Lost at Sea

February 20, 2023
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.

March 1, 2023
The final heroic episode in a hero's life. Throughout his life, Eddie Rickenbacker (1890-1973) regularly occupied the front pages. A famous race car driver before World War I, he ended the war as America's greatest fighter ace, won the Medal of Honor, thrilled the nation with aviation records during the 1920s, and retired to turn Eastern Air Lines into a profitable company. Military historian Wukovits, author of Pacific Alamo, Hell From the Heavens, and other books, delivers a compelling account of Rickenbacker's early years, dominated by auto racing and flying. Though he was successful in both ventures, he also seemed to be accident-prone. This was partly owing to primitive machines, but he also experienced a February 1941 crash as a passenger on one of his Eastern Air Lines planes. Horribly injured with multiple fractures, he spent four months in the hospital and never entirely recovered. During World War II, the middle-aged Rickenbacker toured the world as an inspirational speaker and adviser. In October 1942, he flew from Hawaii toward Australia, but defective navigation caused the plane to miss its first stop, run out of fuel, and ditch. Rickenbacker and a few others escaped on three tiny rubber rafts with few tools, no fresh water or protection from the elements, and little food. It took 24 days for them to be rescued, and Wukovits delivers a detailed account of their suffering from maddening thirst, starvation, burning sun during the day, bitter-cold, wet nights, and painful injuries from the crash. In interviews and books that followed, Rickenbacker took credit for their survival. Wukovits and many other historians (but not all) agree, and the author shows how Rickenbacker refused to lose hope, encouraging and often bullying the others to maintain morale. All added their gratitude to God, and Wukovits pays close attention to their religious backgrounds and emphasizes that the doubters and atheists among them admitted their errors. A gripping survival story.

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April 1, 2023
As his 1973 New York Times obituary stated, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was ""a larger-than-life figure cast in the same mold as legendary folk heroes."" While Wukovits' meticulously detailed history focuses on the captain's 23-day WWII ordeal while he and his men were lost in the Pacific, it is also a page-turner that provides a thrilling account of a towering figure. Rickenbacker rose from humble, immigrant origins to became a renowned race car driver. His speed and accuracy served Rickenbacker well when he took to the wartime skies as a fighter plane ace in WWI. Twenty years later, the pilot cemented his place in history by leading a desperate party of men lost at sea through weeks of threats from sharks, storms, hunger, thirst, delusion, fatigue, and Japanese Navy ships to survival and safety. This well-referenced and illustrated, exciting and illuminating work uses the character of a bona fide hero as a key to unlock the mystery of what makes some individuals ascend to greatness in the face of adversity.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.