More than a week after their B-17 went down in the Pacific in October 1942, the eight men in the life rafts were running out of options.

Among them was Edward Vernon Rickenbacker—World War I fighter ace, Medal of Honor Recipient, former race car driver, and a senior-ranking officer who recently celebrated his 52nd birthday. 

The aircraft had gone down after a navigational error during a World War II inspection mission. They had drifted hundreds of miles off course. 

“We did not know where we were, and no one else did either,” Rickenbacker later wrote in his autobiography. “We were the only ones in the whole world who knew we were alive.”

Eight days into the ordeal, rations were gone. The sun burned by day; salt sores formed by night. Morale began to erode. Rickenbacker believed someone would have to keep the group intact — and that responsibility fell to him.

He was dozing under his hat when something landed on his head. 

“I knew that it was a seagull,” he wrote. “I don’t know how I knew; I just knew.”

That seagull meant food—if he could catch it. No one spoke. The others watched from beneath their hats. Minutes later, thanks to Rickenbacker’s swift and steady hands, they had their first meal in days. Not long after that, they were using what was left as bait for fish. 

“The Meanest, Most Cantankerous So-and-So”

Despite their luck that day, hunger and exposure persisted, but the greater danger was surrender. Rickenbacker refused to let them. 

“I used every trick I knew on them. To some, I spoke with encouragement… but others required stronger medicine. I rode them; I tore them to pieces; I struck at every raw nerve in their bodies. One of the men screamed back at me, ‘Rickenbacker, you’re the meanest, most cantankerous so and so that ever lived!’”

And that insult made him smile. Because if that man could snarl back at him, he could snarl back at death. 

The raft survivors would drift for 24 days before being rescued by the U.S. Navy.

For Rickenbacker, the Pacific was not an isolated trial. By his count, it was one of 135 close calls—part of a life already shaped by early auto racing, aerial combat in World War I, and decades in aviation.

And it began in childhood.

Staying One Step Ahead

“Though I was only three years old,” Rickenbacker wrote, “I remember vividly the first time the Grim Reaper reached out for me.”

He was recalling the day he ran headlong into a horse-drawn streetcar on the streets of Columbus, Ohio. He walked away with a lump and two black eyes. It would not be the last time he escaped with a lesson instead of an injury.

Soon after, he toppled backward into a freshly dug cistern, landing on his head and neck while neighbors feared the worst. On another day, he jumped onto the rear of a coal tender as it rolled past the rail yard where he and his brother scavenged for loose coal. When the engine lurched forward, he slipped and fell between the tracks, lying stunned as the train began to back up. His brother Bill pulled him clear just in time.

One incident, however, left a deeper mark.

During his first year of school, a fire broke out in the basement and quickly spread. Teachers evacuated the students safely, Rickenbacker watched the galloping horses and the red fire wagon with a fair bit of excitement—until an awful realization struck him: he had left his coat and cap inside.

“It was not that I was brave,” he later wrote. “Just the opposite. I was afraid to go home without my coat and cap.”

He ran back into the building, through a sheet of flame, feeling his hair and eyebrows singe in the heat. Only afterward, he wrote, did the danger fully register.

These were not calculated acts of courage. They were impulsive decisions made by a boy drawn to motion, machinery, and momentum. Long before the racetrack or the cockpit, survival had already become part of his story.

Tragedy Strikes—and Opportunity Presents Itself 

In 1904, when Rickenbacker was thirteen, his father died after being struck on the head during a construction incident. Without his father’s income, Rickenbacker understood that his family would need help. Knowing his mother would disapprove, he secured a job before asking his mother’s permission to leave school. Making his case, he left the seventh grade and began earning as much as a dollar a day to help support his siblings.

That pattern would repeat itself throughout his life: he rarely waited for permission to move forward. 

He worked a string of demanding jobs—glass factory laborer, headstone shop worker, errand boy—before finding his way into machine shops and garages. There, surrounded by gears, engines, and tools, he discovered both skill and appetite. He learned how machines worked. More importantly, he learned how to make them work better.

