5
May 27, 1943
Been fixing up our new living quarters, a house only 80 feet from the beach. Stove, icebox, even a private bathroom. Moving in not a moment too soon: a quart was stolen from under my pillow last night.
Got a call from operations that a B-25 has gone down in the ocean 200 miles north of Palmyra. We’re the only crew left on the base, but Superman is in for repair. Phil went ahead and volunteered us for the rescue mission anyway.
The only available ship was a “musher” called the Green Hornet. A musher flies with her tail down and can’t get off the ground with a bomb load. Our engineers had checked it from nose to stern more than once and promised it was exactly like all our other B-24s: it should fly right; it just didn’t. No matter. We’d stripped many of its parts to use on other planes, so we mostly flew the Green Hornet on the cabbage run, meaning we’d take it to the main island of Hawaii to pick up lettuce, fresh vegetables, steaks, and stuff like that. Very occasionally it went on search missions.
Our crew of ten, after the Nauru raid injuries, was Russell A. Phillips, Otto Anderson, Leslie Deane, Frank Glassman, Jay Hansen, Francis McNamara, Michael Walsh, C. H. Cupernell, Robert Mitchell, and me. We were joined by an officer who just wanted to go to Palmyra, where we’d land and refuel after the search. At 18:30 we and another B-24 also on the mission took off.
I figured we’d be back for dinner. Rescue missions were nothing new. We’d recently saved a B-25 crew after they’d sputtered out of gas and ditched in the ocean a couple hundred miles from Oahu. I spotted them with the Zeiss binoculars I’d bought at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. From the sky, bobbing rafts look like mounds of water to the naked eye. I saw not only the rafts but smoke from a flare. We flew closer, radioed in, and circled for an hour until the PBY—a navy flying boat—picked up the crew.
For some reason during the flight out, our copilot, Cupernell, wanted to change seats with Phil, who I’m sure didn’t give it a second thought because sometimes he’d also let me fly the plane so I could log hours and be used as a third pilot in case of emergency, or to cover for him and Cupernell after they’d had a hard night in Honolulu and no sleep. I didn’t party much because I wanted to stay in top shape. A beer or two, that was my style. On the other hand, they’d stagger in after hours and, once aloft, take turns curling up on the radio deck for a nap.
WE ARRIVED IN the downed plane’s vicinity to find cloud cover at one thousand feet. Phil dipped to eight hundred to get a better look and called me to the cockpit while we circled so I could scan the sea for wreckage or a life raft.
Suddenly the RPMs on our number one (left outboard) motor dropped radically. It shook violently, sputtered, and died. Phil called the engineer forward to feather the props. Blades normally face nearly flat to the wind so they can cut into the air and pull the plane forward. However, when a motor stops, those surfaces are like a wall and everything slows. Feathering means to turn the blades edge-on to the wind. Think of it this way: you’re in a car doing seventy miles per hour. Put your hand out the window, palm forward, and the wind will blow it back. Turn the edge of your hand to the wind, and it slices right through. Feathering is possible because we had variable-pitch propellers, allowing a different blade angle for takeoff, cruising, or when the motor stopped.
After the Nauru raid a new engineer had joined our crew, a green kid just over from the States. He was so eager to help that he rushed into the cockpit and feathered the left inboard (or number-two) motor by mistake—and it died. That old musher could barely fly with four motors and no bombs; suddenly we had two motors out, both on the same side.
At first we seemed to glide, then the plane shuddered and we dropped like a rock. Remember that we were at eight hundred feet, flying beneath the clouds. Even at one thousand feet you don’t have much chance to do anything in an emergency, particularly restart a motor. Before you know it you hit the ground—or in our case the water—and all that’s left is an oil-slick fire and debris. Still, I would gladly have taken the extra two hundred feet and a few more seconds to try and save ourselves.
We had neither.
When props go out, most pilots immediately compensate by increasing the power to the engines that still work. All our power was on the right wing, and to boost thrust would force the plane sharply to the left and push it in a circle, causing the dead side to drop while the live side climbed. Flyers in similar situations had been killing themselves like that for years until a test pilot named Tony Lavier figured out that if you lose power completely on one side, you had to decrease power to the good engines. Then you level out. It seems unnatural, but it works.
