Book of the Day: the American Ace who refused to die in crashes

Edward V. Rickenbacker, Seven Came Through (Doubleday, Doran, & Co, 1943, special report by the Book League of America, whose royalty payment was donated by Rickenbacker and Doubleday, Doran to the Army Air Forces Aid Society Trust Fund). Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, 118 pp., some light wear around the jacket edges and staining to the back jacket material, but with a sound binding. Blue cloth boards with gold spine titling; debossed image of a westward-bound bomber on the cover. Good condition. HBB price: $15.

Edward Rickenbacker (1890-1973) was an American success story from the McKinley era, when any Ohio boy with a sixth-grade education and a knack for machinery could become a captain of industry. He turned his interest in autos into fame as an auto racer, and that into a driver’s job for America’s WW1 brass. He turned that into an entree to the Army Air Corps, whose gentlemen flyers might have hired him as a mechanic, and left war service as America’s leading flying ace, with 26 shootdowns. For a decade he was America’s most famous aviator, and in 1930 one of his eight Distinguished Service Crosses was converted to the Medal of Honor.

After the war, Rickenbacker tried to launch an auto company, applying radical advancements like four-wheel braking when the industry standard was two-wheel. Rickenbacker Motor Co failed and its founder went into bankruptcy as part of playing off its debts. He worked on the side for several General Motors brands, including Fokker, and grew keen on commercial flight.  He rescued a regional carrier, Eastern Air, from a junkheap conglomerate GM bought, and made it America’s first profitable airline. When GM decided to cash in, Rickenback enlisted wealthy friends to buy the airline in 1938 and became its president. On the side, he bought and ran the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from 1928 to 1945.

Nearly killed in an Eastern plane crash near Atlanta in 1941, Rickenbacker patched up not only himself but his fraught relationship with President Franklin Roosevelt, whose policies he considered socialist, especially when Roosevelt took US mail contracts from private airlines and returned them to the Army Air Corps.

During the war Rickenbacker carried out various missions for the government, including the one giving rise to Seven Came Through. Wikipedia reported,

One of Rickenbacker's most famous near-death experiences occurred in October 1942. Stimson sent him on a tour of air bases in the Pacific Theater of Operations to review both living conditions and operations, but also to deliver personally a secret message of rebuke to General Douglas MacArthur from the President for negative public comments MacArthur had made about the administration and disparaging cables sent to Marshall. After visiting several air and sea bases in Hawaii, Rickenbacker was provided an older B-17D Flying Fortress (AAF Ser. No. 40-3089) as transportation to the South Pacific. The bomber, (with a crew of eight) strayed hundreds of miles off course while on its way to a refueling stop on Canton Island and was forced to ditch in a remote and little-traveled part of the Central Pacific Ocean.

The failure in navigation has been ascribed to an out-of-adjustment celestial navigation instrument, a bubble octant, that gave a systematic bias to all of its readings. That octant reportedly had suffered a severe shock in a pre-takeoff mishap. The pre-takeoff mishap occurred during the first attempt to take off in a different bomber, but the landing gear's brakes seized mid-takeoff. They kept the same damaged bubble octant on a different plane, which caused the navigational failure. This unnecessary ditching spurred on the development of improved navigational instruments and also better survival gear for the air crewmen. The B-17's aircraft commander, former American Airlines pilot Captain William T. Cherry, Jr., was forced to ditch close to Japanese-held islands but the Americans were never spotted by Japanese patrol planes, and were adrift on the ocean for thousands of miles.

For 24 days, Rickenbacker, Army Captain Hans C. Adamson, his friend and business partner, and the rest of the 8 crewmen drifted in life rafts at sea. Rickenbacker was still suffering somewhat from his earlier airplane crash, and Capt. Adamson sustained serious injuries during the ditching. The other crewmen who were in the B-17, named Bartek, Reynolds, Whittaker, Cherry, Kaczmarczyk, and De Angelis, were hurt to varying degrees. The crewmen's food supply ran out after three days. Then, on the eighth day, a seagull landed on Rickenbacker's head. He warily and cautiously captured it, and then the survivors meticulously divided it into equal parts and used part of it for fishing bait. They lived on sporadic rain water that fell and similar food "miracles", like fingerlings that they caught with their bare hands.

Rickenbacker assumed leadership, encouraging and browbeating the others to keep their spirits up. One crewman, Alexander Kaczmarczyk, was suffering from dehydration. He drank sea water, knowing it was a bad idea. He died and was buried at sea. The U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy's patrol planes planned to abandon the search for the lost B-17 crewmen after just over two weeks, but Rickenbacker's wife persuaded them to extend it another week. The services agreed to do so. Once again, the newspapers and radio broadcasts reported that Rickenbacker was dead.

The seven split up. Cherry rowed off in the small raft and was rescued on day 23. Reynolds, De Angelis, and Whittwaker found a small island, close to another, inhabited one. The natives of the second one were hosting an allied radio station, so all was good for the men. Reynolds was extremely close to death. A U.S. Navy patrol OS2U-3 Kingfisher float-plane spotted and rescued the 3 survivors on November 13, off the coast of Nukufetau in Tuvalu. All were suffering from hyperthermia, sunburn, dehydration, and near-starvation. Rickenbacker completed his assignment and delivered his message, which has never been made public, to General MacArthur. Rickenbacker had thought that he had been lost for 21 days and wrote a book about this experience titled Seven Came Through, published by Doubleday, Doran. It was not until later that he recalculated the number of days, and he corrected himself in his autobiography in 1967. The pilot of the plane that rescued the survivors, Lieutenant William F. Eadie, USN, was awarded the Navy's Air Medal for his actions during the rescue.

The story was also recounted in Lt. James Whittaker's book We Thought We Heard the Angels Sing, published in 1943.

The story of Rickenbacker's ordeal has been used as an example for Alcoholics Anonymous when the first of their Twelve Traditions was formulated: "Our common welfare should come first. Personal recovery depends upon AA unity."

Kirkus Weekly noted the pioneering “instabook” quality of the story:

This will probably -- from the sales angle -- prove to be the They Were Expendable of the Spring. Personally, I confess to some degree of disappointment in the book -- there is no attempt to cut any deeper than the already widely publicized story of the experience published in Life. I had hoped for deeper plumbing of the psychological aspects, for some of the challenge that his brief radio speech, after his return, carried to every listener. Three quarters of the book retrace the many times told record of survival against odds, a story that parallels in many aspects the story of The Raft. The last quarter is virtually a ""report to the nation"" of his findings, such as can be released, on our air power in action, his recommendations as to improvements in equipment of emergency gear, his brief indictment of the failures of labor and industry to measure up to the needs and the spirit of the men at the front. Interestingly at variance with the position of Allan Michie in THE AIR OFFENSIVE AGAINST GERMANY (reviewed below), and one could wish that Rickenbacker had expanded his claims rather than making categorical (and perhaps too rose-spectacled) statements of the things we like to hear. Sure to best sell.

After the war, Rickenbacker led Eastern to become America’s most-profitable airline. He seemed to lose his touch, however. He was forced out as CEO in 1959 and retired as chairman in 1963. His 1967 memoir was a bestseller.