Authors: Mitchell Zuckoff
Frozen in Time (12 page)
On November 16, one week after the crash, Howarth announced that the new and old pieces of the rewired radio fit together. He flipped the power switch on his Frankenstein-like creation and the transmitter lit up. The receiver remained broken, so he didn’t know if anyone heard him. But at least he could reach out farther for help than with the Gibson Girl. Howarth used Morse code to send SOS messages and to describe the PN9E crew’s situation. Hoping that the receiver would soon work, too, he asked for replies with the MO, or magnetic orientation, from which his messages were originating. The crash had destroyed the B-17’s direction finder; knowing the magnetic orientation might enable Howarth to send messages that included the plane’s location.
Unknown to Howarth, his messages were heard as nearby as the U.S. Army’s Bluie bases on Greenland, and as far away as a ham radio operator in Portland, Maine, some two thousand miles from the crash site, who relayed the SOS to military authorities. A message heard by an army radio operator in Greenland was garbled in spots, so the unidentified amateur in Maine filled in the blanks. One of Howarth’s first messages read, in part, “Prep Negat Nine Easy [PN9E] crashed in glacier. . . . Have kept alive. Send help soon.”
Howarth kept working on the stubborn receiver. Certain that he’d put it together correctly, he fretted over an instruction manual missing since the crash. The following day, after a nightlong blizzard, Clarence Wedel stepped outside the tail section, and there was the manual, uncovered by the blowing winds. Paul Spina and several other crewmen considered it a miracle.
Howarth pored over the manual and discovered that he’d incorrectly connected two wires. He switched them and made some adjustments, and then the receiver worked, too. He hailed Bluie West One. When the first faint reply came in, a frenzied Howarth was too excited to talk. Finally he yelled to his comrades, “We got ’em!”
The reply from Bluie West One promised supplies and help, either by plane or dogsled. It also instructed the crew to be on the lookout for a ship on the water nearby, and to shoot flares every evening at set times. Atmospheric conditions made it impossible to pinpoint the PN9E’s magnetic orientation, but the description Howarth provided of being on a glacier northwest of a fjord was helpful.
In the hours and days that followed, Howarth continued to send and receive messages, each one proof of ongoing life in the wrecked B-17. Their rations had shrunk to two crackers and two pieces of cheese a day. But as engineer Al Tucciarone put it, with the radio working they felt like kings.
Monteverde captured the crew’s feelings another way: if they survived this ordeal, they’d all owe their lives to Lolly Howarth.
NOVEMBER 1942
A
T THE
U.S. Army’s Greenland bases, excitement about PN9E’s radio messages contrasted with worrisome silence from McDowell’s C-53. Hope ebbed about the fate of the cargo crew, though the five men wouldn’t be presumed lost until they’d been missing for a month. In the meantime, efforts continued for both planes.
But again searchers were stymied by brutal weather. No flights left the Bluie bases on November 16 or 17. When the skies cleared on November 18, sixteen planes went aloft over the east coast, including the one that spotted Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver as the three Canadians walked toward the fjord. Storms and treacherous winds returned, and no planes left the bases from November 19 through 23.
On November 23, the PN9E crew exhausted their food supply, savoring their last few biscuits. They smoked their last cigarettes. Tucciarone cleaned out the ashtrays in the cockpit to give them a few final drags.
A lack of the most basic supplies came at a cost—literally. Ration boxes included toilet paper, but they used it up quickly. In its absence, the men dug into their wallets for the paper money they hadn’t used for their Short Snorter memberships. They started with one-dollar bills, but soon those ran out and the men moved to larger denominations. The longer they spent on the ice, the more expensive personal hygiene became.
Monteverde and his crew fired several of their remaining flares and listened hopefully for the drone of an airplane engine, but each day of empty skies took a toll. Already weak and thin, their bodies burning muscle to stay warm, the crew’s anticipation of impending rescue turned to anxiety. Maybe no one would spot them, and even if someone did, it might be impossible to navigate the crevasse field. When no planes arrived day after day, morale drained and anxiety descended into fear. Communicating with the Bluie bases on Howarth’s radio would be worthless if all they could do was talk. They needed food and help before the cold picked them off one by one.
November 24 looked like another dispiriting day of lousy weather and no searches. Thanksgiving was two days away, and it seemed as though the men of the PN9E would spend it hungry, wet, shivering, and scared. But the headstrong commanding officer of the remote northern Greenland base called Bluie West Eight had other ideas. He commandeered a civilian passenger plane, filled it with supplies, rounded up a volunteer crew, and flew east into the storms toward the missing men.
For anyone else, it would have been reckless. For Bernt Balchen, it was routine.
