Eddie Rickenbacker, the Hat-in-the-Ring Squadron, and the Twenty-Four Days on a Pacific Raft That Proved the Ace of Aces Was Built Different

Eddie Rickenbacker was the highest-scoring American fighter pilot of World War I, credited with 26 confirmed aerial victories over the Western Front flying with the 94th Aero Squadron. In October 1942, at age 52, he survived 24 days adrift on a rubber raft in the open Pacific after a B-17 went down during a military inspection tour. No other American aviator of the twentieth century compiled a biography remotely like his.

Who Was Eddie Rickenbacker Before the War?

Edward Vernon Rickenbacker was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1890, the son of Swiss-German immigrants. His father died when Eddie was 12, forcing him out of school and into factory work - glass, shoes, stone carving - before the internal combustion engine found him and held him.

By his early twenties he was competing as a factory racing driver. He ran at the Indianapolis 500 starting around 1910, finished in the top ten on multiple occasions, and was ranked among the top ten racing drivers in the world when the war in Europe began reshaping everyone’s plans.

How Did Rickenbacker Become a Fighter Pilot?

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Rickenbacker had a theory: a man who already understood mechanical intuition and three-dimensional awareness at speed would make a natural fighter pilot. The Army initially disagreed, assigning him as a driver - first for General Pershing’s personal staff, then for Colonel Billy Mitchell, the air officer who would become one of aviation’s most complicated advocates for air power.

He pestered his way into flight school. He earned his wings in 1917 at age 27, considered old for a fighter pilot in a war where new pilots at the front measured their life expectancy in days. That did not slow him down.

What Was the Hat-in-the-Ring Squadron?

Within months of earning his wings, Rickenbacker was flying with the 94th Aero Squadron - the Hat-in-the-Ring Squadron. The emblem on the nose of their aircraft, a stovepipe hat dropping through a circular ring, was their declaration that America had thrown its hat into the ring of the war. The squadron flew from fields in northern France, operating over the Western Front.

Their aircraft was the SPAD XIII, a French-built single-seat biplane powered by a Hispano-Suiza eight-cylinder engine producing around 220 horsepower, with a top speed of roughly 135 mph at altitude. Two Vickers machine guns, synchronized to fire through the propeller arc. A responsive, aggressive machine that rewarded commitment and punished hesitation.

What Made Rickenbacker the Ace of Aces?

Rickenbacker approached aerial combat the way he had approached a racetrack: geometry, position, and understanding where the fight was going before it arrived. At Indianapolis, he had learned that the driver who wins is often the one already committed to the inside line before the other driver sees the corner. The same instinct worked at altitude.

His first aerial victory came in April 1918. His fifth - the ace threshold - came in May 1918. By the armistice in November 1918, he had 26 confirmed aerial victories, making him the Ace of Aces, the highest-scoring American pilot of the entire war.

Five of those victories were against German observation balloons. That sounds unglamorous until you understand the stakes: these were floating artillery spotters coordinating fire that was killing men on the ground by the thousands. They were defended by concentrated anti-aircraft guns and dedicated fighter escorts. Attacking them was a volunteer task that most pilots avoided. Rickenbacker volunteered.

He received the Medal of Honor. Administrative problems delayed the formal presentation until 1930, but the recognition was never in doubt.

Rickenbacker After WWI: Indianapolis, Eastern Air Lines, and the Atlanta Crash

Many men came home from the war with the Ace of Aces title and spent the rest of their lives at dinners talking about France. Rickenbacker couldn’t sit still. He attempted an automobile company (it failed), stayed active in motor sports promotion, and worked in aviation sales through the 1920s, when commercial aviation was a collection of small, undercapitalized operations flying mail contracts.

In 1927, he purchased the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and ran it for nearly twenty years. In 1938, he took over Eastern Air Lines as general manager and eventually became its president. He ran the airline with high standards, limited patience for excuses, and a genuine belief that the organization’s success depended on the people at the controls knowing exactly what they were doing.

Then February 1941. His Eastern Airlines Douglas DC-3 went down in fog on approach to Atlanta Municipal Airport. The aircraft came in short, clipped trees on a hillside, broke apart, and caught fire. Rickenbacker was pulled from the wreckage with a fractured skull, a damaged eye socket, and broken bones throughout. The doctors who treated him were not optimistic in those first days. He spent months in recovery. He was 51 years old.

He went back to work.

