Frozen in Time Page 18

  Excited, I telephone Commander Jim Blow to confirm the good news. When I reach him, Blow is in the middle of arranging helicopters to take us from Kulusuk to Koge Bay. He’s too much of an officer and a gentleman to say so, but I swear that I can read his mind: “I told you we’re going.” He says final approval for the C-130 is still pending, but he feels good about our chances and tells me to plan for a week or more of glacier camping.

  With a departure date in hand, Lou’s groundwork pays off. Government officials in Greenland issue an elaborate fifteen-page permit for North South Polar to search out not only the Duck but also McDowell’s C-53 and planes left behind from the Lost Squadron. Corporate sponsors step up with equipment and supplies. Lou slashes his original million-dollar budget by more than half, to the narrowest margin that assures a safe and well-provisioned mission. Lou’s revised plan focuses purely on finding the Duck, with a recovery mission to follow, if and when the plane and its men are located. “If we don’t get onto the ice we have nothing,” Lou tells me. “Once we get there and we’re successful, everything else will follow.”

  I cancel my plan to go it alone and send more money to Lou’s nonprofit Fallen American Veterans Foundation. Three weeks later, I send even more.

  Lou’s team starts to congeal, bringing expertise in fields ranging from geophysics to radar to mountaineering to excavation. They trade flurries of e-mails on everything from bedrock depths to the warmest sleeping bags to the best method of polar bear deterrence. This last leads to a lengthy discussion of weaponry, electrified fences, and something called a “Snublebluss,” a tripwire that activates an alarm and warning lights around a campsite. I like the name but worry about its effectiveness. One e-mail includes grisly photos of a polar bear attack victim.

  In the midst of these discussions, I pull from my files a government pamphlet titled Encounters with Wildlife in Greenland. I highlight a long section on mortal dangers: “Despite its size and awesome strength, the polar bear is swift and agile, moves easily on rough ice and steep slopes, and is an excellent swimmer. . . . Polar bears are meat eaters . . . [and] any animal, including humans, is potential prey.” The recommended response is avoidance, and the guide offers instructions to make a “Chili-Con-Carne Alarm,” using a can of strong-smelling meat stew as bait to trigger a siren. Call it a Chili-Con-Snublebluss. If escape or scaring the bear isn’t possible, hope that a gun is handy. “Avoid head shots,” the guide cautions, “as they often do not kill a bear. Do not check the results of your shot. If the bear goes down, keep shooting vital areas until it is still. Make sure it is dead.” Noted.

  When I show Lou the guide, he assures me that the chance of encountering a polar bear is almost zero. Still, Lou has recruited a medical student and U.S. Army National Guard captain just back from Afghanistan named Frank Marley to be the expedition’s chief of health and security.

  Yet for all the fears of polar bears and hidden crevasses, of vicious storms and killing cold, our biggest worry can’t be overcome with Snubleblusses, electrified fences, safety ropes, guns, or extreme weather gear. Hovering over every conversation, every e-mail, every decision, is the nagging anxiety that even if we reach Koge Bay, we won’t find the Duck.

  IN JULY, AFTER the team is assembled and a mission plan is written, Lou sends a triumphant text message at one in the morning: “Everything is a go.” We’re bound for Koge Bay with radar-generated search coordinates, a historic treasure map, an expert team, the Coast Guard’s support, and Greenland’s approval, for what might be the last chance to find John Pritchard, Ben Bottoms, Loren Howarth, and the Duck.

  By phone the next day, I admit to Lou how deeply I’d doubted him. “Yeah, I figured,” he says, laughing. “No sweat, man. We’ll just leave you on the ice.”

  But during the weeks that follow, the mission again teeters on the edge of oblivion. Money remains the main sticking point, as hopes for a television deal fizzle and counted-on sponsors come up short. Stressed, I unload on Lou and his producer/partner, Aaron Bennet, for not having everything in place, even as I send Lou more cash and use my credit card to pay the balance of a bill for sleeping bags. A few days later, I give Lou my credit card number so he can buy tents, a rifle and a shotgun, boots, gear, and assorted other equipment, with an understanding that I’ll be repaid when other money arrives. Soon I’m answering antifraud calls from American Express, which apparently wants to be sure my account hasn’t been hijacked by a mad survivalist.