Phil could throttle back to keep the plane from yawing to the left, but the Green Hornet itself was in such miserable shape that the maneuver would simply make us drop faster because we had no lift.
Caught between two bad options, Phil had no right choice.
He increased power hoping that if we stayed aloft even a little longer he might regain control, restart the motor, or attempt a water landing. It was no use. The Green Hornet angled to the left and keeled over.
THE MOST FRIGHTENING experience in life is going down in a plane. Those moments when you fall through the air, waiting for the inevitable impact, are like riding a roller coaster—with one important difference. On a roller coaster you close your eyes, hold on despite the sheer horror, and come through. In a plummeting plane there’s only sheer horror, and the idea of your very imminent death is incomprehensible. Of course, only if you’ve lived through a crash can you tell anyone about the abject terror. You think, This is it. It’s over. I’m going to die. You know with 100 percent of your being that the end is unavoidable. Yet a part of you still believes you can fight and survive no matter what your mind knows. It’s not so strange. Where there’s still life, there’s still hope.
What happens is up to God.
Phil looked at me. I knew without his uttering a sound that we were probably dead. Still, his lips moved. Maybe he shouted, maybe he whispered, but I heard him loud and clear. I’ll never forget his words: “Get to your stations and prepare to crash.”
I RUSHED TO my position in the waist section, at the right window, next to the machine-gun tripod. I already wore my life jacket; I knew the drill because we’d practiced it again and again on the ground.
In every water emergency a lot depends on how you land—if you land. A B-17 can make a smooth touchdown; if you dump the fuel beforehand, it will float for about thirty minutes, enough time to get all the life rafts and supplies off the plane. B-25s can also handle the water, but B-24s usually fell apart no matter how good the landing. The retractable bomb-bay doors were about a quarter inch from being flush with the fuselage. Hit the drink at two hundred miles an hour, catch the edge, and water rushes in, tearing the plane to bits—and that’s if you come in easy.
In our case, none of that mattered.
All B-24s pack two life rafts in fuselage compartments above the wings, mounted against spring-loaded plates. The outside covers latch with a pin, with a weight on the end. When the plane hits water, the impact dislodges the pin, the doors burst open, and the spring plate throws the rafts out about a hundred feet, over each wing, into the ocean. That pulls a trigger mechanism and the rafts inflate while still attached to the plane by parachute cord. When the plane sinks below a certain depth, the cords pull free of the plane.
A third life raft was packed in the bomb bay next to my position. My job was to get it out of the plane after a water landing. A big, waterproofed metal box of rations sat nearby, with enough fortified chocolate, cans of water, and other food supplies to last ten guys for two weeks. The engineer or tail gunner’s job was to grab the survival box.
My stomach tightened and lurched as we tumbled and turned. I crouched low and braced myself against the soft round raft. In fact, I’m sure I hugged it.
The nose and the left wing hit the water simultaneously. We did half a cartwheel.
I expected my life to flash before my eyes. It didn’t.
Then the plane blew apart.
FROM PHIL’S WARNING to impact took less than two minutes, then the world was on fire. Had I been in a boat nearby, watching the Green Hornet explode into a ball of flame, it might have sounded like melting, twisting metal and fireworks trying to harmonize. Surrounded by chaos, I heard nothing but my fear.
The crewman to my left died instantly. The ration box flew by my head and disappeared. The crash tossed me forward and down, forcing me under the tripod, which was bolted to the deck plates. The raft jammed beneath my body and wedged me in. The double tail snapped off, and the wires connecting the elevators and trim tabs to the cockpit controls sheared and whipped around the tripod like tightly coiled springs, further caging me. It took only seconds, enough time to realize that I was still alive, trapped, and the plane was sinking.
No matter how I struggled, I just couldn’t get loose from the tripod and the sharp, springy wires that wound around me like metal spaghetti. I looked out the waist window and saw two mangled bodies drift by. I sucked in a huge lungful of air and kept my eyes open as we went under. No way I’d give up. I’d done free diving in Hawaii, and because I ran I could hold my breath longer than most people—over three minutes. I used to practice by sitting on the bottom of a public pool, hanging on to the drain grate, until my friends thought I’d drowned and dove in to save me.
