I just finished reading a French translation of Robert
Trumbull’s book The Raft.
It recounts the miraculous survival of an American aviator
crew, who, during the Pacific war, lose their bearings in the sky and fail to
return to their aircraft. Running out of petrol, the pilot Harold Dixon
successfully ditches their plane in the Pacific just before nightfall. As he
and his crew, radioman Gene Aldrich and gunner Tony Pastula, are preparing
their life raft and scramble to collect the emergency necessities they can lay
their hands on, the plane suddenly sinks away under them, leaving the three men
in the water in the middle of the ocean with nothing but a ridiculous small,
half inflated raft.
The book I read is a cheap 1953 edition with a foreword by
the famous Alain Bombard, the adventurer who crossed the Atlantic on an
inflatable raft in 1952.
Bombard had willingly put himself in an emergency situation
in order to proof several of his survival theories. He did cross the Ocean and
survived without water or food rations for at least 53 days. While the general public embraced his
sympathetic odyssey and his book “The voyage of the Hérétique” became an
overnight bestseller, his crude theories, notably on drinking sea-water and his
media exposure had turned the professional sea-people, the very people he
wanted to reach, away from him.
It does not come as a surprise then, that he accepted to
scribble a foreword for a book that was attempting to cash in on his own
success. Bombard needed more real stories to confirm that what he had done was
possible and that his conclusions could save people.
The story of the survival of the airplane crew was written
ten year earlier, in 1942, during the War in the Pacific and is understandably
heavily censored. There are practically no geographic or navigational details
as to where the plane ditched and how the raft drifted during the 34 days at
sea. The post-war French edition however mentions in a footnote that “it is now
save to say that the wrecked crew landed on the Pukapuka atoll on the South
seas, approximately 10 degrees south of the equator and 166 degrees west".
The writer Robert Trumbull was a young war correspondent
covering the war in the Pacific. I suppose he interviewed the three men but he
wrote the story solely from Harry Dixon’s (the officer) point of view. Without
doubt commissioned by the Us Army, the 200 page story offered the troops an
inspiring survival story with true heroics, a respect for military hierarchy
and fear of God.
Struggling in the dark in the ocean, the three men succeed
after half an hour of intense efforts to inflate, righten ( it opened
upside-down ) and crawl into the tiny rubber boat of 1.2 by 2.4 m. With the
plane sinking so fast, no food, water, navigational tools or anything that
could have helped them, could be saved and embarked on board. The three men are
virtually strangers of each other. The rotation of crews have put the forty
year professional military sailor in the boat with two twenty year old boys.
Together, during 34 days they survive strong winds and heavy
seas, they fight of sharks with their bare hands, they starve and are
dehydrated, they are burned alive by the tropical sun, scorched by the salt and
blinded by the piercing light.
Still they survive and are finally washed upon the shore of
a tropical island. The story ends with a warship collecting the three men a few
weeks later.
There is no reason to doubt the details described in the
story and it is concern of how much these heroic men can take that keeps you
reading about their ordeal.
Still, it is a pity that the story is censored. One can’t
help wondering about the debriefing of the crew once they were back at their
base. How did they lose their way ? Whose fault was it ? Did they discuss it in
the raft ? Did they agree on a common story. Fact is that despite the loss of
the plane, the three men were decorated and mentioned for their bravery.
The survival lessons from the ordeal were quick to be
implemented.
The navigational issues, that is to say how to estimate your
position with nothing but your senses was addressed already the next year with
Harold Gatty’s groundbreaking work The Raft Book ( 1943 ), a collection of
Polynesian techniques of non-instrument navigation. Gatty was an experienced
Tasmanian mariner who had written down and used all kind’s of techniques still
used by wayfarers in Polynesia. The Raft Book would turn out to be the kernel
out of which the Polynesian cultural revival as masters of navigation would
sprout.
I don’t know how fast improvements to the raft were made but
inflatable rafts nowadays are fully equipped to avoid most of the issues
described in The Raft : An inflatable canopy for protection against the weather
elements, with an outside light for easy detection at night. There is a
boarding ramp and grab handle for easy embarking, There are water and food
canisters on board, flares, a knife, fishing kit, rain catching systems, first
aid kit, signaling mirrors and even a torch.
Despite the book’s spare information, it remains an
interesting read and a poignant story. It was recently retold in a motion
picture under the apt title “Against The Sun”.
The truth however is that the three men survive by sheer
luck. This is not to belittle their exploit, but without the regular shower of
rain and the clemency of the weather they would not have made it. The fact that
they are not ripped apart on the coral reef when finally reaching land and that
they do so a few days before a cyclone batters the area where they drifted for
so long time, are miracles on their own right.
The men's true heroism lies in their perseverance.
Maybe the sea is not that cruel after all…
