Lost in the Pacific, 1942 Read online

  For Richard and Estie,

  who made sure I did not get lost

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  THE CASTAWAYS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1: TOP SECRET

  CHAPTER 2: ISLAND EYES

  CHAPTER 3: IMPACT

  CHAPTER 4: STRANDED

  CHAPTER 5: THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  CHAPTER 6: DEAD CALM

  CHAPTER 7: TO CATCH A FISH

  CHAPTER 8: OUT OF THE SKY

  CHAPTER 9: NOT A DROP TO DRINK

  CHAPTER 10: DESPAIR

  CHAPTER 11: LETTERS TO SNOOKS

  CHAPTER 12: DAYDREAMS

  CHAPTER 13: CONTACT

  CHAPTER 14: RACE AGAINST TIME

  CHAPTER 15: THE ONES NOT TAKEN

  GLOSSARY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  SOURCES

  CREDITS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SNEAK PEEK: LOST IN OUTER SPACE

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  OCTOBER 21, 1942

  SOMEWHERE OVER THE SOUTH PACIFIC

  The Pacific Ocean looked calm and inviting from 5,000 feet up, with the drone of four sturdy motors in Jim Whittaker’s ear. But he had no desire to land a 15-ton, 4-engine plane down there. To a B-17 bomber, plunging from the sky, the ocean is as unforgiving as a concrete wall.

  Yet by 1:30 p.m. on October 21, 1942, that was the only option left. Whittaker was the B-17’s copilot. He and the rest of the crew were ferrying a VIP passenger on a top-secret mission deep into the war zone. They had completely missed Canton Island, the tiny speck in the great blue where they were supposed to refuel. Now they were flying in a giant square pattern, hoping to spot land. They took turns staring out the windows at the ocean below, mistaking cloud shadows for islands. “Island eyes,” the airmen called it—the surest sign that desperation had set in.

  The Plane: A 15-ton, 4-engine B-17.

  The fact was they were lost, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. They were nearly out of fuel, and the only landing strip they had was a vast tarmac of water.

  No one knew exactly how they had lost their way. Maybe the tailwinds were stronger than the weathermen had predicted. Maybe the compass had taken a hit when they nearly crashed taking off in Hawaii. Either way, the navigator had finally given up trying to figure out where they were. He was a young guy named John DeAngelis who had gotten married just two days before they were called away. Now he was probably wondering if he would ever see his wife again.

  “Do you fellows mind if I pray?” he shouted to the crew over the roar of the engines.

  Pray? Whittaker thought. How about keeping your mind on the task at hand: surviving an impact with the Pacific Ocean.

  Whittaker decided not to say a word. DeAngelis could swan dive into the ocean and it wouldn’t matter. Their lives were in Bill Cherry’s hands now—the twenty-seven-year-old pilot from Texas who sat next to Whittaker with the controls in his hands.

  Cherry and Whittaker began to talk strategy. It had been ten and a half months since the United States was drawn into World War II. In that time, plenty of bomber crews had ditched in the Pacific. Not one, as far as they could remember, had escaped without casualties.

  If the surface of the ocean were flat, it would be one thing. But today, the water rose and fell in treacherous swells. If you came in across the current you would have to time it exactly right. Scrape the crest of a swell and the nose would dip, sending the plane plummeting to the depths. Avoid one crest and you could ram the plane into the next one, shattering the entire craft into pieces in an instant.

  There was only one way to do it, Whittaker and Cherry agreed. Come in parallel to the swells and set the plane down in a trough. That, of course, was easier said than done. The troughs were a moving target, and the wind blew across your flight path, making it hard to hold a line. Hitting a landing spot just right would still take perfect timing, expert piloting skills, and a whole lot of luck.

  While Cherry and Whittaker worked out a strategy, their top secret passenger took charge of the crew behind them. And if luck really had anything to do with their fate, maybe he would tip the scales in their favor. He wasn’t some desk-bound politician or stuffy diplomat. The VIP on board was none other than Eddie Rickenbacker.