When my ears popped I knew I was about twenty feet beneath the surface. As I sank deeper I felt a pain in my forehead like I’d never experienced, much less ever imagined, as if someone had hit me with a huge sledgehammer. My sinuses seemed about to burst; the headache was unbearable. This is hopeless, I thought. What can I do? Nothing. I can’t budge the wires. I’m sinking. My air is about gone. I have to accept it.
I’m going to die.
I lost consciousness and everything faded to black.
AND THEN FOR some unexplained reason my eyes opened.
Was I dreaming? Maybe I’m dead, I thought. Maybe this is the afterlife.
I figured out pretty quickly that the afterlife—at least the one I’d counted on—was probably not a wet, cold, and gloomy place in which my lungs screamed for air. I was still underwater, some seventy feet down, but I found myself completely free of my death trap and floating upward. My arms reached out blindly, hands searching, and then I felt a tug. My USC ring had snagged on the right waist window. I immediately grabbed the frame with my left hand, and although I thought my lungs would burst, I arched my back and squeezed through the opening, scraping the skin off my back.
I knew I had to inflate my Mae West—my life jacket. I could do it either of two ways. In the plane we blew them up by mouth. I couldn’t do that underwater with no air. The other way was the CO2 cartridge packed into each vest. Sounds easy enough except that most vests didn’t have cartridges because the men always swiped them—sometimes even from other airplanes—so they could make soda water to go with their Scotch.
Luckily I still had a functioning cartridge and the jacket inflated. Then I rose toward the light for what seemed like forever, swallowing seawater mixed with gasoline, oil, hydraulic fluid, blood. When I broke the surface I gasped for air and threw up. The whole thing had taken maybe fifteen seconds; I had operated on pure instinct. All I could see was fire on the water. As I caught my breath it hit me that I was alone, floating in the vast Pacific, hundreds of miles from land, the ocean floor far below and my despair perhaps even deeper.
SUDDENLY I HEARD a cry for help. Through a break in the smoke to my left I saw an auxiliary gas tank float by, twenty feet away, with Phil and Francis P. McNamara, the tail gunner, clinging to the side. Their eyes were wild and strange. Blood gushed from a deep triangular gash on Phil’s head.
I looked around for any of the remaining eight crewmen but saw no one. We three were alone with the bobbing debris and our knowledge that with blood in the water the sharks would soon arrive en masse. That scared the heck out of me, especially when I saw two life rafts that had been automatically ejected from the plane drifting away from the wreckage on the current.
I wanted to help Phil and Mac, but to lose our only means of survival would be crazy. The guys could wait. I made for the nearest raft, but with clothes and shoes on I couldn’t keep up. It was a pointless chase; the rafts were moving farther away. I’d just about given up when I spotted the last three feet of the hundred-foot nylon parachute cord attached to the raft. I managed to grab the rope and reel in our new home.
I climbed in, unhooked the oars, and rowed back to the bomb-bay tank hoping Phil hadn’t passed out or bled to death. I helped him and Mac into the raft and immediately put pressure on Phil’s carotid artery. From my survival training I knew about the little dip in our jawbones and how to find the artery there. The bleeding slowed.
“Mac, take off your T-shirt and soak it in the water,” I ordered. “Now hold it on Phil’s head and press.” I took my hand off the artery, removed my T-shirt, tore it into a long strip, and wrapped it around Mac’s now bloody T-shirt and Phil’s head, to hold the compress tightly in place.
“Boy, Zamp, I’m glad it was you,” Phil said softly. That sent an immediate and affirming message. Phil still believed I had most of the answers. The whole time I’d kept my eye on the second raft. We needed it not only for the emergency supplies and tools but as a place Phil could lie quietly. I shoved the oars into the ocean and gave chase. Rowing was painful, an absurd struggle with three men aboard. Fortunately we were going with the current and I finally got close enough to grab the parachute cord.
Those cords saved our hides, plain and simple.
Parachute cord is nylon and very tough. I used one length to lash the two rafts together, through the topside grommets. Then I retightened the saltwater compress on Phil’s head, and Mac—who, miraculously, was uninjured—and I transferred Phil to the second raft and told him not to move.
“Zamp,” he said, as we made him comfortable. “You’re the captain now.”
“Sure,” I said, trying to reassure him. “Don’t worry. Take it easy. We’ll be picked up soon.”
