“Rickenbacker continued to gravitate towards death-defying encounters in the 1920s.”
By John Wukovits
EVEN BEFORE World War I, when aviator Eddie Rickenbacker flirted with death on multiple occasions as the nation’s leading ace, he lived life on the edge. In one case, a horse-drawn streetcar smacked into the four-year-old Eddie. Later, a tumble into a well knocked him unconscious. In yet another scrape, an out-of-control cart flipped over on top of the youth as he raced down a steep hill.
Throughout his life, Rickenbacker gravitated toward occupations and pursuits fraught with danger. He started a career in automobile racing in the sport’s earliest and most dangerous years. One race in 1906 saw Rickenbacker miraculously walk away from a crash with only mild bruises, adding to his burgeoning belief that fate smiled kindly on him.
Eddie continued to race cars where, as he stated, he loved to “Get out in front and drive like hell,” until a new form of adventure piqued his interest: aviation. He joined the military with the onset of war and rose to prominence in France with a combination of deft piloting, skilled shooting, self-assurance and luck.
On May 17, 1918, for instance, when Rickenbacker attempted to evade two German pursuers, his violent jinking and turning ripped the fabric off his right wing’s frame. As his plane twirled toward the ground, Rickenbacker pulled every trick he could think of to regain control.
“It was death,” he later wrote. “In that situation there was not much that I could do. Even birds need two wings to fly.”
With the plane only a few hundred feet above the ground Rickenbacker, in desperation, pulled open the throttle. The last-ditch gambit halted his downward momentum, and he pulled on the stick while reversing the rudder. His plane suddenly coughed and sparked to life. He finally regained control, and with his plane groaning to remain above the treetops, Rickenbacker miraculously evaded a torrent of ground fire as his aircraft sputtered towards the airfield.
“I grazed the top of the hangar, pancaked down on the ground and slid to a stop in a cloud of dust,” he recalled.
Rickenbacker leapt from the bullet-riddled Nieuport and strutted toward the hangar, grateful, but hardly surprised, that he had once again outfoxed the Grim Reaper.
On another flight, tracers from seven German aircraft ripped into his aircraft. Despite damage to his propeller, Rickenbacker turned to attack and dove directly through the enemy formation, shooting down two before eluding the other five and limping back to the airfield. When he landed, mechanics stared at the splintered propeller and 27 bullet holes that peppered his airplane, each within six feet of Rickenbacker’s seat. His exploits notched another successful encounter with death and earned Rickenbacker the Medal of Honor.
Rickenbacker continued to gravitate towards death-defying encounters in the 1920s, when on numerous occasions he hopped into an aircraft, not to travel to another city, but to establish speed records, winning the title of fastest pilot in the skies. His aircraft’s engine often quit while stunt flying, forcing him to make emergency landings. Once in 1920, his plane hit a ditch at the end of a field and smashed into a house on the other side, causing a plank of wood to puncture the cabin, missing Rickenbacker’s head by inches.
On another occasion, his airplane malfunctioned as he flew over the Rocky Mountains. Eddie turned to a newspaper columnist, Henry McLemore, who had joined as a passenger to write about the adventurer, and with a broad grin told the columnist to prepare for a possible crash. McLemore, petrified at the specter of his own demise, then glanced at Rickenbacker.
“His old friend of many years, Mr. Death, was just outside the windows, but he was laughing at him,” wrote the columnist.
Fortunately, the engine restarted and they continued the flight, but the incident illustrated the composure and confidence with which Rickenbacker responded to crises. He almost seemed calmed by moments that caused others to panic.
Before his 30th birthday, Rickenbacker had already illustrated multiple times that he lived a charmed life.
“In more than 25 years tinkering with speed,” wrote one reporter, “Captain Rickenbacker figures that he has cheated the ‘grim reaper’ about as often as any living man. He has cracked up in racing cars and fighting planes.”
However, Rickenbacker almost met his match with his 1941 flight from New York to Atlanta. One of 13 passengers, Rickenbacker became concerned when the Eastern Air Line airplane encountered low cloud cover and heavy rains as it neared its destination. The Atlanta tower operator cautioned the pilot that the ceiling had lowered to 300 feet, the minimum height for a safe landing.
With Atlanta’s Candler Field drawing closer and the pilot descending from 500 to 300 feet, Rickenbacker felt the left wing clip the tops of large pine trees, which flipped the left wing up and the right wing down. The collision ripped the right wing from the plane, put the aircraft into a wild somersault, and knocked it directly toward other trees. The plane cartwheeled, sliced the tops from a cluster of trees, and came to rest on its roof as it burrowed into the earth. The impact shoved the plane’s nose and cockpit backward under the inverted top of the fuselage, instantly killing both the pilot and co-pilot, sheared the nose section from the plane, sliced off the tail section, uprooted trees in its path, tore loose and hurled one motor seventy-five feet from the plane, and thrust Rickenbacker and the other passengers inside the cabin against seats, arm rests, and the floor. The ship broke in two, with Rickenbacker lying on the floor between the cockpit and cabin compartments, suffering from fractures to his left hip, his ankle, left elbow, nose, and several ribs. A gruesome slash oozed blood above his left eye, and his shattered left hip socket and pelvis shot waves of pain throughout his body.
