The Chance Vought OS2U Kingfisher was designed as a scouting aircraft—an airplane that had the range and loiter capabilities to extend the visual reach of the fleet and provide gunfire spotting for battleships. The type, which was first flown in 1938, featured a number of firsts and improved on existing technology. It was a two-seat, low-wing monoplane readily convertible from a wheeled land-based aircraft to a float-equipped seaplane. Its load-carrying ability was less than prodigious: Two .30-caliber machine guns and 650 pounds of external bombs or depth charges was the limit.
Although not regarded as a search-and-rescue plane, that is how the OS2U—“Old Slow and Ugly”—made its mark.
The first and most noteworthy rescue occurred less than a year after the United States’ official entry into World War II. Retired U.S. Army Air Service Captain Edward V. “Eddie” Rickenbacker, who gained fame as the top American ace of World War I and earned the Medal of Honor, had gone missing at sea.
In late 1942, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and U.S. Army Air Forces Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold had requested that Rickenbacker, then the owner of Eastern Airlines, evaluate and report on the status of Pacific Army Air Forces combat units. His trip was to include stops in Hawaii, Australia, New Guinea, and Guadalcanal. Rickenbacker, then 52, agreed to the dollar-a-day assignment as a nonmilitary observer.
After research in Hawaii, Rickenbacker, business partner Army Colonel Hans C. Adamson, a staff sergeant returning to his unit in Australia, and five crew members took off at 0130 on 21 October in an old Army Air Forces B-17D Flying Fortress that had been converted as a passenger transport. The party had transferred to the Fortress after its original plane suffered a broken hydraulic line and ground looped. Their destination was island “X,” codename for Canton (present-day Kanton) Island, about 1,900 miles south-southwest of Hawaii.
Following navigator Lieutenant John DeAngelis’s directions, pilot Captain William Cherry Jr. began to descend toward Canton while still searching for the island. It never came into view. Despite having radio contact with X, the B-17 had no instrument on board to provide a bearing. After 12 hours in the air and with just enough fuel for another hour, the passengers and crew prepared to ditch amid rough, high swells.
The landing barely could have been better. The plane did not break up, but water surged through it, and all the prepared survival gear was lost. One two-man and two five-man life rafts were available, but the swells, as well as injuries incurred during the crash, made boarding them difficult.
Adamson, who weighed more than 200 pounds and had suffered a badly sprained back, was helped into one of the larger rafts. He was joined by flight engineer Private John Bartek and Rickenbacker. Cherry, copilot Lieutenant James Whittaker, and radio operator Sergeant James Reynolds clambered into the second large raft, and passenger Staff Sergeant Alexander Kaczmarczyk and DeAngelis boarded the third, smallest one. Rickenbacker had salvaged a 60-foot line, which they used to secure the rafts about 20 feet apart.
Taking stock of their situation, the survivors realized they had no drinking water, and their only food was four oranges the pilot had stuffed into a pocket. Only Rickenbacker and Adamson were fully dressed; the others had shed clothing and shoes to swim.
They were exhausted, but most had suffered only cuts and bruises in the crash, except for Adamson. Kaczmarczyk, who had been released from a hospital only a couple of weeks earlier, was in bad shape. He had swallowed saltwater and needed more help than could be provided.
The B-17 crew unknowingly had ditched at least 100 miles south of Canton Island. DeAngelis’s octant had been thrown to the cabin floor when their first aircraft ground looped, apparently jarring it out of alignment and leading to navigational error.
The subsequent arduous ordeal has been recounted in numerous books, not the least of which are three written by survivors. The four oranges did not last a week. They subsisted on small fish and what rainwater they could collect. They often went days without food.
On the morning of the 13th day, Kaczmarczyk succumbed to his injuries.
By day 17, the survivors began sighting floatplanes. All were too far away to see them. The aircraft, however, did raise their hopes of being found.