THE LIFE RAFTS were standard issue: sturdy inner tubes inside canvas covered with yellow rubber. Each one had two sections, meaning a separate inner tube and valve on each side. That was smart for safety reasons. If one side went flat, you’d still float. Each raft was about as big as a desktop inside, maybe three feet wide and six feet long. Two seats cut across the width, both molded in and filled with air. Underneath each seat was enough room to shove your legs in case you had to lie on the bottom during a storm to maintain a low center of gravity and keep the raft from turning over.
A supply kit came with each raft. After checking Phil again I started an inventory but was interrupted when Mac suddenly screamed: “We’re gonna die. We’re all gonna die!”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “Are you kidding? We’re not gonna die.”
“Yes, we’re all gonna die! You know we are.”
Though we never had time to radio a distress call, I absolutely believed we’d be saved. Our failure to land at Palmyra was itself a signal. The other B-24 on the search mission—it had split off to cover another area—was probably already on the ground in Palmyra, waiting for us. “Hey, we’re gonna get picked up today or tomorrow,” I said with certainty, looking at Phil instead of Mac. “Don’t worry. We’re not gonna die. We’ve rescued plenty of guys and now they’re out searching for us. We’ll be eating dinner with the marines tonight—or tomorrow night.”
But Mac kept screaming. I tried reverse psychology. I threatened to report him when we got picked up. Neither worked, so I did what I had to do: I cracked him across the face. Mac flew backward, surprised yet somehow content. He regained control and, for the moment, kept his fears to himself.
Look, no one wants to crash, but we had. I knew the way to handle it was to take a deep breath, relax, and keep a cool head. Survival was a challenge, and the way to meet it was to be prepared. I’d trained myself to make it. I was in top physical condition. Except for his head gash, Phil was in good shape, too. We played three or four sets of tennis almost every day at the officers’ club. Mac was also young and healthy, but his mind didn’t seem ready to take the kind of great punishment that might await us. I worried about him.
I noted the time and location of the crash, the ocean currents and the trade winds. Then I returned to the inventory. I found the patch kits—the same stuff you’d use to fix a bicycle tire: sandpaper, patches, rubber dope. We had air pumps that came in their own little cases. We had a flare gun, and dye to mark the water so planes could find us. Also a mirror made of chromed brass, and a pair of pliers with a screwdriver handle. That’s all. Not even a net to catch fish.
And I couldn’t find the most important item.
Where was the knife?
Frustration began to eat at me. “Where’s the knife?” I grumbled. I almost swore, but I knew that was a sign of a person losing his cool. Yet, what a blunder. I swear I almost started to search for the raft’s trademark to see if it was made in Germany or Japan. Some dummkopf had put in pliers when everyone knows that no matter where you are, on land or sea or in the air, you need a knife.
We had no knife, and I couldn’t make one appear out of thin, warm salt air. As for provisions, between the two rafts, we had six bars of chocolate and eight half-pint tins of water. Designed as survival food, the chocolate bars were big, divided into six sections, and meant to last about a week. The instructions were to eat only one section a day, and to take thirty minutes to do it. The chocolate was fortified—it said so in big letters on the package—with all the vitamins, minerals, and protein anyone in an emergency would need.
I took the water and chocolate from Phil’s raft and placed it in mine. It didn’t seem like a lot, but that didn’t bother me. We were only two hundred miles—or ninety minutes—north of Palmyra, and eight hundred miles south of Hawaii. I was sure that the search-and-rescue planes would find us soon.
WHEN LIFE INSTANTLY and drastically takes you completely by surprise, the first reaction is confusion. If one minute you’re following a normal routine in an airplane, motors roaring, and a couple of minutes later the plane crashes and you’re on a raft, lost and adrift in a vast, loud silence, the disorientation is, at best, intense. Then a new world unfolds. You need time to understand and figure out what’s happening. Fate had thrown us into 65 million square miles of salt water and stillness. I couldn’t hear the wind; I couldn’t hear birds; I couldn’t hear waves. I felt like one minute I’d been watching television and the next I’d suddenly found myself on the moon.
