The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (59 page)

Other evidence suggests that Rickenbacker’s message was to inform MacArthur of the date and scope of the North African invasion, top secret information the army would not want to commit to the airwaves. Events of the next several weeks lend substance to this opinion.
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Either of these scenarios is possible—in fact, both may be true—but whatever the case Rickenbacker was the ideal candidate to deliver the message because he was both trustworthy and retained his high stature as America’s most famous fighter pilot and Medal of Honor recipient. MacArthur could intimidate a lot of people, but not Rickenbacker.

Rather than lay over at Pearl for a day, Rickenbacker asked for a flight to the South Pacific at once, and a little before ten-thirty that night he and Adamson stepped aboard the B-17, where the pilot, twenty-seven-year-old Captain William T. Cherry, and copilot, forty-two-year-old Lieutenant James C. Whittaker, were in the cockpit going through their preflight checklist. At 10:28 p.m. Whittaker felt a hand on his shoulder and a voice said, “My name is Rickenbacker.”

The crew naturally knew who he was; everybody still knew who he was. But they had been cleared for takeoff and there was no time for formalities. Eddie and Adamson strapped themselves into the jump seats behind the pilots, and Cherry began to taxi the plane to the runway. Whittaker ran up the engines and they began to roll as Cherry released the brakes. They had reached about 75 miles per hour when a brake expander tube burst and locked one of the wheels. The plane lurched to the left, ran off the runway, and was headed for the hangars when Cherry, “by clever manipulation of the engines,” in Rickenbacker’s estimate, managed to get the B-17 back on the runway. But there was not enough speed for takeoff and they were headed for the bay at the end of the strip. Seeing that the speed had dropped to about 60 miles per hour, Cherry threw the plane into a violent ground loop to stop it, which very nearly tore off a wing and knocked the engines slightly out of their mountings. It came to a stop with such force someone said it could have broken everybody’s neck.
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After a moment of silence to capture their breaths, Whittaker quipped, “Well, you know the old saying, any landing you can walk away from is a good one.” By then fire trucks and ambulances, their sirens blaring, had arrived on the scene, as had a car carrying Brigadier General William Lynd, who was yelling, “Anybody hurt? Anybody hurt?” Rickenbacker shocked him by asking how soon a replacement plane could be made available. In only a few hours they were again taxiing for takeoff in a more modern B-17. Their first destination was tiny Canton Island, an atoll in the Phoenix archipelago eighteen hundred miles to the southwest, where Pan Am had once refueled its Clippers, the big four-engine flying boats.

The flying weather was clear and fine, with a few fleecy clouds and a three-quarter moon. Cherry expressed dissatisfaction to other crew members that he’d been given no time to evaluate the airworthiness of the new B-17. When Cherry complained to General Lynd back at Pearl that he needed time to check out the plane, he was told that Rickenbacker wanted to get away at once and “if he didn’t want to fly the plane [Lynd] would get somebody else to do it for him,” which would have effectively ended Cherry’s career as an army pilot.
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For another, while that was going on, Johnny De Angelis, the twenty-three-year-old navigator, was carefully studying his octant, a complex navigational instrument used for celestial navigation. It contained a bubble to create an artificial horizon from which a skilled aviator could measure lunar, solar, or celestial angles and distances to find the relative earthly latitude and longitude of an airplane, ship, or other vehicle. Versions of octants have been in use for hundreds of years but the modern ones were fashioned with mirrors, ocular lenses, prisms, the horizon bubble, gears, and calibrators, all of which were extremely delicate. They were so sensitive that the Air Corps did not include them among a plane’s standard equipment but left each individual navigator to care for his own octant, which he carried in its specially designed hard leather case.

De Angelis—whom other crew members said had the “instincts of a homing pigeon”—was concerned that the octant might have become damaged because during the ground loop it had flown off the navigator’s table and bounced on the deck. The most infinitesimal misalignment or miscalculation could lead to a serious error, which would simply keep compounding itself when trying to find a tiny speck of an island in an ocean as large as the Pacific. There had been no time to recalibrate or even check the adjustments before the second takeoff, and when Whittaker asked De Angelis if there was anything wrong with the octant, De Angelis replied that there didn’t seem to be, though he noted it had taken “quite a wallop.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, before takeoff Sergeant James W. Reynolds, the radio operator, hadn’t been able to check in for a directional fix with any of the local radio stations, because all were signed off at that time of night. If he had, he would have found that the new plane’s radio direction finder, or loop, on the outside of the plane, could not be adjusted because its gears were stuck. Unaware of all of this, the crew and passengers droned on into the night, in the belief that morning would bring them to a sandy coral atoll in the ocean six miles long and three miles wide and seventeen hundred miles away.