On the 20th day, despite Rickenbacker’s protests, the three rafts separated. Cherry went solo in the two-man raft, while Rickenbacker, Adamson, and Bartek and Whittaker, DeAngelis, and Reynolds were in the larger rafts.
Enter an OS2U-3—most likely BuNo 5308—The Bug. The Kingfisher was one of seven and a pair of Grumman J2F-5 Ducks of Scouting Squadron 1, Detachment 14 (VS-1, D-14; also VS-1D14), assigned to Marine Corps Air Group 13 based at Tutuila, American Samoa, on 22 April 1942. The aircraft were split between two other islands—Wallis and Funafuti—450 miles apart and each more than 700 miles from Tutuila. The planes carried out patrol, scouting, and escort missions in addition to mail and courier service between the islands. The Bug was based at Funafuti.
Late on the 20th day, 11 November, The Bug was on a routine patrol when Aviation Radioman Second Class Lester H. Boutte spotted Cherry. Boutte was in the Kingfisher’s back seat, behind pilot Lieutenant (junior grade) Frederick E. Woodward. The radioman later recalled: “In my squadron we had not been looking for them at all. . . . We knew they had gone down, but supposedly they were not in our area. I just happened to sight the first raft.”
A PT boat, PT-21, investigated Boutte’s report and picked up Cherry, who gave general directions to where the other rafts might be. Based on this, Whittaker, DeAngelis, and Reynolds were found on an uninhabited island, Nukufetau, about 40 to 50 miles away.
Twenty-one days after ditching, the last three survivors were finally spotted. Late in the day on 12 November, one of four Kingfishers located them, but all of them had to refuel. Boutte, once again in The Bug, but with a different pilot—Lieutenant William F. Eadie—went out and “landed just as the sun was setting.” The landing was “fairly rough . . . but we taxied up to the raft and picked them up,” Boutte recalled. He was amused that after he grabbed the raft, “the first thing Mr. Rickenbacker did was introduce himself and the two people in the raft to us.”
The weak, injured Adamson was put in Boutte’s seat. “Then we tied Bartek and Mr. Rickenbacker together and sat them on the wing, one on each side of the cockpit,” Boutte said. “Then I stood on the wing and held them by the collar of their shirts and we started taxiing on the water back to the base which was 40 miles away.”
After taxiing for more than 45 minutes, with Rickenbacker and Bartek hanging their legs over the front of the wing, they encountered another PT boat, PT-26, searching for the missing men. The two healthier survivors were transferred to the boat, but Adamson, in no condition to be moved twice, stayed in the radioman’s seat for the remainder of the taxi ride. Boutte continued the trip, spending about eight hours in the wake of the propwash sitting on the wing. He noted they arrived “about three or four the next morning.”
All the rescued men pulled through. Rickenbacker, after two weeks of recovery, continued his mission and later presented significant reports in Washington. He also fostered a revamping of life rafts and rescue equipment, which aided many a downed flight crew. Of The Bug’s rescuers, Boutte went to flight school a year later and became a pilot and a seaplane squadron commander. He retired as a captain after 30 years of service.
The Bug’s bureau number is not definitively known. But an intensive search of OS2U record cards by National Museum of Naval Aviation library volunteer Pam Thomas found BuNo 5308, which matched the The Bug’s known service.
The aircraft was accepted on 20 August 1941 at San Diego, California, and assigned to the battleship USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) on 30 September. It was on board the Pacific Fleet’s flagship when she was attacked at Pearl Harbor on 7 December. The plane suffered minor damage and soon began patrolling the harbor. It was then assigned to VS-1D14 in April 1942 and found the Rickenbacker rafts that November. The Bug remained with the squadron, which was redesignated Scouting Squadron (VS) 51, through November 1943. The next January, it was transferred to Scout and Observation Unit (SOSU) 3, where it remained through August 1945. The Bug was stricken from the Navy rolls on 31 January 1946.
