Miracle at sea: during World War II, flying ace Edward Rickenbacker and his crewmates crashed at sea. Their belief in God strengthened them to survive, and Providence rewarded their faith.

"We'll try the box procedure first," the pilot told the old ace. They were lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The B-17D "Flying Fortress" had by that point obviously overflown its intended destination, Canton Island, a tiny eight-by-ten mile South Pacific island with a secret airstrip. American forces used Canton Island as a refueling stop for ferrying men or messages between Hawaii and Australia.

The old ace, Edward V. Rickenbacker, was now a civilian assisting in the war effort. On this ill-fated flight, he carried a secret message from Secretary of Defense Henry L. Stimson to Pacific Commanding General Douglas McArthur. But he and the other seven men on the plane were now less concerned with their various missions than with finding a place to land.

The crew took a risk by breaking radio silence. At this stage of the war--October 20, 1942--the Japanese still held islands several hundred miles west of Canton. Although the Americans could reach Canton on the radio, the island base had not yet been equipped with radar (a new invention at the time), and Canton couldn't tell the plane how far they were from land or even what direction to fly to get there. The plane's radio operator asked Canton to shoot up antiaircraft shells to burst above the low-flying cumulus clouds, but none of the crew or passengers saw anything but the "islands" created by the cloud formations.

The crew consisted of the pilot, Captain William T. Cherry Jr. of Texas, co-pilot Second Lieutenant James C. Whittaker, Navigator Lt. John J. DeAngelis, Radio Operator Sgt. James W. Reynolds and Mechanic Pvt. John F. Bartek. The passengers included Rickenbacker and his aide, Col. Hans Adamson, along with Sgt. Alexander T. Kaczmarczyk, who was returning to duty after an appendectomy.

Cherry agreed to "box the compass"--that is, to take a 90-degree right-hand turn every 45 minutes--in an effort to cover as much of the area as possible. But unbeknownst to those on board, stronger than expected tailwinds had blown them more than 4013 miles south of their destination. Or maybe it was because the navigation equipment had been damaged during takeoff. They didn't know. And they didn't have enough fuel for even all four legs of the box.

As the B-17D began to run out of fuel, Capt. Cherry decided to attempt a controlled landing on water. Rickenbacker and the rest of the crew lightened the plane by jettisoning all of the nonessentials out the bottom hatch, from priority U.S. Mail to Rickenbacker's beautiful suitcase, a Christmas gift from Eastern Airlines employees.

Rickenbacker and Adamson carefully prepared the life rafts--along with food rations, thermoses of coffee and water bottles--near the hatch for the inevitable crash. If they were lucky, the plane wouldn't break up and they would have two or three minutes before the plane sank under water. Rickenbacker wrapped a 60-foot rope around his waist; stuffed his pockets with cigarettes, a chocolate bar and a little crucifix a friend had given him in 1917: and then braced himself against a parachute. Others covered themselves with mattresses and braced themselves against walls.

Adamson noted that Rickenbacker had a "calm, conversational tone" as the plane descended to the endless blue-green sea. Rickenbacker had faced death before, as an ace in World War I, and many years later in an airline crash in Atlanta.

Into the Sea

Cherry placed the plane down perfectly, despite the sea's heavy swells. He had landed the plane in a trough between the 12-foot swells, tail first, and the plane remained intact as it slowed from 90 miles per hour to zero in 30 feet. Everyone survived the crash, though Adamson suffered whiplash from the quick stop, and Reynolds gashed his nose.

The crew helped the injured members and pulled the three life rafts out onto the floating wings of the plane. But no sooner had they mounted the undersized rafts than someone asked who had the water. They quickly discovered that they had forgotten not only the water but the coffee and rations. Though someone suggested going back into the plane for them, Rickenbacker and others warned against it. "Don't be a fool. That plane's going to sink any second." But the flying fortress held together so well after Cherry's masterful controlled landing that it stayed afloat for another three minutes, six minutes in all. "That was another mistake," Rickenbacker later recalled.

The eight men pooled their food: a mere four oranges. The chocolate bars and cigarettes had been mined by the salt water, so the men threw them away. They had no water. They managed to save a flare gun. and each of the two larger rafts had a fishing pole and hooks without bait.

They tied their rafts together with Rickenbacker's rope and agreed to eat one orange (one-eighth of one orange per man) every other day, in case the rescue would take a number of days. And the men were crowded on the rafts. The two "five-man" rafts measured only 6'9" long by 2'4" wide inside, hardly enough for the three people who had squeezed into each of them. The "three-man" raft was so small that DeAngelis and Kaczmarczyk could only stay inside by putting their legs over each other's shoulders.

