Frozen in Time Read online

  With time to kill, they invented a primitive calendar. To mark the month, they lined up a row of eleven matchsticks in a pile of snow inside the bomber tail. Below that row, they lined up nine matchsticks, to note the day they crashed. They added one matchstick for every day after that. Several of the men had heard that no one had ever survived on the ice cap for longer than two weeks, so they expected to be rescued or dead before they added a twelfth matchstick to the top row.

  They ventured outside in the mornings to clear off heavy loads of snow that piled up on the wings overnight. They didn’t know it, but there was little point to the exercise: the weather made it nearly impossible for searchers to take flight. One search flight went up on November 13; no planes flew the next day; two were airborne on the fifteenth; and none searched on the sixteenth.

  The foul weather also meant no search flights for McDowell’s missing C-53.

  Daily logs from Bluie West One recorded the frustration: “November 13, 1942: We are unable to continue search today on account of weather. . . . November 14, 1942: Search for lost plane could not be continued today on account of weather. . . . November 15, 1942: We are unable to search for lost plane today on account of weather conditions and daylight shortage when weather was clear over the Ice Cap.”

  With no new radio communications from McDowell’s crew, doubts rose among military officials whether the five men in the downed cargo plane were alive. Yet officially the search continued.

  As winter approached, the nights grew longer, leaving precious little warming sunlight on the ice cap. At the December solstice, sunrise and sunset would be separated by little more than three hours at Koge Bay.

  Inside the PN9E, the combined leadership of Monteverde and Spencer held things together. The men continued to pass time beating their arms and massaging their legs in futile attempts to get warm, or at least warmer. They moved around as much as possible, which wasn’t much in the broken tail. They played spelling games. They recounted their life stories. Woody Puryear came to believe that he knew the eight men crowded against him better than anyone else on earth, despite having only met them a week earlier when he came aboard as a volunteer searcher.

  At what passed for mealtime, they used body heat to thaw their partial rations under their armpits. They didn’t have a Bible, but they spoke of God, and they continued their prayer sessions. The men came from several denominations, but all were Christian. Monteverde prayed the rosary daily, a spiritual response to what he considered banishment to a frozen white hell.

  During silences between stories and prayers, Woody Puryear thought about his mother; his sisters, Blanche and Pearl; and his girlfriend, Erma Ray Yates, back in Kentucky. Like hungry survivors everywhere, he and the others talked and fantasized about food. For Puryear, the imagined meals featured old standbys such as steaks and chops, but also little sandwiches his mother made with a dab of peanut butter between two crisp crackers. Thoughts of home loomed large for Puryear, who in ten months had gone from country boy to Greenland-based soldier to missing man. The young staff sergeant could find some relief in the knowledge that he’d already sent his Christmas cards, two months early, to be sure they’d arrive home on time.

  WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM RECEIVED BY PAUL SPINA’S MOTHER, JENNIE, REPORTING HIM MISSING. (COURTESY OF JEAN SPINA.)

  One day, when several men seemed to be losing hope, Monteverde asked, “How many of you are Short Snorters?” Weak smiles knowingly crossed lips.

  SHORT SNORTERS WERE a loosely bound society of airmen and -women who enjoyed a drink and a good time. The club traced its origins to 1925 and a handful of rough-and-ready Alaskan bush pilots with too much time on their hands. Beyond that, the group’s creation stories were like bar tales: confused and often contradictory. The main requirement for induction in the Short Snorters was completion of a flight over at least one ocean, either as pilot or passenger. By virtue of that alone, a prospective member was considered a man or woman of the world, with stories to tell and friends to share them with. A “short snort” was slang for a small or weak drink, so it was said that Short Snorters were fliers who knew how to kick back but also knew the importance of keeping a clear head.

  Beyond a transoceanic flight, requirements for initiation were four dollars and three relatively sober sponsors. Each new member had to be nominated by three existing Short Snorters in exchange for payment of a dollar, or a drink, to each sponsor. The fourth dollar bill became the new Short Snorter’s membership card. Each sponsor signed the bill and noted the place of initiation. The new member, in turn, signed his or her sponsors’ membership bills.

  From then on, a Short Snorter was required to produce his or her membership dollar in reply to the inquiry, “Are you a Short Snorter?” Failure to produce the signed bill within two minutes would cost the member a dollar or a drink to all fellow members present. One forgetful Short Snorter tattooed a dollar bill on his chest because he said it was less expensive and less embarrassing to open his shirt than to pull out his empty wallet. When membership dollars were produced, Short Snorters would sign each other’s bills, noting where they’d met. When a bill could hold no more signatures, its owner would tape a new bill onto its end, and then another; some Short Snorters had membership bills stretching several yards long. After a Short Snorter’s death, the membership bills became a paper memorial that commemorated the people and places he or she had encountered along the way.

  World War II created exponential growth for the Short Snorter movement. A New York Times story called it “a billion dollar racket with around three million members.” Egalitarian and inclusive by design, the organization admitted women, accepted foreign currency, and inducted members from Britain, Canada, Australia, and Russia. Some German pilots got wind of the idea and created their own branch. By the end of the war, the Short Snorter web reached up to generals, among them Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton Jr.; diplomats including W. Averell Harriman; and world leaders such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, King Peter of Yugoslavia, and Prince Bertil of Sweden. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt joined, too.