  After thanking me for the card, Lou asks, “What’s my limit, Dad?” We both laugh, me more ruefully than him. In no time, Lou blows past the limit I set.

  FORTUNATELY, I’M NOT the mission’s only potential funder. In addition to the C-130, the Coast Guard appears ready to provide as much as $150,000, as “support for expedition to Greenland to provide positive location of USCG J2F-4 Grumman Duck suspected crash site.” A document seeking bids for the job talks about “positive location,” but if the contract comes through, Lou and North South Polar will only be expected to investigate—and either confirm or rule out—six “Points of Interest” considered the most promising from radar hits and historical research. If those sites don’t pan out, up to four more locations might be examined, time permitting. Effort is guaranteed, success isn’t. Yet what’s happening is clear: at the urging of Jim Blow, the Coast Guard is getting ready to close the major gaps in the expedition’s streamlined budget.

  It’s safe to say that there could be no odder couple than the Coast Guard and North South Polar. If the contract is consummated, it would be a marriage of discipline and dreams, and the Duck Hunt’s civilian and military point men personify the contrast. While Lou sallies forth to slay dragons, Jim Blow is a study in precise control and military planning, as rooted in reality as his regular haircut appointment.

  AT FORTY-FOUR, JIM is married to his college girlfriend, a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit. They live in suburban Virginia with their three sons, at least two of whom can imagine becoming pilots like their father. He’s spent nearly twenty years in the Coast Guard, and the service defines him. His father was a navy flier, but Jim prefers rescue work. “The navy is always training for something that might never happen. With the Coast Guard, you’re training for what you do day in and day out. Making that rescue, making an impact on people’s lives.”

  COMMANDER JAMES “JIM” BLOW. (MITCHELL ZUCKOFF PHOTOGRAPH.)

  The lineage from rescue flier John Pritchard to Jim Blow is easy to trace. One of Jim’s best days at work came when he was flying a twin-engine Falcon jet, searching for a missing diver in the Gulf of Mexico. “Those searches usually don’t end well,” he says. He was assigned to fly a search pattern a maximum of four miles from where the diver was last seen. Jim decided that wasn’t far enough, so he stretched the area to seven miles. When turning his jet at the far edge of the enlarged area, he spotted the missing diver from his left-side window. Soon the man was safe and dry.

  To win Coast Guard funding to find Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth, Jim has written his superiors a lengthy brief titled “Operation Duck Hunt 2012,” with justifications including the military ethos of “leave no man behind”; the risk of climate change exposing the crew’s remains to wildlife; the rising value of World War II aircraft luring unscrupulous salvagers; and Nancy Pritchard Morgan Krause’s advancing age.

  Unknown to Lou, Jim also arranges for the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, known as CRREL, to send a radar team to Greenland. His reputation at stake, Jim wants reconfirmation that something might be found under the ice near Koge Bay. While Jim awaits those results, his superiors approve his “Operation Duck Hunt” request and authorize spending up to $150,000 on the mission.

  But then Lou submits a bid seeking almost $200,000, and the mission flirts with disaster. For Lou, the bid reflects something closer to his true costs, with all the technology needed to do the job. Even at that price, he says, he would take significant loss, after working unpaid on the mission for two-pl
us years. Having seen how Lou operates, from a trailer in his yard as an office, I don’t doubt that money is secondary. But the government can’t pay Lou for the work he’s done on his own, only the work being requested on the ice. Jim Blow recoils at the high bid.

  “We found this money,” he says angrily, “but he’s asking for more, without justifying why.” Jim won’t ask his superiors for more, and in mid-August he sits at his desk at Coast Guard Headquarters ready to scrub the mission. He’s spent countless hours studying charts and photographs, puzzling over Balchen’s treasure map, and imagining himself in the Duck’s cockpit, to calculate where Pritchard might have gone wrong. Still, he can’t defend a wild goose chase, and he worries that Lou doesn’t have his act together.