As night drew on, Rickenbacker detected something bumping the bottom of his raft. Bartek had cut his hand severely when freeing the life rafts from the plane earlier that day, and blood from his fingers had stained the water. Rickenbacker guessed correctly that a shark was bumping the raft, but found out in the morning that it was not feeding-related. The 10-foot shark was trying to rub a 6-inch leech off its head. Nevertheless, the shark's presence made clear the dangers outside the life rafts.

Throughout the long ordeal at sea. Rickenbacker silently struggled to remain relatively still in the cramped conditions. He suffered from a terrible stiffness in his legs that could only be overcome by constant walking--a consequence of a February 26, 1941 crash in Atlanta aboard one of his Eastern Airlines transport planes.

The Atlanta crash had left him barely alive, but it also taught him to fight against death to the last. "He's more dead than alive," a rescuer had remarked When he saw Rickenbacker. "Let's take care of the live ones." But "Rick," as his friends called him, lived anyway, despite a smashed hip, broken pelvis, crushed left arm and an eyeball out of its socket resting on his cheek. "You may have heard that dying is unpleasant, but don't you believe it," Rickenbacker wrote in his autobiography. "Dying is the sweetest, tenderest, most sensuous sensation I have ever experienced. Death comes disguised as a sympathetic friend.... It is easy to die. You have to fight to live."

A year and a half after the Atlanta crash, Rickenbacker still walked with a cane and was unable to sit still for even an hour at a time. Yet he resolved that "not one of the other seven men would ever know it." Now 52 years old, he found his purpose among the stranded men in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: "It was clear that God had had a purpose in keeping me alive. It was to help the others, to bring them through. I had been saved to serve." Though Rickenbacker deferred to Capt. Cherry for overall command of the life raft flotilla, he decided to lead the group by his example. He recognized that the men looked up to him because of his WWI exploits. Therefore, even the hint of a complaint about the stiffness in his legs would be unthinkable. "Somebody was going to have to hold them together, and that somebody would have to be me," he later recorded.

The group discussed their coming rescue, which they surely expected would occur before the last orange would be devoured on the eighth day. The first orange was cut in eight equal pieces, with each man eating his piece, peel and all. Rickenbacker and Cherry saved their peels for bait, but caught nothing. Cherry kept the three boats from crashing into each other by using his undershirt and his raft's two aluminum oars as a sail. The tiny sail kept the flotilla moving and the rafts far enough apart.

By the end of the second day, the power of the sun, reflecting back up from the sea, had sunburned everyone, especially the fair-skinned Bartek and Kaczmarczyk. Reynolds, who had only shorts on, also fared poorly. The constant exposure to the sun burned even Rickenbacker's face and body, despite his hat and leather jacket. Others less thoroughly covered suffered terribly from bums and blisters, and their skin peeled off in patches. Their exposed skin became open and bloody sores that wouldn't heal, with salt-water spray constantly being blown into the wounds.

Worst off was Alex Kaczmarczyk. He hadn't fully recovered from his surgery, and be had fallen under the water and taken in several huge mouthfuls of seawater as he mounted his tiny life raft on the day of the crash. He sometimes wretched with dry heaves at night, and he constantly cried out for water.

Remembering God

With morale ebbing, Rickenbacker realized that he would have to fortify the men's will to live by rekindling their faith in God. "My religion had always been a quiet, personal thing. I had not worshipped formally since Sunday-school days. Now, for the first time in all those years, I realized that I should share my faith with others and help them to find strength through God."

Rickenbacker insisted that everyone--even the atheists Adamson and Whittaker--participate in the prayer service. The strong-willed Whittaker openly mocked the effort, and remained a skeptical and reluctant participant in the prayer and hymn-singing services. DeAngelis later recounted: "Whittaker was outright resentful of anything we did concerning prayer ... especially of myself. He ridiculed me and told me 'anybody knows,' he says, 'nobody is going to help us now. It's just yourself. If you can do it, okay.'" But everyone participated in one way or another. Col. Adamson read a passage of the Gospel of Matthew, from a copy of the New Testament that Bartek had brought along with him:

   Therefore take no thought, saying,
   What shall we eat? or, What
   shall we drink? or, Wherewithal
   shall we be clothed? ... 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.