R
ICKENBACKER AND
A
DAMSON
tried to get some sleep on cots that had been arranged for them in the empty bomb bay by Sergeant Alexander Kaczmarczyk, who was on his way back to his unit in the South Pacific after having had an appendectomy in Hawaii. Because his name was almost unpronounceable, he asked them to just call him Alex. It was freezing cold at 10,000 feet, even at the equator, and the plane wasn’t heated, making sleep problematic. At dawn, De Angelis came up from the bombardier’s compartment to report that he’d taken some “exceptional” position shots right before the stars went out and that the plane was directly on course. Rickenbacker and Adamson had some coffee and went forward to the cockpit, where Whittaker asked Rickenbacker if he wanted to take the controls. Eddie demurred, saying he knew nothing of instrument flying, but some prodding soon had him behind the yoke.

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

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

“We’re lost,” Cherry said.

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

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

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

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

Rickenbacker asked Cherry how much fuel was left.

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

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

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

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

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

It was clear they were going to have to put the ship down in the sea. Below they could see the big rollers, headed east. As far as anyone knew, no four-engine plane had ever been put down on a high-wave ocean with survivors. Hitting water in a plane is roughly the same as hitting a brick wall. If a plane lands into the wind and hits a wave crest too hard it will break in two and sink. If it noses through a crest and hits the next crest the nose will dive beneath the water or be caved in. Whittaker suggested to Cherry that they go in sideways and land in a trough between two waves. Cherry agreed and added that he intended to go in with gas in the tanks and the engines running on the theory that a power landing is always better than an uncontrolled one.
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Everyone put on life vests, also known as “Mae Wests.” Sergeant Reynolds pounded furiously at the telegraph key with the SOS call but there was no response. Adamson, using a kind of code because of the presence of the crew, reminded Rickenbacker that if it was Japanese territory they put down in, because of what they knew about the upcoming North Africa invasion, they can’t afford to be taken prisoners. Adamson whispered that during his intelligence training he’d learned the Japanese had acquired some kind of “truth serum” drug from the Germans. Rickenbacker acknowledged that “if the Japs find us on the rafts you and I have only one way to go, and that’s
down
.”
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There were three life rafts in compartments on either side of the plane; two were “five-man” rafts and one was a “two-man” raft in the radio compartment. These could be released and inflated by pulling a lever in the cabin. The B-17 was more than twice as heavy as the B-25s that Doolittle’s raiders flew; if the landing was successful, they could count on the plane surviving on the surface for no more than one minute. The emergency equipment also contained water and some rations, and these were stored near the escape hatch. Eddie wrapped about sixty feet of rope he’d found around his waist.

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

Rickenbacker had heard the “violent jumble of sounds and motions” once before—at Atlanta. “Pieces of radio equipment bolted to the bulkhead flew about like shrapnel,” he said. The tail struck the water first to slow the plane down, a furious jerk, then a stupendous lurch forward as the belly hit and the plane went from 90 miles per hour—stall speed—to a dead stop in less than fifty feet, by Eddie’s estimate. “It was a wonderful landing, timed to the second … If [Cherry] had miscalculated by two seconds and hit the crest … the Fortress would have gone straight to the bottom of the sea.”
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Green seawater poured in through a broken window port. Everyone was terribly shaken up. Adamson “staggered to his feet,” Eddie said, “moaning about his back.” De Angelis and Alex appeared to be all right, but Reynolds had a great gash on his nose from which blood was pouring through his fingers as he held his hand to his face. Eddie and Adamson went first through the escape hatch and out onto the wing where they had trouble keeping their footing as the plane heaved and surged in twelve-foot swells. The life rafts were already inflated and expelled and were bobbing in the waves. John Bartek, the mechanic, had cut his fingers terribly on some sharp edge trying to unfoul a line to the raft. Eddie helped Adamson, who was in “great pain” from his injured back, into one of the five-man rafts, which looked very small against the angry sea. Then Bartek got in, and then Eddie, who remarked, “There wasn’t enough room left for a midget.”

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