  Before Jim can bring himself to abandon the mission, the CRREL folks call with results of the radar survey. More than half a dozen locations inside the glacier reveal “anomalies,” potential metal targets. Several are labeled “strongly prospective targets.”

  In quick succession, a chastened Lou lowers his bid to $150,000, the contract is approved, and Jim commits himself and the Coast Guard to the expedition.

  “That radar report gave me the warm and fuzzy feeling I needed. That report probably saved this mission,” he says. Jim repeats a line I’ve heard from Lou: “If it’s there, we’re going to find it. If we don’t, it’s not there.”

  Lou says that he, too, was close to abandoning the expedition rather than being driven deeper into debt. He says he went ahead because he was determined to complete the mission. “It’s never been about the money,” he says. “We—the families, the Coast Guard, and all those who put in so much time, effort, and energy—have come too far to let it all end here. So I bit the bullet.”

  WHEN THE LAST major hurdles are cleared, Lou and I agree to pack a bottle of Scotch. We’ll toast either to our success or to the respectable failure of having given our all. But not just any whiskey will do. Lou likes the idea of drinking the same liquid fortitude that explorer Ernest Shackleton hauled to Antarctica in 1907 during a failed attempt to reach the South Pole. Shackleton left behind three cases, which were found buried in permafrost in 2007. A Scottish distillery replicated the blend and now sells it for $170 a bottle.

  Apparently I’m buying.

  17

  OUTWITTING THE ARCTIC

  DECEMBER 1942–JANUARY 1943

  EACH NEW DAY seemed to bring a new rescue attempt for Don Tetley and the remaining five PN9E crewmen, without a resulting rescue.

  In mid-December 1942, U.S. military officials turned to a Canadian bush pilot named Jimmie Wade, who volunteered to land a twin-engine plane fitted with skis on the ice near the Motorsled Camp. The plan, almost as daring as Pritchard and Bottoms’s landings in the Duck, called for Wade to pick up the three men there and fly them about 140 miles to the base at Bluie East Two. Then he’d return and do the same for the three men in the snow cave under the PN9E wing.

  Wade was a civilian pilot for a private Canadian airline, Maritime Central Airways, but his bosses agreed to loan him to the U.S. military for the rescue effort. Along with Wade’s services, the airline leased the United States government a sleek and sturdy ski- plane called a Barkley-Grow T8P-1. Wade would be the pilot, and a U.S. Army captain named J. G. Moe from the Air Transport Command would serve as navigator.

  On December 22, Wade and Moe took off from Bluie West One, heading across Greenland toward Bluie East Two, where they intended to refuel before making the short hop to the stranded men. The weather reports were good, but the weather itself wasn’t.

  The flight was at the outer reach of the ski-plane’s range, and Wade and Moe ran into powerful headwinds that forced them to burn more fuel than expected. Unfamiliar with the island’s jagged coastline and hampered by fog, Wade turned into the wrong fjord, thinking that it was the route to Bluie East Two. Before Wade and Moe could correct their flight path, they ran perilously low on fuel. Down to their last fumes, Wade steered toward what he and Moe thought looked like a solid stretch of snow-covered sea ice. They were wrong. Upon touching down, the Barkley-Grow sank through the thin ice. Wade and Moe grabbed whatever equipment they could reach and abandoned ship.

  Freezing and soaked, the two men spent several days in a rubber dinghy, slogging across, over, and through a mile of treacherous fjord ice to the coast. Travel on land was only slightly easier. They walked, leaning forward with their heads bowed, into grainy snow driven by fierce winds. A week after Wade and Moe went down, their supplies dwindled to two Fig Newton cookies a day. Rescue planners gave them up for dead.

  When hope seemed lost, the downed fliers stumbled upon a band of Inuit hunters. Just as answering an SOS call is the law of the sea, offering aid to lost travelers is the rule of the Arctic. The hunters brought the strangers to their village and nursed them for several days. On January 2, eleven days after their flight, Wade and Moe were delivered by native dogsled to Bluie East Two, where they remained until late spring. Six months after being rescued, Wade received the British Explorer Medal, another example of a would-be rescuer honored for a brave but unsuccessful attempt to help the PN9E crew.

