1/8/2024 0 Comments Sjorm burly men at sea![]() In the morning, Adamson forced a smile onto his raw lips and apologized, holding out his hand to the man who had saved him. Rickenbacker seized the suicidal colonel by the shoulder and Cherry and Whittaker helped drag the pair back into the raft. Mortally ill from drinking seawater, he slipped away two nights later after a last long, mournful sigh.Ī few nights later, Rickenbacker awoke when Adamson, in agony from his terribly blistered skin, pitched over the side. The half jigger of water per day per man could not save Sergeant Kaczmarczyk, however. The ecstatic men wrung out the rainwater from their clothes into buckets. In moments, the rafts felt the storm’s buffet and rain poured down in sheets. The sick, exhausted men flailed the sea with their paddles. “Let’s go after it!” shouted Rickenbacker. Rain splattered the parched upturned faces-and then stopped as the storm moved along. That night, the sea grew turbulent under gusting winds. Although not a churchgoer, Rickenbacker did believe in a “Great Power above” and carried a crucifix in the inner pocket of his coat. ![]() It was no coincidence, insisted Rickenbacker, that the two-course dinner had arrived immediately after they had prayed. Within minutes they pulled in a small mackerel and ate it, too. The gaunt survivors divided up the meager catch and baited two fishhooks with fragments of its flesh. He slowly moved his hand to seize the bird’s leg. Afterward, as he dozed off in the oppressive heat, a seagull alighted on his fedora. On the eighth day, Rickenbacker passed out the last orange and started yet another prayer session. for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.” Matthew’s gospel (from the Sermon on the Mount) proved the most popular: “Therefore, take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?. Rickenbacker ordered each man, including the unbelievers, to read one as well. John Bartek pulled out a small copy of the New Testament from his pocket and read a passage. Hans Adamson, growled at the idea, but the others were less resistant. Copilot James Whittaker and Rickenbacker’s aide, the burly Col. Rickenbacker proposed a prayer meeting to the barely conscious men. Attributing his recovery to a supreme act of personal will, he was not about to give up now. He was no stranger to death: the year before, he had sustained such horrendous injuries in an air crash at Atlanta, including an eye popped out of its socket, that rescuers had left him for dead. Rickenbacker understood that time was running out. Morale plummeted early on, when shooting off all 18 emergency flares brought no responding plane. While the dark-haired De Angelis developed a tan, the lighter-complexioned Kaczmarczyk turned into a blistered, sobbing mess and began drinking seawater at night. ![]() Alex Kaczmarczyk had no choice but to lie painfully intertwined, with their legs either over one another’s shoulders or under their arms. Rickenbacker, wearing a civilian suit and a battered fedora, was relatively protected from the sun, but the salt water that sloshed into the rafts raised sores all over his body. Reynolds’s body turn pink, then red, and finally begin to blister. Rickenbacker had watched his radioman Sgt. Then the unrelenting Pacific sun had begun, noted Rickenbacker, “to burn into us and through us.” Several men had taken off their pants and thrown aside their coats and hats before the crash, thinking they might have to swim. In their scramble to escape the sinking aircraft, no one had grabbed even a single thermos of water or emergency ration box. Stimson, but malfunctioning navigation equipment had sent them far off course, causing them to miss their refueling stop at Canton Island, some 1,800 miles west of Hawaii. ![]() Douglas MacArthur from Secretary of War Henry L. Ten months after America’s entrance into World War II, Rickenbacker, known fondly as the “Ace of Aces,” had been headed to deliver a top-secret oral message to Gen. Cherry jammed the fruit into his flight suit just before their B-17D ran out of gas and ditched between Hawaii and New Guinea. They would have had nothing to eat at all had not Capt. The desperate men had just consumed the third of their four oranges, the only food they had with them. Adrift on the Southern Pacific Ocean, Day Six, October 1942įifty-two-year-old Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s top World War I ace and the dapper president of Eastern Air Lines, looked with deep concern over his seven companions in three rafts bobbing on the Pacific.
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