B
ALCHEN
(
RHYMES WITH
“walk in”) was forty-three years into a remarkable life spent at the extreme edge of adventure. Powerfully muscled, with a square chin, thick blond hair, and Nordic good looks, he had the constitution of a draft horse and a fitting nickname: “The Last Viking.”
The Norwegian-born son of a country doctor, Balchen joined the French Foreign Legion as a teenager, then transferred to the Norwegian Army as an artillery trainee. He was too late to fight in World War I, so he joined the Finnish cavalry under an assumed name to battle the Russian-supported socialists in the civil war of 1918. Left for dead on a battlefield when his horse was shot out from under him, Balchen recovered by relying on the strength and vigor that had made him a champion skier, cyclist, marksman, and boxer. He was not yet twenty.
After the war, while awaiting word on whether he’d been chosen to box for Norway in the Olympics, Balchen gave up his athletic career to become a pilot in the Norwegian Naval Air Force. Commissioned a lieutenant, in 1925 Balchen joined a rescue mission for famed Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen, who had hoped to be the first man to fly over the North Pole. More polar adventures followed, as Balchen alternated between working with Amundsen and Amundsen’s great rival, U.S. Navy commander Richard E. Byrd.
LEGENDARY AIRMAN BERNT BALCHEN.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)
With Byrd, Balchen piloted the plane that made the first airmail delivery from the United States to France. He took the controls during fierce storms and heavy fog over Paris, winning acclaim for saving the crew by setting down in the waters off Normandy. Already famous, Balchen gained worldwide renown in 1928 when he flew to remote northern Canada to rescue a German crew that had crashed after a transatlantic flight.
Balchen and Byrd had a contentious relationship, yet Byrd respected Balchen’s flying skills and invited him to immigrate to the United States. In 1929, Balchen served as the chief pilot when a Byrd-led crew made the first flight over the South Pole. His exploits became so celebrated during the early years of flight that he found steady work as a test pilot for extreme weather conditions and as a consultant for aircraft makers and other fliers, including Amelia Earhart. In 1930 Congress passed a special act making him a dual citizen of Norway and the United States.
In an era of self-promoting aviators, some of whom were more skillful in press conferences than in the sky, Balchen was described as modest, even shy, despite a reputation among his peers as one of the best and bravest fliers of the age. Later in life, he’d shed his youthful reserve and display a streak of braggadocio.
Balchen kept busy throughout the 1930s, including a stint as chief pilot for a journey through Antarctica led by the American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth. He served as chief technical adviser for Norwegian Airlines from 1935 to 1940; as a cocreator of the Nordic Postal Union; and as a negotiator on an aviation treaty between the United States and Norway.
When Russia attacked Finland in 1939, Balchen was in Helsinki trying to obtain U.S. fighter airplanes for the Finnish Air Force. When Norway fell to the Germans the following year, he established the Norwegian Air Force training base known as Little Norway in Canada, to train pilots who’d escaped the Nazis. After handing that task to others, Balchen ferried bombers for the British. He also found time to indulge in his hobby as a watercolorist, favoring bold colors and the powerful scenery of Arctic vistas he knew and loved.
In 1941, an aide to U.S. Army general Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold met Balchen in the Philippines to ask him to command a secret air base in Greenland that would be used as a ferrying stop over the Atlantic. Soon Balchen was a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps and commander of its northernmost base, Bluie West Eight.
The Operation Bolero ferrying effort had barely begun when Balchen had a chance to demonstrate his rescue skills. In June 1942 a B-17 called
My Gal Sal
with a crew of thirteen ran out of fuel in bad weather and went down in Greenland. A radio operator at Bluie West Eight picked up the crew’s distress calls and determined that the plane was about one hundred miles from the base.
My Gal Sal
was soon located from the air, but it wasn’t clear how to rescue the crew. After dropping supplies, a search pilot noticed that melting ice had formed a temporary lake about sixteen miles from the downed B-17.
With Balchen aboard, a navy pilot named Dick Parunak landed an amphibious plane on the meltwater lake. Balchen hopped out and led a ground party on a two-day trek across soft ice, around open crevasses, and through glacial rivers. After reaching
My Gal Sal
, Balchen guided all thirteen members of the crew back to the rescue plane, and Parunak made two trips to return them all to Bluie West Eight.
Balchen received the Soldier’s Medal, the army’s highest award for heroism outside combat, and Parunak received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Two weeks later, the pair teamed up again to rescue Colonel Robert Wimsatt, commander of the U.S. Army’s Greenland bases, and another flier whose plane went down on a patrol flight. After two successful missions and fifteen men rescued in two weeks, Balchen and Parunak jokingly named their army-navy partnership the Greenland Cooperative Salvage Company.
Now, four months later, Balchen faced a new test: guiding a commandeered C-54 Skymaster through late-autumn storms toward Koge Bay, hoping to add the nine men of the PN9E to his rescue total.