  For anyone who cared about flying—and for most everyone else—that was all the introduction he needed. Aside from Charles Lindbergh, he was the world’s most famous pilot. He hadn’t flown in combat since 1918, when World War I ended. But to millions of Americans, his heroics against the Germans were unforgettable. He had shot down more enemy aircraft than any other American pilot.

  The Ace: Rickenbacker in France near the end of World War I.

  Now Rickenbacker was a businessman—president of Eastern Air Lines. But he had a well-known reputation for surviving close scrapes. He had first become famous as an auto racer, driving primitive cars at breakneck speeds. As a fighter pilot, he nearly had his plane shredded by German bullets several times. Then, in the spring of 1941, he had been a passenger on one of his own airliners when it crashed in a Georgia forest. Trapped in the wreckage, he managed to direct rescue efforts with broken ribs, a shattered elbow, a fractured skull, and an eyeball torn loose from its socket. He was in such bad shape that the famous radio commentator Walter Winchell reported his death on the air. When Rickenbacker heard it from his hospital bed, he picked up a water pitcher and threw it at the radio.

  A year and a half later, Rickenbacker still looked frail from the crash and walked with a cane. But now, with another crash looming, he seemed determined to survive one more time. Rickenbacker grabbed the young sergeant, Alex Kaczmarczyk, and pried open the bottom hatch in the B-17’s tail. Then he and Kaczmarczyk lightened the plane’s load to save fuel and lessen the impact when they went down. Out went the cots, tool kit, blankets, empty thermos bottles, and luggage. Sacks full of high-priority mail sailed into the wind, soon to be a soggy, unreadable mess of good wishes that would never make it to the soldiers on the front lines.

  Cherry announced he was starting his descent, and the water outside Whittaker’s window looked more distinct by the second. Back in the radio compartment, the men piled essential provisions by the hatch: a few bottles filled with water and coffee; emergency rations in a small metal box; a two-man raft rolled into a tight package. Once they landed, they might have as little as thirty seconds to get out before the plane went under—assuming they were still alive.

  The men stacked mattresses in position, padding the aft, or rear, side of the walls that separated the compartments of the plane. They all took their positions. Three men—Kaczmarczyk, DeAngelis, and Rickenbacker’s military escort, Colonel Hans Adamson—lay on the floor, braced against the mattresses. Rickenbacker sat near them, belted into a seat near a window. Johnny Bartek, the engineer, sat just behind the cockpit. The plane had two inflatable rafts packed into compartments on the outside of the nose. It would be Bartek’s job to release them just after they ditched. James Reynolds, the radio operator who went by Jim, sat at his desk in the center of the plane. He tapped out SOS after SOS, hoping that someone out there would register their location before they hit the water. There was nothing but silence from the other end.

  “How much longer?” someone asked.

  “Not yet,” Rickenbacker answered, peering out the window.

  In the cockpit, the altimeter showed they were 500 feet above the sea. Cherry cut two of the engines to save fuel. Whittaker grabbed cushions from the seats behind them and stuffed them under their safety harnesses.

  “It’s sure been swell knowing you, Bill,” he said, offering his hand.

  Cherry gripped his copilot’
s hand for a second, and then said in his Texas drawl, “You’re going to know me a long time yet, Jim.”

  In the back, someone asked again, “How much longer?”

  “Fifty feet!” said Rickenbacker. Then, right away, “Thirty feet!”

  Cherry was staring into the waves, trying to pick a trough to aim for. The swells looked towering—twice the height of a man.

  “Twenty feet!”

  They were coming in at 90 miles an hour, but to Whittaker the plane seemed strangely still—the roar of the engines muffled, the whoosh of the wind against the fuselage fainter than it should have been. And then there was the radio, whining its lonely signal into the sky.

  “Ten feet!”

  Bartek reached above them and loosened a set of bolts. The wind snatched the door of the cockpit escape hatch and sent it hurtling to the sea. A rush of air howled through the opening.

