Thank you for your reasoned observations. OK, we should be fair. Agreed. Also, I wasn’t there in Yamamoto’s shoes.
Oftentimes, I view things through the prism of my own eyes, then coin a response.
In other words- you drop dead next to me in the water, or are unresponsive, and your head is above the water, I’m either keeping ahold of you, or tying something to you, to keep you with me, corpse or not. In fact, I would be orchestrating the group to close in and form a circle, so that each of us could keep an eye on each other and lend encouragement. It’s my nature.
Maybe Yamamoto will offer more, dissuading my cynical opinions, and if so, I will apologize for my reactionary, suspect behavior.
And I’ll just mention that even in a light breeze, those inflated jackets act like a sail - the survivors would have been scattered over a considerable distance by the time there was any rescue. It would be interesting to see an image from above, just how far apart they were. They had nothing to hang onto after the aircraft went down. Evidently no one thought to form a human chain as you have suggested.
What wind there was would have scattered them as soon as the plane went down.