The Raft: The Courageous Struggle of Three Naval Airmen Against the Sea - Softcover

Trumbull, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557508275 ISBN 13: 9781557508270

Publisher: Naval Institute Press, 1992

Synopsis

A gripping account of three naval airmen adrift in the Pacific for 34 days.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

On the afternoon of January 16, 1942, three men boarded a TBD Devastator aircraft -- a low-wing, single-engine torpedo-bomber -- for an antisubmarine patrol flight. Although it was to be a relatively short flight, they became lost. When the fuel ran low, they decided to ditch into the Pacific. Before they could get their life raft to inflate, however, the plane sank beneath them, carrying most of the survival gear down with it. Thirty-four days later the raft landed on Puka Puka, a New Zealand governed atoll in the Danger Islands, having meandered 1,200 miles!

The story of the voyage, with few resources except courage and indomitable human spirit, is not only inspiring listening, but a tribute to the human species and its will to survive. The miraculous escapes, especially the passage over a killer reef and the reaching of safety only a day ahead of a typhoon, also suggest that someone was looking over them!

About the Author:

Robert Trumbull was born in Chicago in 1912 and graduated from the University of Washington at Seattle. He worked as a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser from 1933 to 1943 but began writing for the New York Times in 1941, serving during World War II as the Times' war correspondent in the Pacific theater until 1945. The US Navy awarded him the Asiatic-Pacific Theater Ribbon for his wartime reports. After the war he continued writing for the Times, serving as a foreign correspondent, chief correspondent, and bureau chief in such places as Japan, the Philippines, South and Southeast Asia, Tokyo, China, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands, and Canada. As well as contributing articles on Asian and Pacific affairs to Encyclopedia Americana, Reader's Digest, Saturday Review, and New York Times Magazine, he was the author of ten nonfiction books. For his The Scrutable East: A Correspondent's Report on Southeast Asia, he won the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award in 1964, an award given yearly for best nonfiction book on international affairs.

Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over eight hundred titles to his credit. Named one of the "Best Voices of the Century" and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.

About this edition

• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1557508275
• ISBN 13: 9781557508270
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 213