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By Root 1525 0

someone told him to report to the base commander immediately. When he got there, he was told that Green Hornet had never come in. “Holy smoke!” he said. He knew that there were two possibilities. One was that Phillips’s crew had turned back to Hawaii; the other was that they were, as Deasy phrased it, “in the drink.” Someone went to check with Hawaii. Knowing that if Green Hornet was indeed down, they’d still have to wait until morning to search, Deasy went to bed.

At around midnight, a sailor woke Deasy’s radioman, Herman Scearce, and told him that Phil’s plane was missing. The navy wanted to check Scearce’s radio log to see when the last contact with the plane was. Scearce asked the sailor to wake Deasy, and he, Deasy, and navy officials reviewed the log at the base office. It yielded little information.

At four-thirty A.M., Green Hornet was declared missing. Two planes were now down—Corpening’s and Phillips’s—taking twenty-one men with them.

The navy assumed command of the rescue effort. Once the sun was up, Daisy Mae would be sent out, along with at least two navy flying boats and at least one other AAF plane. Because Daisy Mae and Green Hornet had flown side by side early in the journey, the searchers knew that Green Hornet had not crashed during the first two hundred miles of the trip. It had apparently gone down somewhere between the point at which Daisy Mae had left it and Palmyra, a stretch of eight hundred miles. The trick was figuring out the direction in which any survivors would be drifting. The ocean around Palmyra was a whorl of currents, lying at the meeting point of the westward-carrying north equatorial current and the eastward-carrying equatorial countercurrent. A few miles of difference in latitude could mean a 180-degree difference in current direction, and no one knew where the plane had hit. The search area would have to be enormous.

Each crew was given search coordinates. From Palmyra, Daisy Mae would fly north. From Oahu, several planes would fly south. Not long after sunup, the planes took off. Everyone knew that the odds of finding the crew were very long, but, said Scearce, “we kept hoping, hoping, hoping …”

——

Louie woke with the sun. Mac was beside him, lying back. Phil lay in his raft, his mind still fumbling. Louie sat up and ran his eyes over the sky and ocean in search of rescuers. Only the sharks stirred.

Louie decided to divvy up breakfast, a single square of chocolate. He untied the raft pocket and looked in. All of the chocolate was gone. He looked around the rafts. No chocolate, no wrappers. His gaze paused on Mac. The sergeant looked back at him with wide, guilty eyes.

The realization that Mac had eaten all of the chocolate rolled hard over Louie. In the brief time that Louie had known Mac, the tail gunner had struck him as a decent, friendly guy, although a bit of a reveler, confident to the point of flippancy. The crash had undone him. Louie knew that they couldn’t survive for long without food, but he quelled the thought. A rescue search was surely under way. They’d be on Palmyra later today, maybe tomorrow, and the loss of the chocolate wouldn’t matter. Curbing his irritation, Louie told Mac that he was disappointed in him. Understanding that Mac had acted in panic, he reassured him that they’d soon be rescued. Mac said nothing.

The chill of the night gave way to a sweltering day. Louie watched the sky. Phil, weak from blood loss, slept. Mac, a shade short of being a redhead, burned in the sun. He remained in a dreamy, distant place. All three men were hungry, but they could do nothing about it. The fishhooks and line were useless. There was no bait.

As the men lay in silence, a purring sound began drifting gently between their thoughts. Then all three realized that they were hearing a plane. Searching the sky, they saw a B-25, high up and well to the east. Flying much too high to be a search plane, it was probably on its way to Palmyra.

Louie lunged for the raft pocket, retrieved the flare gun, and loaded a flare cartridge. He couldn’t stand in the soft-bottomed raft,