Jean Jack

Jack Jean recalls details of ditching his B-17 in the Pacific Ocean:

It was obvious that there was no way that I could get back, so I started deviating my course a little bit to the south and following the islands that are scattered out through there. Knowing that our final landing place was going to be the ocean itself, I started looking as I would pass by these islands. I was looking for huts, native huts, because I figured if there were native huts, people were living down there. That means there's food and water down there and so I thought that was pretty important. So I kept looking for something like that on the way and eventually I got to a place that there was an extinct volcano there, Urasi Island. It had, scattered in the palm trees along there, huts; you could see native huts. I figured we haven't got very much longer to stay up in this thing, so I told the radio operator to break radio silence and send a message back to our command that we were going down at sea and give them our position report.

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