should become necessary," he said, but would make no suggestion as to the form the butchery should take. Just when and whether we would have begun carving ourselves up for bait I don't know and never will. Because just then there came a startling interruption.
A moment before, the air above us had been empty. Now there was a loud flapping of wings. Without warning and as natural as anything, a sea swallow alighted on Rickenbacker's head.
We held our breath.
The bird, about half the size of a seagull, looked curiously at each of us in turn - as well it might. Rick's hand moved up slowly. He rubbed his chin. He caressed his nose. He smoothed an eyebrow. Then, with a swift snatch, he made the bird prisoner.
Rick carved him up. I got a leg. And let me say here and now that I will have to be starving before I ever taste sea swallow again. Not only is the flesh rank, but the muscles are like iron wires. I will say, however, sea swallow plumbing makes excellent bait.
We dropped the hooks over the side, I using my ring as a sinker. In another minute I had hauled in a fish about the size of my hand. While I was getting him off the hook, someone else hauled in another about the same size.
We pulled the rafts together and handed our catch over to the Colonel. Never was a man watched so closely as Adamson while he carved with one of the sheath knives. Each of us received a fish steak about an inch square and just a little over half an inch thick.
This is about the size they are in some of our better restaurants. We, however, didn't have to pay $1.75 for ours. There was no strengthening effect in our meal that I could detect and afterward I was even thirstier. Perhaps I should blame that on the sea swallow leg.
My thirst increased as the sun drove higher toward the zenith. During midafternoon my craving for water seemed to grow unbearable. I was able to forget it for a while after the heat had passed; that is, until the sun's nightly show. Then I got to thinking about strawberry, raspberry, lemon and grape again - with plenty of ice. Just as I had driven these things out of my mind, Cherry fired the evening flare. Its red glare made me think of strawberry once more.
The night was cold and miserable. We had to do some bailing because of choppy, sloshing waves. And, as usual, I found myself welcoming the morning sun, although I knew I would be swearing at it before many hours had passed. At half light Cherry sent up the flare, a dud. I was half pleased; the red glare ould have brought back my cravings, I thought. The damage was done, however, by the sight of the thing and I soon was thinking of strawberry sodas again.
While we were sitting there miserable and depressed, an ill-advised school of minnows swept past; I should say some of them got past. We scooped up enough to allow each of us about three 2 1/2 inch, semi-translucent fish. It was the first time I ever had eaten live hors d'oeuvres. All I needed to follow them was a good meal.
The others may have been thinking along the same lines, because the talk turned to food and nearly drove us all crazy. Bill Cherry said that when we were rescued he would take us to eat at a famous restaurant atop a San Francisco hotel.
Then he played waiter. Pretending to have a pad and pencil, he started taking our orders. Most everyone started out with about a dozen kinds of chilled fruit juices; pineapple, orange, grapefruit, apple, tomato, and others. For some inexplicable reason, everyone wanted strawberry.
Then came the steaks, roasts, chops, turkey, and heaping platters of cold meats with jellied consomme' - ice cold - and plenty of lemons. No one wanted fish. Finally I yelled that I would brain the next man who mentioned food. There was silence for a while.
I think it was Johnny Bartek who started talking about the luscious hamburgers you can get back in New Jersey. We were off again. We decided that our previous menus had been too elaborate and agreed to settle for malted milk - strawberry malteds, of all flavors! This is genuinely odd, because few ofus ever had drunk anything except chocolate malteds. But the craving for that particular drink - and flavor - stayed with me torturingly for many a day to come.
At last Bill Cherry remarked in his Texas drawl that he guesed he'd gather all the food we'd dreamed up and trade if for a big frosted pitcher of water with ice cubes floating in it. We all bellowed at him to shut up.
While this was going on, the rafts had been strung out in a line, pulled along by Cherry's undershirt sail. Everyone now felt pretty blue. At length Bartek got out his Testament and by common consent we pulled the rafts together for a prayer meeting. We said the Lord's prayer. I should make it clear that the others said the Lord's prayer. I only knew a word here and there.
I was exposed to religtion and Bible teaching in my two boyhood homes, Cape Girardeau, Mo., and Pueblo, Colo., but I lost it all knocking around in the years after. My feeling that day on the raft was a considerable modification of my impatience when DeAngelis had asked to pray as the plane was heading down into the sea.
I didn't have the least notion that this open-air hallelujah meeting was going to do any good; neither did I resent it. I simply felt it couldn't do any harm. In addition, it probably would be good for morale. I observed that Rick seemed to encourage the suggestion and appeared inclined to take part.
Col. Adamson was reading from the Testament. Suddenly Cherry stopped him.
"What was that last, Colonel?" he demanded. "Where is that from?"
"It is from the Gospel According to Matthew," Col. Adamson replied. "Do you like it?"
"It's the best thing I've heard yet. Read it again, Colonel."
Col. Adamson then read from the 31st through the 34th verses of the sixth chapter of Matthew:
" 'Therefore, take ye no thought, saying: What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For these are things the heathen seeketh. For your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' "
I was somewhat impressed and said so. Then I was a little surprised at myself and added that the evil certainly had been sufficient unto the the last two or three days.
