Frozen in Time Read online

  To begin with, reaching the coastline on foot or by motorsled would be far harder for Monteverde’s nine-man crew than it had been for Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver, who were exhausted but still able-bodied. In a follow-up message from Howarth in the PN9E, he described the “very sick man”—Bill O’Hara—as having “frozen feet, a touch of gangrene, high fever.” A further complication was the instability of the Koge Bay glacier. Between the wrecked PN9E and the coast were untold hidden crevasses, one of which had nearly killed Harry Spencer.

  In fact, the terrain proved too much for expert dogsledder Johan Johansen and his team. They turned back, defeated by deep, finely powdered snow and the tall waves of crusted snow called sastrugi. Even if Lieutenant Max Demorest and his motorsled team could reach the PN9E, there was no guarantee they could get the survivors to Beach Head Station, perhaps forty miles away, depending on the route. In addition, with fog and storms approaching, the Northland’s motorboat might struggle or capsize in Comanche Bay.

  With doubts rising about how best to reach the PN9E crew, Lieutenant John Pritchard, the Northland’s Duck pilot, dreamed up a daring new plan that would eliminate the need for motorsleds and motorboats altogether. It also would remove arduous travel by sea, and would minimize the risk of crevasses. Pritchard proposed flying the Duck to the ice cap, landing briefly, leading the B-17 crewmen to his little plane a few at a time, then flying back to the Northland. Then he’d do it at least twice more to get all nine men off the ice.

  JOHN PRITCHARD (LEFT) ON THE DECK OF THE NORTHLAND AS THE CHIEF BOATSWAIN’S MATE INSPECTS THE DUCK. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

  It was likely the same plan Pritchard had hoped to use during the search for Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver, but he’d been unable to find them. Now, with Balchen’s coordinates, he knew exactly where to locate Monteverde’s crew, so it made perfect sense that Pritchard and the Duck’s radioman, Benjamin Bottoms, would be eager to show what they and their Duck could do.

  PRITCHARD’S PLAN WAS elegant, efficient, brave, and dangerous. It also was unprecedented. No plane had ever landed on Greenland’s ice cap and then taken off again. On each of three or more round-trips, Pritchard would have to contend with buffeting winds, blowing snow, and treacherous haze, the same conditions that contributed to the PN9E’s crash and numerous others. Also, he’d have to avoid hidden crevasses located between his landing spot and the broken bomber.

  Pritchard’s plan to save the B-17 crew was bold, but it wasn’t reckless. It fit the selfless oath he’d taken as a Coast Guardsman. It’s also easy to imagine another, more personal motive: Pritchard’s younger brother Gil was a B-17 pilot, flying combat missions in a Flying Fortress over North Africa.

  By neglecting to inform Rear Admiral “Iceberg” Smith of the emerging Duck-centric rescue plan, Northland captain Frank Pollard might have been operating on the theory that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. Another possibility was that Pollard hadn’t yet decided to allow it.

  Later, Pollard would explain that Pritchard had been determined to land on the ice cap in the Duck as soon as Balchen located the PN9E. Pollard said that he was persuaded to approve the mission by what he called “the touching appeal that was contained in the simple messages being sent out by the wrecked crew on their hand-powered radio set. They kept repeating they were getting weaker and told of two men suffering from advanced cases of gangrene, of other injuries and hardships.” It wasn’t clear to whom Pollard was referring when he mentioned a second man with gangrene, but he apparently meant Paul Spina.

  With Admiral Smith expressing qualms about the Northland’s role to begin with, Pollard wouldn’t test his commanding officer’s resolve. He’d tell the head of the Greenland Patrol what was happening only after the Duck took flight.

  BY THE TIME he volunteered for the PN9E rescue, John Pritchard had gone through hell and humiliation to prove himself a gifted, fearless pilot.

  Born in January 1914 in Redfield, South Dakota, Pritchard was the eldest of five children. Gil, his bomber pilot brother, was a year younger, followed by two more boys, one of whom died in infancy. Last was a girl, their baby sister Nancy. Their mother, Virginia, ran a strict home while working as a children’s book reviewer. Their father, John Pritchard Sr., was a cattleman and a banker, but he lost everything when a late-spring storm in 1926 wiped out his herd. Reduced to selling applesauce, John Senior moved the family to Los Angeles for a fresh start.