They held prayer services twice daily, in the morning and afternoon, and occasionally sang hymns they could remember.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Captain Cherry, a Baptist and goateed Texan with cowboy boots, led the prayer. At the end of the service, Rickenbacker drifted off to sleep with his hat over his face as a shield from the sun. Moments later, he awoke suddenly with the unmistakable sensation that a bird had landed on his hat. Slowly raising his hand until it was level with his head, he snatched up the bird by the legs. Rickenbacker identified it as a sea gull in his autobiography, but Whittaker recorded it as a sea swallow in his memoirs. Whatever kind of bird it was, nobody wasted time worrying about the species classification. Rickenbacker quickly wrung the bird's neck and divided it up eight ways, saving the intestines for fishing bait. The starving men devoured the tough bird, bones and all, and then tossed the two fishing lines out. Cherry immediately landed a foot-long mackerel, and Rickenbacker pulled in a sea bass. The group cut up the mackerel and saved the bass for the following day. Everyone recovered to some degree after having eaten their first real meal in four days.

Rickenbacker later recalled in his autobiography: "There was not one of us who was not aware that our gull had appeared just after we had finished our prayer service." The men are the sea bass the next day, but were only able to catch a small shark with the organs they had saved. The shark meat was too distasteful for even the starving men to eat. They used the shark parts as bait, but the live sharks that grabbed the bait pulled the fishing poles out to sea.

Rickenbacker's and Whittaker's historical accounts of the voyage differed regarding certain details, such as what happened on which day. This is not surprising, considering that the relentless sun, hunger and thirst had driven all of them to a half-conscious delirium. But both Rickenbacker and Whittaker recalled that, after losing the fishing poles, they had no food, no prospects of obtaining more food, and diminishing hopes of rescue. Having experienced one miracle, they all expected another, and when it was not immediately forthcoming, they became discouraged and despondent," Rickenbacker wrote.

Rickenbacker had called the sea bird a "gift from heaven." And Heaven had more to give. On the eighth day at sea, Cherry led the prayer service, finishing with a plea for water. At the time, the men were near death from dehydration. But by evening, the crew noticed a few sprinkles of rain. At midnight, lightning on the horizon indicated a storm raging across the Pacific. Rickenbacker and the men put together a plan to quench their thirst from the rain. According to the plan, they would use their rancid, salt-soaked clothing to gather rain, and then wring them out into bailing buckets.

At first, the life rafts were literally on the edge of the storm, and they could only taste a few drops of the fresh rain that came their way. But the men decided to try to row into the rainsquall, in order to be in the midst of heavier rain. Rickenbacker wrote that he really believed he and the little flotilla of sick men were able to row into the middle of the storm, though the storm undoubtedly moved toward them.

The men held out their clothes to catch the rain, wringing them out a few times to rinse out the salt and stench before wringing the precious water into the two bailing buckets--or directly into their mouths. The storm created heavy seas, and the tiny raft with DeAngelis and Kaczmarczyk temporarily separated from the other two rafts. The men saved about a quart of water, which was stored in compartments of the air-inflatable life vests they called "Mae Wests."

Alex Kaczmarczyk's health eventually failed him, despite the fact the group had doubled, then tripled, water rations for his sake. Thirst had driven the poor man to drink seawater at night, which only made his thirst greater. His mouth and gums rotted away with disease, and he died during the night of the 12th day at sea. DeAngelis performed what parts he remembered of a burial service, and the men gently slipped Kaczmarczyk off the raft into the sea.

The survivors fully realized the odds were against any of them making it home alive, and if they had been able to read the headlines back home, they might have been even more despondent. Several newspapers had reported their fate as hopeless, including those in Rickenbacker's adopted hometown of New York City. The New York Daily News had already published an editorial obituary under the headline "Good-bye Rickenbacker." But his wife Adelaide never doubted he had survived.

A Fighting Spirit

Rickenbacker himself had always demonstrated a strong spirit and will to survive. The third of eight children, he had quit school in the seventh grade after his father died, and found work so that his mother and oldest sister Mary could raise his younger brothers and sisters. He had advanced through sheer will power. Willing to work hard and to do whatever honest labor needed to be done no matter how menial, he became a mechanic after volunteering to sweep up an automotive shop in his native Columbus. Before volunteering for service in World War I, he became a race car driver of national renown.