Cherry explained that these verses did not mean tomorrow literally, perhaps. They meant soon. I thought of these words during the wet, dreary night that followed. I dismissed them finally with the decision I would believe when I saw the food and rink. I was destined to see something startlingly like proof the following night.
- J. C. Whittaker -
As the coppery sun shot into the sky on our sixth day adrift we all began to realize the gravity of our situation. It had been almost 120 hours since our Flying Fortress had disappeared beneath the waves.
During that time each of us had had three minnows, one morsel of raw fish, and a fragment of sea swallow in the way of solid food. We also had moistened our mouths with three segments of orange. If you ever have to try it you find there is mightly little nourishment in such a diet. We had drunk no water since we left the plane.
As we pulled the rafts together for a morning Scripture reading I scrutinized my companions. They all were haggard. I suppose I must have been, too. I felt haggard, certainly. Alex looked a little better I thought. Col. Adamson looked like a man who has resigned himself to the inevitable.
I didn't know it until afterward, but the Colonel's ordeal was far greater than ours. He was suffering from an ailment that required daily injections of a medicine he did not have with him.
At the end of our service and while the rafts still were drawn together, Col. Adamson divided the last of our four oranges. We had gone without the day before because of the minnow catch. Again we moistened our throats and again the tangy juice accentuated our thirst.
My own reaction to lack of water, however, was not so much thirst as dryness. It seemed as though all the water in me had been baked out. The wet trunks about my head and neck helped some, but salt water, after the first day or two, stings and burns the body. I didn't want merely to drink water. I wanted to wallow in it. It seemed that I could soak it up by the gallons through my pores.
Everyone knew by now we were out of the way of either ships or planes; in one of those culs de sac of the Pacific that may go years without a visit from ship or plane. The hopes stirred within me by last night's prayer service had vanished in the face of what I was fond of calling "hard reality."
The rafts were back in line by this time and we were waiting for our daily beating from the sun. Those days of merciless and heat and nights of chilling cold; those days of thirst and hunger and sharks would only be a blur in my mind now I suppose if it hadn't been for my diary. I wrote in it every day except six on that cruise.
Almost every night the dashing spray would soak it through and the next day I would dry its pages in the blazing sun. It puts me back out on those to read some of those entries. Our sixth day was much like the others had been, except that it was the worst - up to that time.
When the cool of evening finally came it was quite a while before we could summon the energy to assemble the rafts and open our prayer service. As Col. Adamson began to read from Bartek's Testament it appeared ridiculous to me that men as practical as we and as hardboiled - and some of us were pretty hardboiled - could expect a mumbling voice out on that waste of water to summon help for us.
However, I joined pasively in the prayers. I found I was learning the Lord's prayer. I could start with the rest and finish the first two lines. And, of course, I could join in on the "Amen." There was a general prayer for food in which I joined, still passively.
Cherry repeated his favorite passage about food and drink on the morrow.
"Always tomorrow," I thought bitterly. "What is this; a come-on game?" But we were approaching an experience that was to make me wonder greatly.
Cherry finished his verse from Matthew. His voice went on. I realized with a start that Cherry was praying. He was addressing the Lord as "Old Master." He was saying it with deference and reverence; simply and directly. It was obvious he was deeply in earnest:
"Old Master, we know this isn't a guarantee 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, as least. See what You can do for us, Old Master."
This is the way we all came to talk to God; just as we would talk to anyone we respected and from whom we craved a boon. We made it simple. There were no "thee's" and "thou'se." There was nothing irreverent or kidding about it. Men don't kid when the chips are down.
Cherry finished his talk to God. Then he fired off our evening flare in the hope that something might happen. And it did! Though it was nothing any of us could have forecase.
The flare's propulsion charge was faulty and the flaming ball rose 50 feet or so into the air, then fell back among the rafts. It hissed and zigzagged around the water, blazing a brilliant red. One contact with a raft airchamber would have meant the finish of somebody. The dazzling red light illuminated the ocean for hundreds of yards and in the depths we could see barracuda playing havoc with a school of fish attracted by the glare.
Two fair-sized specimens, pursued by the barracuda, broke water and plumped into our raft. We had just time to grab them when the flare sputtered and died. The moon came out and shed a ghostly light on the ocean. Fish were for breakfast, but I was too puzzled to sleep.
It was Rickenbacker, as I recall it, who carved up our fish tidbits on the seventh morning. They were moist and dampened our parched mouths, but even in normal times fish makes one thirsty enough to drink a quart of water. And we didn't have a drop.
Our mental state grew lower. Col. Adamson seemed worse off in this respect than anyone, even including Alex. I saw Rickenbacker looking sharply about him, especially at the Colonel. I thought once he was about to speak. He changed his mind, apparently.
Col. Adamson sat, head bowed, in a sort of sorrowful daze. Then, in midafternoon, when the heat was at its worst, he suddenly raised himself over the side of the raft and slid into the water.
Quick as a flash, Rick had him. We hurriedly pulled the rafts in close and helped push the Colonel back into his boat. Looked at broadly, it was a brave thing he tried to do. He thought that if he were out of the way there would be more of everything and a better chance for the others. But it made us all pretty mad at the time.
