"Abandon Ship"

The big B-36 southbound from Alaska was on its last flight. Three of its engines were ablaze and it was settling fast. At 5,000 feet, Captain Harold L. Barry passed the order over the intercom: "Abandon ship." Then he cut in the automatic pilot. In the radio compartment just abaft the pilots' seats, Staff Sergeant Vitale Trippodi tied down his radio key to keep a signal on the air as long as the aircraft was 'aloft, and dove for the escape hatch. Within seconds, all 17 aboard had leaped into a 55-mile gale, drifted down into the wilderness of Princess Royal Island, off the coast of British Columbia, 450 miles northwest of Seattle. It was a few minutes before midnight.

The First Night. "The jump," said one of the crew later, "was the easiest part." Eleven of the men landed in a twelve-square-mile area on the northwest shoulder of the desolate, storm-swept island. Most of them landed in trees, disentangled themselves from chute shrouds and branches and spent the first night wrapped in wet nylon or under inflated rubber dinghies taken from their parachute seat packs. Captain Barry, last to leave his stricken ship, came down in a shallow pond and spent the rest of the miserable night on the shore. Corporal Richard J. Schuler passed a wakeful, uneasy night alone listening to a bear prowl about his improvised parachute tent.

Radioman Trippodi hung in his chute in excruciating pain. He had come down in a treetop near the peak of a steep, 4OO-ft. incline. Trying to unbuckle his harness, he slipped. His foot caught in the leg strap and he had hung head down, helpless. Next morning two of the flyers found him still hanging there. They cut him free, wrapped him in his parachute, and put him in a bed of spruce boughs; but they themselves were too weak to get him down the cliff.

The Rescue. In scattered twos and threes the airmen painfully worked their way down to the beach. The wood was too wet for fires. Continuing bad weather hampered search craft. But in the afternoon of the second day, the Canadian fishing ship Cape Perry sighted two of the men signaling from the shore, and in a short time it had picked up ten. Late the same day, a detail from the Canadian destroyer Cayuga reached Trippodi, who was by now delirious, suffering from exhaustion, shock and frostbitten feet. In all, twelve were rescued.

But despite efforts of a whole armada of U.S. and Canadian naval and air search units,* there was no sign of the other five airmen. A U.S. Coast Guard plane searching the island at week's end broadcast the national anthem and a message to the missing five: "Don't give up hope; we are still looking for you."

-Taking off to join the search from Great Falls, Mont., a B-29 crashed and split in two, killing eight. It was the sixth Air Force crash in the Pacific Northwest this year. The worst: an Air Force EUR-54 with 44 aboard, lost last month on a flight from Alaska to Montana.

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