Though technically not qualified to be a pilot (he lacked a college education and was older than the 25-year-old age maximum for pilot training), the mechanic secretly trained himself to fly and eventually became a commissioned pilot. Flying outdated French Nieuport airplanes at first, and later a French Spad fighter, Rickenbacker earned more kills than any other American pilot in the war--26. He eventually became a captain and commander of the famed 94th "Hat in the Ring" squadron. Congress awarded him a Congressional Medal of Honor in 1930 for his bold solo attack against five German Fokker fighters, two of which he shot down.

After World War I, he launched the Rickenbacker Automobile Company, which failed after enjoying some early success. But he succeeded in building up the Indianapolis Speedway he had purchased in 1919 (and sold in 1945), and he organized Eastern Airlines from two tiny regional air earners into one of the largest passenger lines in the sky. Eastern thrived first as an arm of General Motors, and later as an independent company. Eastern became the first airline to generate a profit without a government subsidy, and continued to earn a profit every year Rickenbacker was the president, in which capacity he served until 1959.

Rickenbacker had spent a lifetime defying death as a race car driver and a pilot. He had struggled to overcome seemingly hopeless odds before, and this trial at sea would be no exception. He steeled himself to survive, and to inspire others to survive. "To some I spoke with encouragement; I was as soft and gentle as a mother," Rickenbacker wrote. Regarding that encouragement, Bartek recalled: "I said to myself if Eddie can do it, I can do it. That gave me the confidence to go on. As long as Eddie was there I felt confident. I didn't think I was as good as Eddie but I knew that I could do it because I was younger." At the same time, some of the men hated Rickenbacker. "But others required stronger medicine," Rickenbacker wrote. "I rode them; I tore them to pieces; I struck at every raw nerve in their bodies." And he did. "I learned later that several of the boys had sworn an oath that they would continue living for the pleasure of burying me at sea." Rickenbacker was pleased by this attitude, noting that if a man "could snarl back at me, he could snarl back at death."

After Kaczmarczyk's death, the group encountered another miracle of food and more storms. Even the atheist Whittaker was beginning to become a believer. In his memoirs, Whittaker recalled: "I was finding God in those watery wastes and we were meeting as strangers." They didn't see any birds in the sky when Cherry fired a flare after dusk one evening. Nor did they have any fishing poles. But the flare turned out to be a dud. The shell went up only 50 feet before plummeting into the water by the rafts. However, the still-burning shell revealed a school of mackerel frantically evading pursuing barracuda. The panic induced by the underwater flare and the barracuda caused the mackerel to jump out of the water, and two of them landed in the rafts. The men were able to grab the fish just before the flare went out and darkness resumed.

Another rainsquall came, and again the men were able to quench their thirst. The group was also able to catch and eat tiny, minnow-sized fish that occasionally hovered face-first at the rafts.

But the men were fading fast. Most had lost 50 pounds by that time, and tiny Reynolds was an emaciated wreck. Bartek wasn't much better off. Adamson was the worst off mentally, and at one point he cast himself overboard to lessen the burden on his fellows. DeAngelis still had some spirit left, but little strength. Cherry, Whittaker and Rickenbacker retained the most fight.

On the 18th day, they began sighting airplanes, though the airplanes didn't see them. "I think it's time we were giving Providence a little help," Cherry announced on the morning of the 20th day. He said he would split off alone in the small raft, since three rafts apart would be easier to spot than three together. "When one raft is found, they'll start a real search and pick up the others," he argued. Rickenbacker opposed the idea, and Col. Adamson, agreeing with Rickenbacker, ordered Cherry to remain. But as commanding officer, Capt. Cherry left without even replying. Less than an hour later, Whittaker separated his raft. With him were DeAngelis and Reynolds.

Cherry was picked up by a Navy "Kingfisher" seaplane later that day. Whittaker's raft managed to find land on the tiny island of Nukufetau the next day, where natives alerted the nearest American base. Rickenbacker, Bartek and Adamson continued to drift before finally being spotted by a Navy "Kingfisher" on the 23rd day. Had Cherry not separated, it is likely the rest never would have been found since the search effort wouldn't have been accelerated. "We had drifted through the Ellice Islands, a full 500 miles southwest of Canton," Rickenbacker wrote. "The next group was another 500 miles across the open sea."

Through it all, the men credited their prayers and faith in God as their salvation on the voyage. "It was my newfound faith in God that sustained me. Of this I am sure," Whittaker, the atheist-turned-believer, said on the day of his rescue. Later Whittaker, obviously recognizing that God helps those who help themselves, said: "I hope if I ever have to go through hell like that again, Eddie Rickenbacker or someone like him will be along."