B
ALCHEN VIVIDLY DESCRIBED
the challenges facing pilots in the far north: “When you fight in the Arctic, you fight on the Arctic’s terms. . . . In the air you fight ice that overloads your wings and sends you out of control; you fight eccentric air currents over the ice cap that rack a plane and drop it several thousand feet without warning; you fight the fog. Most of the time you win, but sometimes you lose, and the Arctic shows no mercy to a loser.”
A search flight he made for the PN9E nearly proved his point. “For twenty minutes our four-engine ship is tossed like a leaf in a cyclone. It’s the severest turbulence I have ever encountered in an airplane, and I think in all my flying this is the narrowest escape of my life.”
Hoping not to repeat the experience, on this day Balchen skirted around the storms. As he approached Koge Bay, the sky was getting dark. But before Balchen turned back, he saw a small red star rising in the distance. Then another. Then a third. He changed course to head toward the flares and dropped to a lower altitude. Looking down through the windshield, he saw the broken PN9E. He thought it resembled a crushed dragonfly on the ice.
He noticed how the bomber had snapped in two, and how the tail hung down at about a thirty-degree angle toward a gaping crevasse. Scouting the area beyond the wreck, Balchen concluded that the plane had gone down on the worst possible area of the ice cap: an active, crumbling glacier, surrounded by crevasses and deep ice canyons. The only approach on the ground, he thought, would be from the north, where the glacier seemed more stable, with fewer crevasses. Balchen considered it a miracle that anyone had survived the crash, not to mention the two weeks that followed.
Balchen noted the wrecked plane’s position near Koge Bay, placing it around the intersection of longitude 65 degrees, 15 minutes north, and latitude 41 degrees, 18 minutes west. As he brought the big C-54 lower, Balchen ordered the crew to prepare bundles and crates of cargo they’d brought along, a cornucopia of food, fuel, two stoves, sleeping bags, clothing, and medical supplies.
W
HEN BALCHEN’S PLANE
approached the crash site, the men of the PN9E were clustered inside the tail section. At the sound of the four-engine Skymaster, all but O’Hara and Spina spilled outside onto the ice, tripping over each other like roaches startled by light. Monteverde and his men didn’t believe their eyes until they saw packages falling from the plane at the end of parachute lines.
They’d been lost, but now they were found. Lolly Howarth’s radio magic had led to their discovery. They huddled together for a prayer of thanks.
As he watched Balchen’s plane circling overhead, Monteverde began to weep. He looked around and saw that his men were crying, too. Every last one. Tears rolled down their chapped faces and froze on their reddened cheeks.
O
N THE FIRST
three passes by Balchen’s plane, fierce winds caught the cargo parachutes, turning them into sails and carrying the supplies into crevasses or far from the PN9E. One crewman grabbed a bundle only to be swept away by its wind-filled parachute. He let go just in time to avoid being pulled into a crevasse. Watching in horror, Balchen ordered the parachutes removed.
He made contact with Howarth by radio and told the men of the PN9E to take cover inside their living quarters. Balchen flew a death-defying fifty feet above the glacier and treated the next ten cargo drops like pinpoint bombing runs. As he swept over the wreck, turbulent air treated Balchen’s ninety-four-foot-long plane the way a bull treats a rodeo rider. Tucciarone felt certain that the C-54 and its crew would be joining them on the ice. Yet the low-altitude cargo drops without parachutes made a difference; several bundles even bounced off the B-17’s fuselage. Still, Tucciarone estimated that he and his crewmates found only about one-fifth of the dropped cargo.
So eager were the men to gather the supplies that they ignored the cold wind raking the ice cap. One after another they stumbled back into the tail section nearly blind, their eyelids frozen together. The injured Spina and O’Hara blew warm air on their crewmates’ faces to thaw them.
Within a day, the men had recovered medical supplies and five days’ worth of food, mostly C rations, consisting of tin cans of “wet” meat with hash or beans, and D-ration survival bars. Tea and sugar had mixed together on the way down, so the men separated the two using mosquito nets from the jungle kits. They found two sleeping bags, which they gave to O’Hara and Spina. Both men soon had company from crewmates, who took turns doubling up with them for warmth. They recovered an Arctic Primus stove that looked like an upturned blowtorch. But it was useless because it wouldn’t burn the leaded gasoline from the plane’s tanks, and they couldn’t find any fuel dropped by Balchen.
A quart bottle of whiskey, dropped for “medicinal purposes,” made the rounds, then reached Spina. A note in pencil on the label said, “Take only in small quantity.” Others heeded the advice, but Spina belted down shot after shot. His compromised circulation system experienced a powerful jolt. At first, his hands and feet tingled; within ten minutes they throbbed with pain. Spina howled. When the pain ebbed, he took the penciled instructions to heart.