They Shot an Albatross

Squalls forced the spluttering Navy bomber down onto the dark seas. When it sank, the three men scrambled into a rubber life raft, 8 ft. by 4 ft. They had only their clothes, a .45 automatic pistol, a pocketknife, pliers and a length of 1/2-inch Manila line.

Thirty-four days later, they had sailed and been blown 1,000 miles by one of the worst South Sea hurricanes in history. The man who pulled them through could shake hands with Captain Bligh.* Hawknosed Bomber Pilot Harold Dixon was a man that Bligh would fancy. Dixon was a hard guy from Oklahoma, who came up the hard way and never knew when he had enough.

With him was Radioman Gene Aldrich, 22, a husky, gabby, self-confident Missouri farm boy, and Ordnanceman Tony Pastula, shy, dreamy, sandy-haired son of Polish immigrants. After CCC camps in the West, they had both joined the Navy to see the world. But with 41-year-old Dixon, whose first hitch began in 1919, the Navy was a business. He took charge as soon as his beloved bomber sank from sight.

The first night wasn't bad. Dixon would have loved a cigaret, but he lived. So did the other. When a searching plane missed their tiny raft the next day, they all realized that living was the only thing they had left to do.

It is a Gentle Thing. After three days of drifting, the three men had talked themselves out. They knew all about every woman any one of them had so much as kissed. They could recite back to Aldrich the names of the three cows on his old man's farm; and they warned him not to describe again how the peach trees looked in the spring. Pastula sang softly until his throat became too parched. Dixon, impatient, worried but cheerfully profane, decided to head for islands in the south. He drew a chart on a piece of canvas. With the salvaged line of rope and a life jacket, he rigged up a sea anchor which steadied the bobbing raft when winds were contrary.

The men could only doze because the life raft, said Dixon, was like "sleeping on a Beautyrest mattress and someone smacking you with a baseball bat twice every three seconds, and someone else throwing buckets of cold water in your face."

On the fifth day the first rain came. Dixon made "the lads" take off their underwear, tear it into strips which soaked up the rain and could be squeezed into an oar pocket. The next morning Aldrich used the pocketknife to spear a fish which "looked something like what we used to call a pumpkin perch. We ate the liver, all the innards and some of the flesh."

With My Crossbow. That night an albatross landed on the raft. Aldrich killed it with the pistol and Dixon, the only one who could swim, dived overboard and retrieved it. The men ate the organs and the entrails, but put the unplucked flesh away to save. In the night it glowed with phosphorescence and Dixon threw it overboard. That was a tough thing to do. But during the night it rained again. "The drawers worked fine," Dixon said. "We all had a good drink."

On the seventh day Aldrich slashed out with the pocketknife again, this time gilled a four-foot shark and yanked it aboard. It flopped down on Pastula in the bottom of the raft. He rolled over and pinned it like a wrestler. With their pliers the men ripped the shark open. Dixon remembered reading that sharks stored up vitamins in their liver. They joked about that. The liver was "very tasty," so were two sardines in the shark's stomach which the men said "must have been partly digested because they tasted as if they had been cooked."

On the eighth day Aldrich lost a finger nail when a shark nipped his hand. A leopard shark was shot before a squall left the pistol corroded. Dixon batted one shark on the nose with his fist and drove it away.

On the 13th day the men caught a "tern-like bird that tasted like dried chicken." But the confinement and lack of sleep were beginning to tell. With so little food, peristalsis had stopped. To keep all hands busy Dixon tied shoes to the men's wrists and made them paddle.

On the 21st day a floating coconut provided slightly brackish milk and meat. By then, as far as he could tell, Dixon was "somewhere in the vicinity of Ireland." Trying to catch another albatross, he had upset the boat and lost his chart.

And Now the Storm-Blast Came. When the hurricane struck a few days later, the men used their shirts and trousers to bail out the mountainous combers breaking over the raft. One wave flipped the raft completely over. Then the men lost everything, including their clothes. Exhausted, when the storm subsided, they were stark naked. When the sun came out again, their only shelter was a tiny piece of fabric ripped off the oar pocket. On the 33rd day the raft capsized once more. "For the first time," Dixon said, "I was ready to give up." His nerves were so frayed that he flew into violent rages. But Aldrich and Pastula only stared at him. Then came the 34th day and Aldrich shouted: "Chief, I see a beautiful cornfield."

Dixon was sure then that Aldrich "had gone." But ahead of them white rollers were breaking on an island beach and behind that there were rows of palms.

Is This the Hill? Is This the Kirk? Paddling with the last of their energy, the three men made for shore. Pastula screeched when a shark struck his hand. "Hell with the shark," Dixon roared. "Row." At sundown they grounded on the beach, then found that they could scarcely walk because their legs were so cramped. Dixon's hip refused to straighten out, but even so he forced his crew to march up the beach in military fashion.

"If there were Japs," Dixon explained, "we didn't want to be crawling." But there were no Japs, only a deserted copra hut. In this the men slept. All their adventure now lacked was a shapely native girl to find them the next morning. One did.

Back in Pearl Harbor again last week, Dixon told reporters: "I'm going back to that island some day. It's better than anything Dorothy Lamour ever dreamed of."

"Me, too, chief," said Aldrich.

Pastula smiled.

* Captain William Bligh and 18 men, set adrift in a 23-foot boat by the mutinied crew of H.M.S. Bounty in 1789, navigated 3,600 miles of open seas to Timor, Dutch East Indies. But Bligh had a small supply of food, water, navigation instruments and a much more seaworthy craft.

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