The Mission That Put Him on a Raft

Secretary of War Henry Stimson asked Rickenbacker to tour military installations throughout the Pacific and report on conditions and morale. There was also a personal message to be hand-delivered to General Douglas MacArthur - too sensitive to commit to paper or radio.

On October 21, 1942, Rickenbacker and seven other men boarded a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and departed Hawaii bound for Canton Island, a coral atoll roughly 1,600 miles to the southwest. The navigator made an error. They missed Canton Island entirely.

They flew past the point of no return on fuel, searching for a landmass that never appeared on the horizon. When the last engine quit, pilot Captain William Cherry ditched the bomber in the open Pacific. All eight men survived the water landing and climbed into three rubber life rafts. Their total food supply among eight men: four oranges.

How Did Rickenbacker’s Crew Survive 24 Days in the Pacific?

The largest raft measured roughly five feet by nine feet. Rickenbacker and three others shared it. The equatorial sun in October comes down without mercy, burning from above and reflecting off the water from below.

Fresh water meant whatever they could catch during rainstorms by stretching canvas across the raft. Men who drank sea water during dry stretches drifted into delirium. Thirst dismantles clear thinking before it does anything else, and keeping eight minds working - keeping the logic of survival intact - was itself a leadership task stacked on top of the physical ordeal.

On the eighth day, a sea gull landed on Rickenbacker’s head while he sat motionless with his eyes closed. He caught it with both hands in a single motion. They killed it, divided the raw flesh among eight men, and used the entrails for fish bait. The small fish they subsequently caught may have been the margin between seven men rescued and none.

Each evening, crew member John Bartek read aloud from a small New Testament he had kept in his pocket. Rickenbacker later wrote that those readings were what kept the men thinking of themselves as men rather than as things waiting to die - an important distinction when the Pacific is working very hard to make the second version feel true.

Sergeant Alexander Kaczmarczyk died. He had been ill before the ditching, and the raft finished what had already started. The remaining seven men buried him at sea, then turned back to the horizon. Search aircraft flew overhead twice during the ordeal. Both times they missed the rafts - three small orange shapes sitting low in an ocean that stretches to every horizon, leaving no wake and making no sound.

The Rescue

November 11 - three weeks after the ditching - a Navy Kingfisher floatplane out of Funafuti Atoll spotted one of the smaller rafts that had drifted away during a nighttime squall. Two men were pulled from the water. Rickenbacker’s raft was still out there.

November 13. Twenty-four days after Captain Cherry put the B-17 into the Pacific, a Navy patrol boat out of Funafuti found them. Rickenbacker was skeletal, burned past recognition by the sun and salt and weeks without real food. He could barely stand. The sailors who brought him aboard reportedly wept at what they pulled out of those rafts.

He recovered. Within months he was back in the Pacific, completing the inspection tour that had nearly killed him. He delivered his report to the War Department.

Why This Story Matters for Aviators

There is a version of the aviator story that is about technical skill - ratings, endorsements, logbook hours. Rickenbacker had all of that. But what holds across every chapter of his life is something harder to teach: he looked at situations that most people would correctly assess as hopeless and found a next move. Not because he was delusional about the odds. Because he wasn’t done yet.

That orientation is what separates the pilots who become legends from the ones who simply logged a lot of hours. It does not guarantee survival - nothing guarantees survival. But it changes the probability in ways that matter, especially when the Pacific is involved.

Rickenbacker ran Eastern Air Lines until 1963. His memoir about the raft ordeal, Seven Came Through, was published in 1943 and sold widely; proceeds went largely to servicemen’s families. Eddie Rickenbacker died in 1973 at age 82.

Key Takeaways

Rickenbacker earned 26 aerial victories in WWI with the 94th Aero Squadron, making him the highest-scoring American fighter ace of the entire war - a record built on positional thinking borrowed directly from racing.
Five of his victories were against German observation balloons, a defended and dangerous volunteer task that most pilots avoided.
In October 1942, a navigation error stranded him and seven crewmen on three rubber rafts in the open Pacific with only four oranges between them.
The group survived 24 days through discipline and improvisation - including Rickenbacker catching a seagull barehanded on day eight - before rescue by Navy forces out of Funafuti Atoll on November 13.
The through-line of Rickenbacker’s life is not luck. It is the sustained capacity to find a next move when the situation appears completely closed - a quality that cannot be logged but can be cultivated.

Primary sources: W. David Lewis, Eddie Rickenbacker: An American Hero in the Twentieth Century; Eddie Rickenbacker, Seven Came Back (1943).