999 Survival Experiences in the South Pacific

1000 SURVIVAL CASES: Front Emergency to Rescue

1. BACKGROUND FOR THE STUDY

During the period of action in the Pacific theatre of combat in World War II a program was in operation to prepare flying personnel and passengers for possible inflight emergency that might require parachute escape and descent, ditching, or crash landing into unfamiliar, hostile or dangerous terrain. This preparation had two aspects: 1. training, and briefing of flying personnel, and 2. the development and distribution of equipment necessary for survival following an inflight emergency.

Training for inflight emergency and subsequent survival was given to pilots and crews in all stages of flying training from pre-flight schools to instructions in operational areas. Passengers were briefed on emergency procedures by military intelligence personnel or by the crew of the plane prior to a flight.

All branches of the service carried on this training which tended to follow the lines suggested by the Arctic, Desert, Tropic Information Center in such publications as "Survival ", the "Nine School Lectures on Survival " and in movies such as the "Land and Live " Series and "Castaway ". Special schools of survival training were established the author of this report served as the chief of one of them, the Jungle Survival School conducted under the Aero-Medical Department of the Army Air Force at Orlando, Florida. Similar training was given in Hawaii by the Bishop Museum, at Chapel Hill and Pensacola by the Navy, at Quantico by the Marines, and in London by the British.

The Orlando School trained instructors to teach survival information the school also presented detailed instructions and briefing to crews of aircraft headed for combat. The instructors in most of these organizations were men with experience in the tropics, or arctic, depending on the nature of the school, who knew the principles of living off the land in the areas concerned. The men taking these programs of training varied from raw recruits to veterans of combat in the Pacific area who had been returned to the United States for special training prior to the next campaign of the Pacific war.

In the majority of cases the training given these men was based on past experiences and the biological knowledge of the instructors. During the war years only a bare trickle of survival stories, tales of actual survival under combat conditions, found their way back to the various schools.

The author found the lack of actual survival stories a severe handicap in conducting the Orlando training program-While the few available could be used as examples or directional aids for training, they obviously represented only a very small sample of the total.

When the war ended many of the survival training programs were abandoned before actual survival experiences could be collected and considered in terms of the training or preparation the men had received before experiencing a critical survival condition.