Of Hell and Prayers

The pain-racked frame, the deep-lined face, the grave voice were those of a man who had seen the horrors of war and the mysteries of death--and lived to tell the tale. Perhaps better than anyone he could tell the U.S. what war really meant.

The man was Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who with six others was miraculously plucked from tiny rubber rafts in the middle of the South Pacific (TIME, Nov. 23). In War Secretary Stimson's conference room last week Captain Eddie told a group of newsmen his moving story of 24 torturing days adrift:

Frankly & Humbly. Just after midnight on Oct. 21 Captain Eddie, with seven Army officers and enlisted men, climbed into a Flying Fortress, took off on a special mission to the South Pacific. By next morning the compass had gone awry, the radio was out of kilter, they were lost. They crash-landed in the ocean, clambered into three rafts.

Captain Eddie talked as if out of a bottomless memory: "We organized little prayer meetings in the evening and morning. Frankly and humbly we prayed for deliverance. .. . Then we prayed for food." The Captain glanced at the newsmen, resumed in a low, slow voice: "If it wasn't for the fact I had seven witnesses, I wouldn't dare tell this story because it seems so fantastic. But within an hour after prayer meeting a sea gull came in and landed on my head." They ate the gull raw, used its innards for bait. They caught two fish, ate them raw, too.

Then Captain Rickenbacker told how death came to a 22-year-old sergeant, the only crew member lost. He swallowed salt water when his raft overturned, drank more later, died of saltwater poisoning and starvation. Captain Eddie stared hard at the table in front of him: "On the eleventh night this boy was very low. The waves kept beating over the raft. . . . For two nights I cuddled him like a mother would, hold a child, trying to give him warmth from my body. At 3 a.m. I heard his final gasp. . . ." Then came the rescue by a Navy flying boat, the trip home.

Plea to Americans. Captain Eddie was far from through. The man who outrode death as a race-track driver, a World War I ace and an airline operator had learned much on the Pacific that he wanted to tell the U.S. He spoke of the ordeal of American boys on the Pacific battlefronts ; begged war workers to make superhuman efforts to turn out more goods. Said he: "If they could bring the combat troops back here and put them in the factories we would have production doubled in 30 days' time."

Then he pleaded with civilians to sacrifice more, complain less. "The cry and objection to being rationed on rubber and gasoline seem so insignificant, so ridiculous, when we see what the boys at the front have got. ... If people only knew that the saving of one old rubber tire makes it possible to produce one of those rafts, which might be responsible, as it has been in our case, for saving seven men . . . they might not worry whether they have their automobiles on weekends. . . ."

The newsmen blinked, rose, applauded, quietly filed out.

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