With Phil patched up and Mac subdued, I finally had a moment to settle back and think, but I found no peace of mind. I thought of the eight other crewmen and the sharks that never slept, but that was too horrible to contemplate. Instead I tried to figure out how we three had survived. That was easy: we’d all been on the right side of the plane. Phil, because he’d switched seats with Cupernell. I’d been at the right waist window, and Mac had been behind me. The impact threw Mac free when the tail snapped off, but I could hardly imagine how Phil had made it. Anyone familiar with a B-24 cockpit knows how tough it is to get in or out on a good day. Phil should have been dead. The cockpit must have split apart when the nose hit the water. Because he was on the right side and up higher than Cupernell, who probably died instantly, the force pushed Phil through the opening, tearing his scalp on the way.
That left me. More than Phil or Mac, I should be dead. I began to focus on my miraculous escape from an impossible situation, and I had one simple question: “How did I get loose?” I relived every moment trying to find a logical answer. I went through it repeatedly. My ears had popped, I felt the unbearable pressure on my forehead, I lost consciousness…then my eyes opened and I was free. But how? Again: my ears popped, I felt the pressure…I was free. It made no sense. If the water pressure had knocked me out at a certain depth and at that point I was still sinking, why didn’t the increasing water pressure keep me out? Not to mention that the tripod was bolted to the deck and wrapped in metal wire.
I had no choice but to believe that something strange and wonderful had happened, and I was at a loss to understand it.
Memories surfaced of all the times since childhood I’d narrowly escaped death or horrible injury. Then I thought of a letter I’d sent just that morning to Payton Jordan, a friend in navy preflight school who’d been a USC sprinter and would later become an Olympic coach. I’d stuffed it in my pocket, intending to mail it, when we got the call to report for the rescue mission. I discovered it just before takeoff and tossed it out the window to one of the ground crew. “Mail this for me, would you, please?” The letter began with the words “I am still alive and kicking around, why I don’t know.”
As undesirable as my situation was now, I was still alive, and although I still didn’t know why, it was better than the alternative.
I soon tired of reviewing the movie of my life, but with no other pressing engagements, I relaxed, tried to focus on the sea’s soothing motion, and just let sleep come.
I AWOKE WITH the words Lucky Louie stuck in my head. From high school on I’d always accepted the nickname with a certain smugness. Now I desperately needed it to remain so. Neither Phil, Mac, nor I were regular churchgoing guys; we never prayed before heading into combat. But because we’d survived the crash I had to at least consider the possibility of some kind of divine intervention. Just to be on the safe side, I thanked God for saving our lives. My buddies prayed with me. Of course, on life rafts that’s what you mostly do: you pray.
FOR THREE GUYS used to looking down at the ocean, we now found ourselves always looking up. Hours passed, the sun slid toward the horizon, the air grew damp, our stomachs growled. No rescue plane had appeared, so I portioned out some chocolate and resigned myself to a night at sea.
In the dark it quickly grew cold, and the chill penetrated our bones, making it almost impossible to sleep. Using the sea anchor, a hollow, collapsible piece of canvas a lot like the feed bag you put over a horse’s mouth, we scooped six inches of water into each raft and let our bodies warm it like a blanket. It worked. We finally drifted off into an exhausted, deathlike slumber.
The next morning we dried out in the sun and scanned the sky hopefully for planes. No one wanted to spend another night on the ocean.
For breakfast I figured we’d each have a little more water and some chocolate. We had enough for a week if we took it easy, but when I went for our rations the chocolate was gone.
I didn’t understand. I’d secured our supplies the night before, and the ocean had been calm; the chocolate couldn’t have washed overboard. I knew I hadn’t eaten it, and Phil, in the other raft, was too weak to move.
The obvious hit me: Mac.
“What did you do?” I hissed. “What did you do?” Phil stared at me. Mac said nothing, but his eyes opened wide and his expression turned pathetic. Almost funny.
“Why?” I asked.
Again, no response. But what could he say? Mac had no excuse for his actions. “I don’t know anyone who would do something like that,” I said. “We’re three together; we must cooperate and pull together, work together.” I wanted to crack him in the face again, but I didn’t. I turned away, disgusted. Mac was a weakling, a kid who’d broken something and didn’t want to take responsibility. What could I do with someone like that, kick him in the head? Sure his problem was psychological, induced by stress, but we were all under stress. Mac seemed helpless. He was numb and he knew he’d done wrong, no question. But why get angry? Besides, I truly believed we’d be picked up in a day or two. For a moment I even worried about him: Who knew what eating six bars of fortified chocolate would do to your insides?