  “Cut it!” yelled Cherry.

  Whittaker pulled a switch, and all electrical power on the plane went dead. Cherry pulled back hard on the wheel, lifting the nose and ramming the tail into the water.

  Back in the radio compartment, the noise was deafening. Pieces of equipment that had been bolted down a moment ago flew through the cabin like shrapnel from a bomb.

  And then the belly of the plane hit the water.

  Whittaker exploded forward, and the safety belt tried to slice him in half. Pressure filled his head. His eyes strained against their sockets. He couldn’t see a thing. He began to lose consciousness.

  And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the pressure released. The belt went slack against his chest. His vision returned.

  They had gone from 90 miles an hour to a dead stop in less than 50 feet. He couldn’t be sure who had survived and who had not. The Pacific Ocean was pouring fast into the plane. And no one in the big, broad world knew where they were.

  CHAPTER 1

  TOP SECRET

  Just two days before they vanished to the world, Jim Whittaker and the four members of his regular Air Transport Command crew had been looking forward to some time off. Air Transport crews didn’t fly combat missions, but they served an important purpose in a war that ranged far and wide across the globe. They flew planes, supplies, and people from training bases to the battlefront and back again. Whittaker, Cherry, DeAngelis, Bartek, and Reynolds had been doing this for ten months, since the U.S. entered the war. They had just picked up a B-24 “Liberator” bomber in the South Pacific and brought it to Hawaii. That afternoon they were scheduled to fly a B-17 from Hawaii to San Francisco. Then they’d take off for a well-earned leave.

  John DeAngelis, the crew’s navigator, couldn’t wait to see his new bride, Mary. She was his high school sweetheart, and she had flown out from Pennsylvania to California for the wedding. They’d been forced to cut the celebrations short when DeAngelis was called to duty to pick up the B-24.

  The radioman, Jim Reynolds, had gotten engaged in between his six trips across the Pacific, so he was eager to get home, too.

  Johnny Bartek, the engineer, was the youngest of them all at twenty-two. Less than a month ago, he’d opened a letter from his parents in Freehold, New Jersey. The news left him numb. Back home, his sister Ruth had hit her head on a wall while roller-skating. Blood pooled inside her brain from the impact, and the next day she died on the way to school. It was hard to get your mind around: Out in the world, men were surviving onslaughts of bullets and bombs, and his sister had died walking to school.

  Ruth had been born on his birthday, August 30. She was seventeen years old. Bartek just wanted to get home to his family.

  At 5 p.m. the crew strode across Hickam airfield toward their plane. The bright blue waters of Pearl Harbor glistened a few hundred yards to the west. It was so peaceful in the Hawaiian sun that Jim Whittaker had trouble imagining the violence that had torn this place apart ten months ago when the Japanese had launched a surprise attack. But this was where the war had started for all of them, and the signs were still there. Bullet holes pockmarked the airplane hangars. A giant crane towered over the harbor, preparing to haul the crippled battleship Oklahoma upright again. At night, army police patrolled the streets to make sure all lights were out—in case the bombers came back.

  The giant battleship Oklahoma lies crippled in the waters of Pearl Harbor, fifteen months after the attack.

  It was just after dawn on December 7, 1941, when 353 Japanese planes came screaming out of the sky over the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. People who lived near the base thought it was just another combat exercise. Their morning coffee had been interrupted before by the sound of machine-gun fire. This time, a dark cloud began to rise over the harbor, and many people thought it was a smoke screen laid down for the latest in a series of training games.

  But the navy men aboard the warships in the harbor knew only too well that this was no game. The bombs fell on battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Fuel tanks exploded into flames. A 16-inch shell tore into the battleship Arizona’s forward magazine, and a searing column of fire erupted thousands of feet into the air. Fragments of steel and wood rained down on the wreckage. Human body parts fell from the sky. Men who had been burned snow-white stumbled on the decks until they fell over. Before long, eighteen ships lay crippled at the surface or sank to the bottom of the harbor.

