Page 4

(Had Fuel Oil in One Eye)

Had Fuel Oil in One Eye

We discovered later why this was [that there were no other survivors around]. A number of people had jumped off the ship at the first inclination [when the ship started to list], or they had slid off the deck, and since she did go down rapidly, she had not lost way [forward motion], and apparently these people had been left to the rear of us. So that when we got in the water, there was consequently nobody except the three or four we heard who were yelling for help.

We managed to get along very nicely during the first two days. The sea was quite rough, the wind was not very high and we were not uncomfortable because none of us had been badly injured and were at that time in fairly good shape. As each hour went by, people became more exhausted from lack of sleep and from the usual tension caused by wondering whether we were going to be sighted or not. It gradually sapped people's strength.

To go back to the midnight of Sunday [when the ship sank] after we had gotten into the water, I don't believe anybody saw anything at all that night. Most people had been sucked down by the ship or were full of fuel oil and salt water and were violently ill or else so exhausted that they lay more or less in a stupor. I was fortunate, insofar as I had not been sucked under. I had only one eye that I had gotten fuel oil in and I could see with my other eye. The rest of the people, their eyes were filled with fuel oil and consequently, they spent a very uncomfortable 36 to 48 hours trying to get the fuel oil out of their eyes. It smarts very badly, you are not to uncomfortable when your eyes are closed for any length of time. Its rather peculiar that when you open them for about the first ten minutes, you have a very excruciating, smarting feeling in your eyes. Then it subsides and your eyes are quite comfortable. When you close them again, you have exactly the same smarting feeling. So that it was a question of either trying to keep them open when you got them open, or trying to keep them closed when you got them closed.

This Alert, this Quartermaster, Third Class, took a large piece of canvas, there is a large piece of canvas in each bag, and by the way, one of the other rafts had a bag of canvas, or had the usual canvas bag with the matches, first aid kit and such as that in it, so that he was able to make hats for everybody. That was the thing, I believe, that saved most of us from very bad sunburn. He made sort of cornucopia type hat[s] and during the heat of the day we pulled that down over our ears. You could pull the collar of the life jacket up above your neck, of course; we were sitting in the water and you could keep your hands under cover. That and the fact that we were all covered with fuel oil, I believe, is the reason that none of us were badly burned.

The first night, the first day, Monday, and Tuesday night, were, as I say, very uncomfortable. We then had two days of almost no wind and a glassy [calm] sea. However, the sea still contained those long rolling swells which did not permit you to see very far. Also during the nights and the days, we had seen a number of planes. At night we would fire the Very stars at the planes which to us were very clear. We could, in cases, see their red and their green running lights; we also, at one period, saw their revolving white light, which I thought meant that they had seen us.

We knew now that these eight or nine planes that we saw and that we either during the day time flashed these signal mirrors, the emergency signal mirror at, nobody ever saw the mirror, us, or any of the Very stars. The reason being, of course, that planes fly too high to see anything visually. They need their radar, they are looking at their radar and also their instrument board, and they naturally, at the height they fly, you cannot see an individual in the water. You cannot see a raft.

The thing that I couldn't understand was when one of these planes would come near us, I thought that the way we had the rafts spread out, which covered about 75 feet, the fact that the rafts are about 2-1/2 feet wide, we had two mirrors, we also had some yellow colored bunting, which is an emergency signaling apparatus, you might call it, a signaling flag, we had two of those, so the two of us would use the mirrors, two of them would wave the two pieces of bunting and the others would wave their arms and legs in the water, and it just didn't seem possible to us that nobody that we could see so plainly could fail to see us.

Of course, we knew later that they didn't know that we were missing, so consequently, they didn't expect to see anything. It's the same old thing, if an aviator doesn't expect to see anything, he doesn't see it. He's too busy trying to fly his plane.

I was not particularly perturbed by not being picked up by planes, nor were the people with me, because I had told them that they probably couldn't see us or wouldn't see us until they had really discovered we were missing. And I was basing my hopes on ships. I did not believe that any ships could reach the area prior to about sometime Thursday.

Well, about Thursday noon, we did see quite a ways to the south of us a plane circling and later some other planes circling. I didn't know what they were doing down there, and then that night we saw some searchlights of ships down there, so we naturally thought, well, there must be other survivors. They were quite a ways south of us and we said, "Well, I guess we do have other people than just this small group that is apparently is quite a ways up north here." But the planes kept getting further away from us and I must admit I had several misgivings, I commenced to think I was north of the northern limit of their search. I thought that "We are in a fine fix now. If they're going south all the time and we're going north, why, it looks as though they'll miss us."

Well, on that assumption, I decided to cut the rations in half. We had been getting 1.2 ounces of spam, the two crackers, the two malted milk tablets, which seemed to maintain us. Nobody seemed to be particularly hungry, but that night when I saw the ships down there, I decided that I would let them have the normal ration. We had been too excited during Thursday to eat. We didn't each until after dark, by that time we had seen the searchlights so I said, "Well, I'll give you the normal ration again. We won't cut it in half."

The next morning we saw planes quite a ways to the north of us, we saw a plane quite a ways to the north. It was making a box search and it was gradually getting closer to us, so we felt a lot better. It made this very wide search, would disappear and come back again, then go way north and then come back on a westerly leg and fly its easterly leg fairly close to us. Just about the time that we had figured out the next sweep he should see us, somebody said, "My God, look at this, there are two destroyers bearing down on us. Why, they're almost on top of us."

So one of the kids said, "Well, the hell with the planes, we know these people will pick us up." They were almost on top of us when we saw them.

Page 4

(Had Fuel Oil in One Eye)