Rescue at Sea

One of 16 B-29s on the way from California to Great Britain was having trouble with its radio compass. The pilot asked for a radio bearing, got it. It was three hours later when Kindley Air Force Base in Bermuda heard from it again. This time the message was terse, urgent: the B-29 was running out of gas and preparing to ditch. A few minutes later the Coast Guard cutter Bibb heard a faint SOS. After that, there was nothing.

Aboard the big bomber, Lieut. Colonel John Grable Jr. remembered later, he had passed the ditching order back through the intercom: "It wasn't the nicest thing to tell the boys because the seas were running high. We threw everything into the sea that we didn't need. We got all the rest of our stuff together and looked down at the ocean." Then, somewhere about 400 miles northeast of Bermuda, the B-29 smacked into the rolling Atlantic swell with a rending jolt. There was another jolt as the big bomber's high-finned tail snapped off.

Two Red Flares. Splashing through cold, tumbling waves, 18 of the plane's 20 passengers safely reached two life rafts they had managed to launch before the aircraft sank. But two enlisted men disappeared before their companions could reach them through the swells. Crowded aboard two rafts built to hold only six men apiece, the survivors settled down to the bruising, salt-sprayed hours of waiting.

Foaming 20-ft. waves burst over the rafts, and the chafing salt burns grew so bad that the airmen soon had to cut their heavy G.I. shoes away. Rain squalls swept past in raw, chilling gusts. Huddled painfully together, their knees jammed under their chins, the men in the rafts rode out the first night and second day. Now & then they heard search planes passing in one of the greatest air-rescue operations in peacetime history, but the aircraft were hampered by a lowering ceiling and the rafts were not sighted. It was not until after dusk of the second day that a search-plane crew spotted two red flares set off by the castaways.

Bobbing Flotsam. Drifting, drinking rain water, munching the hard candy which was all they had saved from their emergency rations, the survivors spent a second sleepless night. Colonel Grable caught a two-foot yellowtail, but lost it before he could bring it aboard. One raft overturned twice; all but two flares were lost and the emergency radio would no longer work. Overhead, the men still heard the sound of crisscrossing search planes, twice sighted ships but were unable to attract the attention of the searchers.

The weather worsened. But the third evening, a search pilot picked up unmistakable signs of debris from the sunken B29: a cluster of red and yellow boxes, a slab of aluminum, a bobbing flotsam of abandoned baggage. Another search plane was just heading back to base when its tail gunner thought he spotted a light. The plane turned back and at that moment the castaways decided to risk one of the last flares. "We knew then," said the search pilot, "that we had found them."

Eighteen Heroes. Next day a sharp-eyed sergeant in a B-17 spotted the two life rafts tied together just off his plane's left wing. The B-17 circled to drop smoke bombs and green-dye markers, then flew in low to release a parachute-borne "Flying Dutchman" lifeboat. "It was a beautiful drop," said Grable. "Right in our laps." Seventy-nine hours after their B-29 went down, the bearded, haggard survivors were hoisted safely over the rail of the Canadian destroyer Haida.

As the Haida arrived at Bermuda the next afternoon, cheering islanders put out in small boats to welcome the destroyer. Newsmen crowded around to hear about the saga. "What did we talk about?" repeated Grable. "Well--'will you please move over and give me some room?' Only we didn't say 'please.' " Was there any hero in the lot? "Yeah," rumbled one ' sergeant, "there was 18 of them."

It was a bad week for the B-29s. Less than 24 hours after the Bermuda crash, two B-29s on a 13-plane training flight from Spokane collided in the midnight sky over Stockton, Calif., fell spinning into the rich peat lands of the San Joaquin River delta. Only three of 21 crew members parachuted to safety. Two days later a rescue plane taking off from Tampa, Fla. to join the Bermuda hunt spouted smoke and flames from its No. 4 engine, swung back to the field but plowed into the tideland muck 500 feet short of the runway. The toll: five dead. So far in November two other B-29s had gone down, both because of engine trouble. Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg grounded all B-29s whose engines had not been overhauled and modernized.

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