  At the airfields, planes swept in so low that some people remembered making eye contact with the enemy pilots. Forty-three fighter planes—lightning-quick Japanese Zeros—hit Hickam Field right where Whittaker walked ten months later. They sprayed machine-gun fire like sheets of rain. Airmen were gunned down while they raced to their planes. At Hickam alone, 189 people were killed. Of the four hundred aircraft on the island, just sixty escaped damage. Exactly eight made it into the air to fight back.

  December 7, 1941: An explosion rocks the Naval Air Station at Pearl Harbor.

  Unless you counted the American Revolution, the United States had been attacked by a foreign power only once in 166 years—in 1812. Now it had happened again.

  “A date which will live in infamy,” President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed. Then he asked Congress to declare war on Japan. Germany rushed to the defense of its Japanese ally and declared war on the United States. The American people suddenly found themselves swept into World War II, the most destructive war in history.

  Call to Arms: The day after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. was at war with Japan. Posters like this one encouraged Americans to support the fight.

  Whittaker, who had been flying single-engine planes since his twenties, put his construction business on hold and joined the army. At forty, he was too old to fly in combat, but he figured if he flew transport planes it would free up a younger pilot to fight.

  When the crew arrived at their B-17 that October afternoon and found new orders waiting for them, Whittaker took it in stride. They were headed back into the Pacific. There would be no trip home to see his wife and his sixteen-year-old daughter; no side trip to visit the navy base in San Francisco where his son was training. But this was what Jim Whittaker had signed up for.

  Besides, the orders that were handed to Captain Cherry announced the name of their famous passenger: Eddie Rickenbacker. The crew talked about it on the way back to the base as they waited for their new takeoff time. If you had to lose a few days off, this wasn’t a bad reason. They’d all get to meet the great flying ace. And with Rickenbacker aboard, chances were they’d get as close to the action as possible.

  The crew were back at the plane well before the 10:30 p.m. takeoff time, checking instruments, stowing food, topping off the fuel tanks. They were joined by Alex Kaczmarczyk, a second engineer who was there to help Bartek keep the plane running smoothly. The B-17 wasn’t exactly a luxury ride. It was a giant, clumsy fighting machine known as the “Flying Fortress.” When it went to war it lived up to its name, carrying at least five machine guns and more than two tons of bombs. For transport missions, the gear was stripped out, but some things remained the same. The planes were
still unheated, open to the air, and deafeningly loud.

  Exactly two minutes before takeoff, Whittaker felt the plane rock under the weight of two new passengers. In a moment, the VIP came up behind him and introduced himself, only one name needed.

  “My name is Rickenbacker.”

  He introduced his military aide, Colonel Hans Adamson. But it was clear he was in no mood for small talk. Rickenbacker and Adamson took the two seats just behind Whittaker and Cherry and belted in for takeoff.

  Bartek, the engineer from New Jersey, came forward to find that Adamson had taken his seat. But Private Bartek had been in the military long enough to know how things worked. Officers got the best of everything, and privates were left to pick up the crumbs. Like a lot of enlisted men, he’d grumble about it when there was no one around who outranked him, but he wouldn’t dream of arguing with a colonel. Bartek found another seat and strapped in.

  With all eight men aboard, Cherry pulled onto the runway and picked up speed. They were halfway to liftoff and well above 60 miles an hour when one of the brakes suddenly seized. The plane lurched left and careened toward the hangars.

  Rickenbacker started to get up. He opened his mouth to say something, looking for a minute like he wanted to take over. Then he thought better of it and sat back down. By this time, Cherry was already wrestling the plane into a ground loop—a tight, barely controlled circle at high speed. The idea was to drain the plane’s momentum gradually without hurtling off the airfield into a building. But for the better part of a minute they spun round like a high-speed amusement park ride.

  Just below the cockpit, in the navigator’s bay, John DeAngelis hung on for dear life. If one of the wheels gave out, the nose of the plane would collapse in a heap on the runway. DeAngelis would be the first thing to hit the ground.