  In Nancy’s eyes, her brother John was their parents’ favorite. In the tradition of firstborn sons, John Junior was a responsible, dependable boy. The family’s German nanny proclaimed that someday he’d be president. John cruised through Beverly Hills High School with a mix of A’s and B’s, and worked as a paper boy for the Los Angeles Times, where his father had found work as a circulation manager.

  From age twelve, Pritchard dreamed of becoming a naval officer, but he couldn’t collect the required recommendations for the U.S. Naval Academy. Instead, after high school he joined the navy as an enlisted man, then spent two and a half years trying to blaze a path to a career as an officer. He served nine months at sea and endured a hernia operation, and eventually he gathered enough support for admission to Annapolis. Pritchard passed all the tests—except for one, in geometry, where he fell four-tenths of a point below the bar. He’d reached the age limit of twenty for admission, so retaking the test the following year wasn’t an option.

  Pritchard swallowed his disappointment and set his sights on the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, where he’d be eligible for admission until he turned twenty-two. But again he hit a snag. He ranked eighty-eighth out of one thousand applicants on the Coast Guard exams, but only fifty-eight cadets were offered spots. Pritchard tried again the following year, but he was foiled by the physical exam: a blood test claimed that he had syphilis.

  Watching their son’s dreams and reputation unravel, Pritchard’s parents mounted a feverish letter-writing campaign to powerful men from California to Washington. John Pritchard Sr. won support from a U.S. senator and a congressman. Virginia Pritchard wrote an impassioned letter to an old friend who’d become administrator of the U.S. Agricultural Adjustment Administration, who forwarded her letter to the secretary of the treasury. When campaigning for her son, Virginia Pritchard bared her political soul, declaring her love for the New Deal and her FDR-inspired conversion to the Democratic Party after a lifetime as a Republican. “We have no political friends,” she pleaded. “If in any way you can help this son of ours, we shall be more than grateful.”

  John Pritchard took a second, more reliable blood test for syphilis, which came back negative. Yet still he was out of luck: the cadet class was full. His parents kept up the pressure, and their efforts paid off. Six days before the start of the school year, an accepted cadet dropped out and John Pritchard proudly took his place in the Coast Guard Academy’s Class of 1938. His roommate, a future vice admiral named Thomas Sargent, called Pritchard “the happiest man I have ever known.”

  “At reveille,” Sargent recalled, “he would practically jump out of his bunk and, in spite of rain, snow or darkness, he would say, ‘Good morning, Tom, what a great day’ and break out in song. He had a good singing voice, and his favorite rendition was ‘The Grandfather’s Clock’—he knew all the verses. At first, starting the day like this was a little wearing, but his enthusiasm for life was so infectious I actually looked forward to reveille.”

  Upon graduation, the blue-eyed, brown-haired Ensign Pritchard stood five feet, ten inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds. He carried his thin frame at attention, shoulders back, a posture that his sister said reflected self-assurance, not cockiness. A good-looking man, Pritchard had an oval face he arranged in a thoughtful expression. He had several girlfriends, but was in no rush to marry. He seemed more interested in building his career while looking out for his sister and his friends. During one of his first postings, aboard a Coast Guard cutter in the Bering Strait, Pritchard became best friends with Ensign Harry “Tick” Morgan
. He decided that Morgan would make an ideal match for Nancy. “He said, ‘I’m saving Nancy for Tick and Tick for Nancy,’ ” she recalled.

  JOHN PRITCHARD’S COAST GUARD ACADEMY PORTRAIT. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTO.)

  After Alaska, Pritchard was accepted for flight training and became Coast Guard Aviator No. 82. Promoted to lieutenant, he served at the Miami Air Station until February 1942. Nancy spent six weeks of her summer vacation from college visiting him in Florida. During that time, Tick Morgan’s ship came in, and so did Nancy’s. They wed two years later and stayed married for the next sixty years.

  After Miami, Pritchard was assigned to the Northland, as pilot of the ship’s Duck. Except for a brief period back in Florida, he spent most of 1942 flying the little biplane countless miles over and around Greenland.

  THE MAN WHO sat behind Pritchard in the Duck was the Northland’s ruddy-cheeked radioman first class, Benjamin A. Bottoms. A year older than Pritchard, the bearded, blue-eyed Bottoms could have shared a wardrobe with his pilot. He, too, stood just over five-feet-ten and weighed 145 pounds. By coincidence, Bottoms also had a sister named Nancy, who was his twin.

