Lost at Sea: Eddie Rickenbacker’s Twenty-Four Days Adrift in the Pacific—A World War II Tale of Courage and Faith

Historian Wukovits (Dogfight over Tokyo) delivers an immersive account of wartime disaster and survival. On Oct. 21, 1942, WWI fighter ace and airline executive Eddie Rickenbacker and seven others took off from Hawaii on a goodwill tour of U.S. bases in the South Pacific. After faulty navigation led their B-17 hundreds of miles off course, they ran out of fuel, crash-landed in the ocean, and escaped the sinking plane in three small life rafts. The 52-year-old Rickenbacker used “every trick” he knew to get his younger companions not to succumb to despair: “He loved hearing someone call him a son-of-a-bitch,” writes Wukovits, “as it proved that the individual still retained the will to live.” In addition to Rickenbacker’s “hard-nosed determination,” Wukovits credits “faith and prayer” with helping all but one member of the group to survive, and points out that the decision to separate the cluster of rafts to increase the odds of an airplane or ship spotting them—which Rickenbacker initially opposed—led to their discovery and rescue. Drawing largely from survivors’ accounts, Wukovits viscerally describes their ordeal and conveys the miraculous nature of the outcome. Readers will be gripped. (May)