By his late teens, the garage had become more than employment. It was an entry point into a new American obsession: the automobile.

Racing at the Edge of Innovation

The garage was only the beginning.

Rickenbacker’s mechanical skill earned him a spot riding as an assistant and mechanic in professional races while still in his teens. He learned to listen to engines at full throttle, to feel imbalance through vibration, to make split-second repairs with tools and instinct alone. In an era when automobiles were still experimental, races doubled as high-speed testing grounds.

By 1911, he was competing in the first Indianapolis 500 — a 500-mile endurance trial on a dusty brick oval that would become the most famous racetrack in America. It was the first of his six appearances at Indy.

From 1912 to 1916, Rickenbacker started 42 major races and won seven. He competed in events from Los Angeles to Des Moines to Tacoma, racing on dirt tracks and wooden board circuits before crowds that packed grandstands to watch machines — and men — pushed to their limits.

Racing in the 1910s was unforgiving. Cars overturned. Engines exploded. Drivers were thrown from open cockpits. Mechanical failure could mean catastrophe. Success required nerve, mechanical intuition, and the ability to stay steady when everything else shook.

Rickenbacker built a national reputation behind the wheel. But by late 1916, another machine would catch his attention.

From Driver to Ace

In late 1916, while in England on racing business, Rickenbacker watched military aircraft cross the London sky as World War I raged across Europe. The machines were fragile, experimental, and wildly dangerous.

They were also faster than anything on the ground.

When the United States entered the war in April 1917, he enlisted in the Army. His mechanical background initially placed him behind the wheel again, driving senior officers connected to the Army Air Service. But proximity to aviation wasn’t enough—he wanted to fly. Older than most trainees and without a formal education, he pressed for flight training and earned his pilot’s wings that October.

By early 1918, he was flying combat missions over France with the 94th Aero Squadron—the “Hat in the Ring” squadron. Aerial warfare was still new and unpredictable: open cockpits, no parachutes, navigation by landmarks and instinct. Like competitive car racing, success and survival depended on nerve, judgment, and a deep understanding of machines—skills Rickenbacker already possessed.

Within months, he was named commanding officer.

He gathered his pilots and mechanics and made his expectations clear: “I want no saluting, no unnecessary deference to rank. We’re all in this together, pilots and mechanics. We need each other, and we’re going to work together as equals, each man doing his job.”

He promised he would never ask a man to fly a mission he would not fly himself. Rather than celebrate his promotion, he wrote that night, “I must work now harder than I did before.”

By war’s end, the race car driver from Columbus had become one of the most decorated American airmen of World War I. Within seven months, he was America’s leading ace, credited with 26 confirmed aerial victories.

He ultimately flew 50 combat missions and received eight Distinguished Service Crosses—one awarded for a September 25, 1918 flight in which he volunteered for a lone patrol over enemy lines, attacked seven German aircraft, and shot down two.

In 1930, that award was upgraded to the Medal of Honor.

After the War — And After the Headlines

“I never sought to become a hero, only to serve my country,” Rickenbacker wrote in his autobiography. “I knew that with the title ‘American Ace of Aces’ would come an awesome responsibility. Because of it, I now represented the spirit of American aviation, especially to the youth of the nation, and I must never permit that image to be cheapened.”

Responsibility, for Rickenbacker, meant building.

In 1921, he founded the Rickenbacker Motor Company. Though the company did not survive the decade, he later purchased the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1927, preserving the track that had shaped his early career. In 1938, he acquired Eastern Air Lines, guiding its growth during a period of rapid technological change and helping expand commercial aviation across the country.

When World War II began, he again served the nation in a civilian capacity, inspecting air bases at the request of the War Department — a mission that led to the Pacific crash in 1942.

The 24 days at sea were not his first brush with death. Nor were they his last serious trial.

Late in life, Rickenbacker reflected not on danger, but on fullness.

“I realized I wasn’t afraid to die,” he wrote, “because I had lived so much, in good ways and bad, that I no longer felt the youthful pang of not having lived at all.”

He died in 1973 at age 82.