I partly blamed myself for not anticipating his panic and his impulses. Mac never took proper care of himself. On the base he skipped our physical-fitness program. He chain-smoked. Drank. Spent his nights in Honolulu doing who knew what. He also missed meals. We had pretty good food in the dining room, but he’d come in, eat whatever was sweet, and leave. You couldn’t make him listen. Several cups of coffee and three pieces of pie? No problem. Mac had developed a sweet tooth long before he met our chocolate. I should have known I couldn’t trust him. Instead, I was like the guy who puts his hand in front of a rattlesnake expecting not to get bitten. Only a fool does that.
Everybody in the service gets the same combat training. We go to the front line with the same equipment. When the chips are down, some will panic and run and get court-martialed. Why? Because we’re not all brought up the same. I was raised to face any challenge. If a guy’s raised with short pants and pampering, sure, he goes through the same training, but in combat he can’t face it. He hasn’t been hardened to life.
It’s important to be hardened to life.
Today kids cut their teeth on video games. I’d rather play real games. This generation may be ready to handle robotic equipment and fly planes with computers, but are they ready to withstand the inevitable counterattack? Are they emotionally stable? Are they callous enough to accept hardship? Can they face defeat without falling apart?
Mac was good at his job because he had lots of practice, but I shouldn’t have expected any more from him on a human level. I still can’t imagine what he was thinking as he gobbled the chocolate, knowing that the next morning we would wake up and find it gone. I only knew that I couldn’t let it throw me.
THE SECOND MORNING the skies were overcast, making us harder to find. We waited, not saying much. Phil, at least, didn’t seem any worse off than the day before. I wondered how far we’d drifted. At about noon I heard the familiar yet faraway thunder of Pratt & Whitney motors overhead. I grabbed the flare gun just as I saw a B-24’s nose break through the clouds. She was so low I could recognize her as one of our own squadron. I wanted to place a flare by the pilot but didn’t because I was afraid I might hit the plane. Instead, I aimed where the waist gunners and tail gunner would see it and fired. The bomber made a ninety-degree turn and I shouted, “She sees us!”
Even Phil managed a smile.
But she hadn’t seen us. At first I thought, “Those stinkers; they’re not at their positions!” Yet, even to someone looking from as low as one thousand feet, our raft was a speck that blended in with the whitecaps. Then the clouds closed and the plane disappeared in the distance. I figured they’d try again the next day. For now, we were alone.
Well, not exactly alone. A couple of sharks had arrived. Occasionally they nosed the raft to test its strength, hoping—as only sharks can—for material flimsy enough to soon surrender us to their relentless hunger and waiting jaws. We were hungry, too, but we had to ignore it. Better just to sleep. Mac and I scooped a few inches of water into the rafts, and once again we all huddled down for the night.
YEARS LATER I learned from a crewman on our sister B-24 that we’d been officially reported missing at 04:30 the next morning. By dawn, the plane was out searching for us and did so for a whole week, until it had to return to Oahu for maintenance. By then we were presumed dead.
On the third day we heard another plane. I spotted a B-25 flying north, just a dot in the sky at about ten thousand feet. We fired flares, tossed dye into the sea, and said a prayer. The B-25 never swerved from her path.
Being stranded was bad enough, but now we had another worry. From the B-25’s position and course I could tell that we had drifted west, beyond the usual air lanes between islands. It meant that unless another miracle occurred, we had run out not only of chocolate but of chances for a quick rescue, and perhaps for a rescue at all.
With Phil incapacitated and Mac a mental wreck, both now depended on me. I had to muster all my resources and training because without food and with only a little fresh water remaining, I had no idea how long we could last. Imprisoned by the ocean, our only choice was to accept and adapt to the situation. I knew the trade winds came in from the east and were pushing us toward the Marshall or Gilbert Islands. But those were still a couple of thousand miles and many, many days away.
For a moment anxiety clutched me; the sea could swallow us all. But rather than give in, I made myself a promise: no matter what lay ahead, I’d never think about dying, only about living. Despite our situation, I felt so fortunate to be alive that I was actually happy. Maybe it seems odd now, but it didn’t then.