  A farm boy from Cumming, Georgia, Bottoms enlisted in the Coast Guard after graduating from high school. He spent a decade moving from station to station, ship to ship, reenlisting three times and picking up a nickname fitting his Deep South accent: “Georgia Cracker.” In 1937 he married Olga Rogers, a fisherman’s daughter from Gloucester, Massachusetts. They settled with her son Edward, whom Bottoms called “Bud,” near the Coast Guard Air Station in Salem, Massachusetts.

  In December 1939, Bottoms found himself in an unusual predicament for a Coast Guardsman: adrift at sea. He and three other servicemen were aboard an amphibious plane called a Douglas Dolphin when it was forced down in fog twelve miles off the Massachusetts coast. Damaged in the landing, in danger of capsizing, the plane drifted for twenty-five miles and was battered by waves for more than a day before being towed to safety by a Coast Guard cutter. No one was injured, but Bottoms would never forget how it felt to need rescuing.

  He served for five months on the Northland in 1941, then returned to Massachusetts with measles. When he recovered, Bottoms could have escaped the demanding Greenland duty. Instead he volunteered to return as the Duck’s radioman. He rejoined the ship in February 1942, around the same time as Pritchard, and the two became a team. Bottoms impressed his crewmates and superiors with his skills and work ethic. Weeks before the PN9E rescue mission he was recommended for promotion to chief petty officer.

  RADIOMAN BENJAMIN BOTTOMS BEFORE HE GREW A BEARD. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

  ON THE COLD morning of Saturday, November 28, 1942, the Northland pushed through the ice into Comanche Bay. The ship’s communication officers picked up Howarth’s faint distress calls, which gave Pritchard and Bottoms a bearing they could follow to the PN9E crash site. The ship’s crew lined the rail as the little plane taxied away. Less than twenty minutes after the Northland’s anchor splashed into the bay, the Duck was in flight.

  As Pritchard and Bottoms flew toward the downed B-17, Colonel Bernt Balchen and his crew were simultaneously flying over the crash site in their borrowed C-54 Skymaster. Balchen dropped more medical supplies for O’Hara’s gangrenous feet, along with extra sleeping bags, canned chicken, sausages, soups, and candy. By radio, Balchen told Lolly Howarth that he’d spotted two motorsleds carrying Lieutenant Max Demorest and Sergeant Don Tetley some twenty miles away. They were making good time across the ice, each one towing a cargo sled loaded with equipment and supplies. Balchen expected the sledders to arrive at the wreck late that night. He told Howarth to shoot flares after eight o’clock to guide them in.

  THE GRUMMAN DUCK, PILOTED BY JOHN PRITCHARD, WITH BENJAMIN BOTTOMS SERVING AS RADIOMAN, TAXIS AWAY FROM THE NORTHLAND ON NOVEMBER 28, 1942. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES DORIAN.)

  As Balchen circled overhead, he received a radio call from Pritchard in the Duck. The two pilots knew one another from Pritchard’s occasional landings at Balchen’s base. Balchen told him about a level area relatively free of crevasses not far from the PN9E. There, he said, Pritchard could make a wheels-up landing on the Duck’s belly, using the central pontoon like a sled on the ice. Balchen flew over the potential landing site and dropped one hundred feet of rope, snowshoes, and bamboo poles to help Pritchard and Bottoms trek to the wreck after they landed.

  Running low on fuel, Balchen turned the C-54 back across the island toward Bluie West Eight, confident that Pritchard and Bottoms in the Duck, and Demorest and Tetley on motorsleds, had the rescue of the PN9E well in hand.

  PRITCHARD CIRCLED THE Duck above the bomber, then leaned forward on the control stick and brought his plane low over the PN9E. Pritchard buzzed so close to the ground that several of the icebound men took cover inside the tail section. Pritchard tossed out a small can with a red flag tied to it. Inside, Monteverde’s crew found a note that Pritchard had written while aboard the Northland. It inquired about ground conditions and asked Monteverde’s crew to stand on the B-17’s right wingtip if they thought it was safe for the Duck to land with its wheels down. If they thought that he should land wheels-up, on the Duck’s belly, they should stand on the left wing. If landing was too dangerous to consider altogether, they should gather on the PN9E’s tail. As a signoff, the note read, “If there’s a 60-40 chance, I’ll take it.”