  If every Short Snorter bill had been collected and collated, the result would have been the membership list of a vast global social network, from peons to potentates, connected by fate, friendship, and thirst.

  By asking whether his fellow castaways were Short Snorters, Monteverde had found a way to bind the lost crew of the PN9E through their ordeal and beyond. Signing each other’s bills was an act of defiance. It said that survival was possible, and someday they’d cross paths and share stories of their incarceration on ice.

  The crewmen dug into their wallets. Puryear couldn’t find his, so he borrowed the four-dollar admission fee. They passed around the bills and signed their names. All they were missing were shots of whiskey.

  AFTER DAYS OF sending distress calls on the Gibson Girl transmitter, radioman Lolly Howarth had nothing to lose except his fingers: he volunteered to go out into the cold to work on the PN9E’s larger, more powerful radio equipment.

  Howarth knew that it was a long shot. When the bomber broke in half at the radio compartment, most of the gear had been thrown around the cabin or left dangling from its mountings. The radio boxes, ranging in size from breadboxes to small suitcases, were now piled atop one another as a windbreak. But on closer examination, Howarth discovered that the glass vacuum tubes in several pieces had somehow survived the crash.

  During the ten months since he’d enlisted, Howarth had trained hard as a radio operator, but he was no veteran expert in communications or electrical engineering—just a corporal who wanted to be an actor or a drama teacher when the war ended. Five-foot-seven and 130 pounds, the brown-eyed, baby-faced Howarth looked younger than his twenty-three years. Born in a log cabin built by his logger father, Howarth was the second of four brothers who hunted deer and lived off the land in rural northeast Wisconsin. Quiet and sweet natured, Howarth was perhaps the PN9E crewman most comfortable with his surro
undings; heavy snows cut off his family’s cabin for much of each winter. Howarth and his brothers had to ski several miles daily between home and school. After leaving home at eighteen, Howarth worked his way through La Crosse State Teachers College by washing dishes in local restaurants, becoming the first member of his family with a college degree. Single when he’d enlisted, now he had a wife, Irene, his former landlady in La Crosse. Seeing her again meant fixing the radio, so he’d do whatever it took.

  Monteverde worried about sparks from the radio igniting spilled fuel, so he insisted that the work occur outside the fuselage. With help from Harry Spencer and Clarence Wedel, Howarth moved several intact pieces of the radio to a small, hollowed-out igloo they dug in the snow under the left wing. They covered the boxes with cloth and pieces of parachute, then thawed them out with a battery-powered signal lamp. Shining the powerful light toward the radio warmed it enough to get the knobs turning and the insides unfrosted. For power, they connected the radio to the plane’s batteries.

  Knowing that the batteries wouldn’t last, Wedel worked to fix the PN9E’s gas-powered generator. He built a fire on the ice and placed the generator nearby. One by one, he thawed out its parts and dried its wires. Wedel then rebuilt it from scratch and somehow got it working. With a large quantity of fuel still in the B-17’s tanks, they’d have power for as long as Wedel could keep the generator from breaking down or freezing. While it worked, he charged the batteries for the radio and scavenged lightbulbs from the cockpit. He wired the bulbs and strung them in the tail section, so no longer were the survivors condemned to darkness for more than eighteen hours a day.

  Tucked in the little igloo under the wing, Howarth focused his attention on a long-range liaison radio, a transmitter and receiver that could communicate with ground stations or aircraft in flight. Depending on conditions, its signal could reach hundreds or even thousands of miles. For an antenna, it could use the skin of the airplane or the long wire from the Gibson Girl. Because the liaison radio was no longer attached to the plane, Howarth chose the wire, unspooling it along the ice.

  His work settled into a punishing cycle: thaw the radio, remove his gloves, work until his fingers froze, warm his hands, then thaw the radio again. Often the cycle took a few minutes, and Howarth’s hands cracked and bled. Between cycles he returned to the tail section, where his crewmates warmed his hands and encouraged him. Spina cringed as he heard Howarth crying from the pain in his fingers. Howarth knew that they were depending on him, and the pressure showed. Woody Puryear shuddered as he heard Howarth lament that the radio was too smashed and the rewiring too complicated.

  “I can’t do it, fellas,” Howarth said. “I can’t do it.”

  But as soon as his hands thawed enough to move his fingers, he returned to the igloo and resumed work. He studied torn and incomplete assembly diagrams and created jury-rigged replacements for broken parts. He worked around the clock.

  After several exhausting days, Spencer and Wedel helped Howarth move the equipment to the PN9E navigator’s compartment, an area behind the plane’s broken Plexiglas nose. They blocked the opening with an inflated life raft, but it wasn’t much warmer than the igloo. Every night the snow poured in, and every morning Howarth had to thaw out the radio and himself.

  One night while Howarth worked, the crew heard what sounded like gunshots in their quarters: metal rivets began to pop as the tail section inched toward the widening crevasse underneath. With each unnatural movement of the broken B-17, the rivets that held together the fuselage panels protested by abandoning ship. To slow the slide into the crevasse, the crew gathered all available rope and parachute shroud lines. They lashed the tail section to the front half of the plane, twisting the lines to keep them taut. It was a temporary solution, but they hoped it would hold until rescue came.

  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.

  10

  FROZEN TEARS

  NOVEMBER 1942

  AT 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 w
arm, 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.

  BALCHEN (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.