A fully alert Rickenbacker, held in place by debris tossed about by the impact, covered in his own blood, and soaked from the gasoline dripping from the fuel tank, feared dying in an explosion if he could not extricate himself from the tangled mess. He concluded he had no choice but to try to free himself from the metal that tightly encased him.
“What the hell,” he said later. “If you have to die, you might as well die trying to get out as laying there and letting the thing happen.”
He twisted his body and forced himself upward a few inches, but a jagged piece of aluminum directly above sliced into his face and popped the left eyeball out of its socket, leaving the eye dangling on his cheek. Rickenbacker tried again, but slumped back when he cracked more ribs.
After searching the thick forest for more than six hours in rain, fog, sleet and darkness, rescuers finally stumbled onto the outer edges of the crash site just before dawn. For 400 yards, rent trees with shorn tops pointed the way to an isolated spot tucked into dense foliage and deep ravines.
“The sylvan dell had become a coldly stark and bloody hell,” wrote one of Atlanta’s premier reporters, Ralph McGill. Bodies of the dead and injured “were strewn in grotesque positions near the ship,” and rescuers doubted that anyone could have survived such a violent collision between machine and terrain.
Shocked workers halted when they spotted Rickenbacker, lying helpless and bloody, still wedged in the rubble. Broken bones protruded from his skin, and the eye dangling gruesomely down his cheek caused some to turn away and vomit.
After freeing Rickenbacker, the rescuers wrapped the aviator in blankets, placed him on a stretcher, and gingerly walked him to an ambulance which whisked him to Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, where doctors initially concluded he was unlikely to last through the day. When the hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr. Floyd W. McRae, Jr., strode in, nurses held Rickenbacker down on the surgical table as Doctor McRae pushed the flier’s eye back into its socket and sewed shut the wound to the eyelid. Other surgeons subsequently wrapped Rickenbacker in a cast that, save for one arm, covered his body from his head to toe.
“The next ten days were a continuous fight with the old Grim Reaper,” Rickenbacker recalled.
Rickenbacker wrote later that “Death comes disguised as a sympathetic friend. All was serene; all was calm. How wonderful it would be simply to float out of this world. It is easy to die. You have to fight to live.”
Spite helped pull him through when he heard the voice of Walter Winchell, a national newspaper columnist who also hosted a popular radio news program, announcing that Eddie Rickenbacker was dying. The irate aviator lifted a water pitcher next to his bed and hurled it at the radio. “Then I got well,” said Rickenbacker.
Over the coming weeks, Rickenbacker slowly regained use of his body. A subsequent investigation determined that the pilot and co-pilot failed to properly adjust their altimeters to the barometric pressure reading given them by the airfield, causing the plane to approach in the fog at a lower altitude than called for. Eight people—three crew members and five passengers—perished in the crash.
On Wednesday, June 25, almost exactly four months after an ambulance rushed Rickenbacker to the hospital, Dr. McRae discharged his patient. Walking unsteadily with the aid of a cane and a specially-designed shoe—the accident had left his damaged leg shorter than his right—and still in great pain, Rickenbacker boarded another aircraft for a return flight to New York. Looking pale and thin, and accompanied by Adelaide and his two sons, he gingerly stepped off the airplane to a rousing welcome from a crowd of two hundred friends and Eastern Air Lines workers, including old buddies from his World War I squadron.
Henry Vance employed a humorist view of the affair in his Birmingham News column when he wrote, “As I understand it, th’ Grim Reaper loses his temper and flies off th’ handle every time he ketches <sic> Eddie Rickenbacker thumbin’ his nose at him.” Adelaide summed it more succinctly. “I guess his number wasn’t up yet,” she said.
Rickenbacker claimed that the more mishaps with death he had, “the more reasons I found for not fearing him,” and that the event reinforced his belief that he had survived spectacular race crashes, death-defying dogfights, and now this most recent event, “for some good purpose.”
Twenty months later the nation would learn that the then 52-year-old national hero had one more ace up his sleeve when over a period of 24 excruciating days he bested the mighty Pacific Ocean and showed again that he would never go willingly from this earth.
John Wukovits is the author of Lost at Sea: Eddie Rickenbacker’s Twenty-Four Days Adrift on the Pacific — A World War II Tale of Courage and Faith. A military expert and an authority on the Pacific Theater of World War II, his articles have appeared for such publications as WWII History, Naval History, World War II, The Journal of Military History, Naval War College Review, and Air Power History.