It was then that Rick took over. I will not put down all the things he said. They would scorch this paper. But from then on, woe betide the man who appeared about to turn quitter or who did anything to lower the morale of the others. That man Rickbacker has got a rough tongue in his head. And he's not bashful!
The afternoon seemed longer that seventh day than ever before. The swells heaved our rafts around and the broiling sun glinted on the blue water - so cool looking and inviting. The sharks about us looked sleek, cool, and happy. Sharks could drink salt water; why couldn't man?
It was unavoidable that now and then a dash of spray would catch someone with his mouth open and the few drops of sea water that passed our lips were bitter as well as salty. the spray had left crystals of salt on our faces so that they prickled and burned as irritatingly as did our bodies.
So it was that on this night we prayed for water rather than for food. Except in the verses from Matthew, I don't think food was mentioned. We were so nearly done that we didn't even fire a flare before starting on our wet, miserable night.
There is little to tell about the eighth morning and afternoon. My diary for the first part of that day, Oct. 28, contains chiefly my own thoughts and they must have been pretty rambling. I note that the day was a smooth scorcher. And that means it was the old routine.
A great ball of a sun, rising briskly to get about the business of putting a nice, crisp crust on us. (We were already browned to a turn.) Wan, whiskered faces lifted to the sky in the vain hope of seeing a plane. Watery, bleary eyes trying to study the horizon in the equally vain hope of a ship.
Ten o'clock. The heat increasing to oven intensity. Noon to five - blessed stupor. Then, a gradual return of our sensibilities and our consciousness of misery, pain and thirst.
But the events of that day from late afternoon on never can be driven from my memory. the time came for the prayer service and it was a chore to haul the rafts alongside one another.
I joined more wholeheartedly than ever before in the prayers. It may have been because of my terrible need or it may have been a growing conviction that no human agency, acting alone could save us. I don't know.
I found now that I could say half the Lord's prayer without stumbling along behind the others.
"Our Father, Who art in Heaven,
Hallowed by thy name . . ."
Johnny Bartek's voice rose youthful and clear above the Colonel's muttered words and Bill Cherry's Southwestern drawl.
"Thy kingdom come, They will be done,
On earth, as it is in Heaven. . ."
I could hear my own voice, mumbling along sometimes past the places where the rest paused.
"Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespass
As we forgive those who trespass against us."
Here I was forced to drop out while the other voices went on. From the little raft came DeAngelis's voice clear enough, but Alex's was a mere whisper. Jimmy Reynolds sat beside me, his head bowed, speaking distinctly but very low. Rickenbacker's words, though uttered reverently, were forceful and audible throughout the prayer.
"Lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil,
for Thine is the kingdom, the power
And the glory, forever . . ."
I came in on the "Amen" as usual. When the group prayer had been completed, Cherry addressed the Lord in his forthright fashion:
"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, I guess that's all there'll be to it. It looks like the next move is up to You, Old Master."
I think now that that prayer, despite its informal wording, has just about everything in it a prayer should have. It presents a petition to God and at the same time expresses resignation to God's will. Finally, it implies the belief - the faith - that the petition will be granted.
We said the Lord's prayer again. Cherry hoisted his undershirt sail and the rafts strung themselves out into a line.
While we rolled and wallowed over the crests and into the troughs I was thinking that this was God's chance to make a believer of Jim Whittaker. If there was indeed a God and He could ignore a prayer like that, then he must be a pretty heartless being.
My thoughts went on in this vein for some time; I don't know how long. I do know that eventually I became aware something was tugging insistently at my consciousness. I looked over to the left. A cloud that had been fleecy and white a while ago was darkening by the second.
While I watched a bluish curtain unrolled from the cloud to sea. It was rain - and moving toward us! Now everyone saw teh downpour, sweeping across the ocean and speckling the waves with giant drops.
"Here she is!" Cherry shouted. "Thanks, Old Master!" Another minute and we were being deluged by sheets of cold water that splashed into our parched mouths and sluiced the caked salt off our burned and stinging bodies. We cupped our hands to guide the life-giving rivulets down our throats.
For a time we could think only of the blessed relief of the moment. Then the more practical minds began turning toward the days ahead, which might hold as much privation as had those just ended. We looked about for storage facilities.
The only reservoirs immediately available were our Mae Wests. As the valve openings into them were very small, we hit upon this plan: We soaked and wrung out our shirts until ass the salt was washed out of them. Then we saturated them again and wrung the water into our mouths. It was easy in this way to deposit it into the life jackets, closing the valve afterward.
Not as sanitary as it might be? In our predicament you don't think of those things; I didn't until weeks afterward.
The rain lashed down nearly an hour, soothing our bodies and quenching our thirst. Then, as though the Lord wanted to remind us that He can take away as well as give, a giant wave swept up from nowhere and capsized our raft. We lost our four remaining flares and all three Very pistols.
The only articles saved were one empty flare shell and Cherry's Mae West, which fortunately took in no salt water. Our hoard of more than a quart of fresh water was safe.