  When Monteverde read that line aloud, several men wiped away tears.

  The desperate bomber crewmen looked at one another. They feared that the crevasses would swallow the Duck like an alligator opening its jaws under a mallard. Without a word, they climbed atop the tail to tell Pritchard and Bottoms that it was too dangerous to land. In doing so, they knew that they were waving off what might be their best chance for survival.

  Minutes later, Howarth and Monteverde reached Ben Bottoms by radio, and Monteverde reinforced the message. He told the Duck’s crew, “Don’t try it.”

  Pritchard buzzed them again, wagging his wings and waving from the cockpit. The dejected PN9E crew thought that was the last they’d see of the plane. But as they watched, Pritchard circled lower and lower over an area several miles away. On Pritchard’s orders, Bottoms radioed: “Coming in anyway.”

  A member of the PN9E crew muttered, “He won’t make it, poor fellow.” Several couldn’t bear to watch. They climbed back inside their shelter.

  Adding to the danger, Pritchard disregarded Balchen’s advice about the best way to touch down. He hand-cranked the Duck’s landing gear into place, intending to treat the ice cap the same as he would a paved tarmac. It was a calculated risk. A belly-down landing might damage the Duck’s fuselage or curl its propeller, rendering it yet another squished bug on the ice cap. On the other hand, a wheels-down landing could lead to the same result. Five months earlier, when the pilot of the first plane from the Lost Squadron tried a wheels-down landing, he’d flipped his fighter onto its back. But Pritchard went with his gut: wheels down.

  Pritchard clicked through his eight-point landing checklist: propeller set at low pitch, cabin hood locked open, tail wheel locked, and so on. He pushed forward on the control stick, and the Duck met the ice cap. The wheels touched, then sank into deep snow. The plane’s bulbous nose seemed intent on burrowing downward into a catastrophic somersault. Pritchard fought back, relying on the big central pontoon and the wing floats to keep the plane level. Several times the tail lifted, threatening to cartwheel over the nose and destroy the plane and both men aboard. Pritchard kept fighting.

  He brought the Duck to a stop, completing the first planned, successful, wheels-down landing on a Greenland glacier.

  TO AVOID THE web of crevasses, Pritchard had landed about two miles from the wreck, far from where Balchen dropped the rope, snowshoes, and bamboo poles. Pritchard and Bottoms climbed out of the Duck equipped with little more than a broomstick to test for hidden ice bridges.

  For more than an hour, the two Coast Guardsmen shuffled, poked, trudg
ed, plowed, and slid across the glacier. At one point Pritchard slipped into the mouth of a crevasse, but he managed to catch an edge and pull himself out. When they reached the wreck, Pritchard approached each crewman of the PN9E with an outstretched hand.

  Monteverde told Pritchard, pilot to pilot, “You shouldn’t have landed. Now you may not be able to get off.”

  “I came prepared to stay,” Pritchard answered.

  It was a good line, but in fact Pritchard intended to take off as soon as possible. He told Monteverde that the Duck would take two men immediately and would return the next day for the rest. O’Hara and Spina were the worst off, and Monteverde wanted them to go first. But the navigator’s frozen feet and the engineer’s broken arm and other injuries made it impossible for either to reach the Duck without being carried on sleds. They’d have to wait until the Duck returned with hand sleds or they could be carried on Demorest and Tetley’s motorsleds. Pritchard suggested that Monteverde’s frostbite made him a good candidate. But Monteverde was captain of the PN9E. He’d be the last to leave.

  Monteverde chose two of the best-liked men aboard the bomber, Al Tucciarone and Lloyd “Woody” Puryear. Both needed medical care, Puryear for feet that had frozen in his leather boots, and Tucciarone for the broken ribs he’d suffered in the crash. Both were weak with hunger and chilled to the bone, yet Monteverde considered them strong enough to reach the Duck on foot.

  The timing was providential for Tucciarone, who’d begun having visions. He felt certain that he’d seen a giant image of Jesus Christ in the Greenland sky. Puryear felt fragile and stiff from the cold, and his mind had become so foggy from hypothermia that he barely registered that he was leaving his new friends. When it dawned on them that they’d been chosen, Puryear and Tucciarone both declined. They argued that copilot Harry Spencer and volunteer spotter Clint Best should take their places. Spencer and Best refused, Monteverde pulled rank, and that was that.