“King 9 Will Not Return” is not the one work that was impressed by the Girl Be Good. The 1970 TV film “Sole Survivor” was additionally loosely primarily based on the bomber’s fateful remaining flight, imagining the lifeless crew returning as ghosts to await the repatriation of their our bodies. Elleston Trevor’s novel “Flight of the Phoenix” (and its film diversifications) additionally draw particulars from the story, with the notable change of getting a few of the Phoenix’s passengers survive.
However regardless of the technicality that the Girl Be Good’s crew didn’t survive, theirs continues to be a survival story — and fairly an unbelievable one. The eight crew members who made it safely to the bottom walked 65 miles via the desert over the subsequent 4 days, sharing half a canteen of water between all of them. In considered one of two small diaries discovered with the our bodies, co-pilot Robert Toner notes that every of them solely drank a single cap of water on the second day. Flight engineer Harold Ripslinger, creator of the opposite diary, says that by their third day this had been reduce all the way down to a single teaspoon. By the fourth day, they have been all the way down to just some drops every … after which their water ran out.Â
By the fifth day, 5 of the crew members have been not able to strolling. “All needed to die throughout midday it was so scorching,” Ripslinger wrote. “All wish to die,” Toner concurs. However the three who may nonetheless transfer — gunners Man Shelley and Vernon Moore, and Ripslinger — strove onwards, hoping to search out assist and convey a rescue staff to the remaining. Ripslinger walked one other 21 miles earlier than lastly succumbing to the desert. Shelley walked greater than ninety miles altogether, a 3rd of that distance coated with out consuming a single drop of water.Â