  THE END OF Wade and Moe’s mission came the same day that another dogsled team was forced back to Beach Head Station by deep snow. With that latest failure, American military leaders in Greenland reached a breaking point.

  Their priority remained the lives of six men on the ice cap, but their own reputations were on the line, too. Military and civilian officials in Washington were being briefed regularly about the rescue efforts. Questions might soon arise about the competence of the men running the war in Greenland.

  Five days after Wade and Moe went down, Colonel Bernt Balchen was summoned to Bluie West One from his remote northern headquarters at Bluie West Eight. Aides ushered him into a meeting with the military’s top land and sea officers on the island: Rear Admiral Edward “Iceberg” Smith of the Greenland Patrol and Colonel Robert Wimsatt, commander of the U.S. Army’s Greenland bases. This was the same Colonel Wimsatt whom Balchen had helped to rescue months earlier. When Smith and Wimsatt asked him for suggestions, Balchen outlined what he considered a surefire plan to rescue Don Tetley and the PN9E crew. All he needed was their support and a couple of very valuable airplanes to pull it off.

  Balchen’s plan demonstrated why he was a rare and talented airman. Plenty of pilots were fearless or seemed so, but few could match his ability to synthesize experience and knowledge to maximize the potential of flying machines. Balchen told Smith and Wimsatt that he wanted to apply the lessons of John Pritchard’s two glacier landings and takeoffs in the Duck, and then combine those feats with a stunt borrowed from the annals of Arctic exploration.

  Despite the Duck’s crash, Pritchard had demonstrated that it was possible for an amphibious plane to use the Greenland ice cap as a belly-down runway. Balchen told his bosses that a much larger seaplane could do the same thing, with even greater effectiveness. As proof, he cited the first attempt to reach the North Pole by airplane. Seventeen years earlier, in 1925, Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth attempted to fly two seaplanes to the top of the world. The effort failed, but not before two pilots hired by the explorers took off in large, heavily loaded seaplanes by skidding them across the ice of King’s Bay in Norway. Balchen knew the details firsthand because he participated in rescue efforts for the expedition as a young flier in the Norwegian Air Service.

  As he built the case for a belly-down-on-the-ice rescue effort using large amphibious planes, Balchen also had a more recent example. Six months earlier, in June 1942, U.S. Navy pilot Dick Parunak had landed an amphibious plane belly-down on a temporary lake on Greenland’s ice cap, as part of the Balchen-led My Gal Sal B-17 rescue. Now Balchen wanted to try what might be called a modified Pritchard-Amundsen-Ellsworth gambit, with a Parunak twist.

  Balchen described his plan as “one last trick to outwit the Arctic.” He proposed using a bigger plane than Pritchard’s Duck. Greenland’s ice cap would serve as a subs
titute for Amundsen and Ellsworth’s frozen Norwegian bay and Parunak’s temporary lake. Balchen told Smith and Wimsatt that his airplane of choice would be the navy PBY-5A Catalina flying boat, the same model plane that Parunak flew.

  Balchen had good taste in flying ships. The plane he’d chosen was a marvel. PB stood for “patrol bomber,” and Y was the letter assigned to its manufacturer, Consolidated Aircraft Corporation. The PBY Catalina was the workhorse of naval aviation, a rugged amphibian with a range of 2,500 miles. Some four thousand would be built before the war ended. They could drop bombs on U-boats on the way into battle, and could rescue drowning sailors on the way out. On bombing runs, crews called the PBY Catalina “The Cat.” But on rescue missions, it was affectionately called Dumbo, a tribute to Disney’s flying elephant, which lit up movie screens in October 1941. At almost 64 feet long, with a wingspan of 104 feet, the Dumbo dwarfed the Duck.

  Wimsatt liked the idea, but Smith balked. In the admiral’s view, Balchen’s plan was too dangerous. Only four PBY Catalinas were in service in Greenland, and they were being used to locate and harass U-boats attacking Allied merchant ships during the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic. Smith feared diverting half his PBY fleet to a dangerous and untested rescue attempt.

  Danger to crews and equipment was a legitimate concern. A PBY Catalina might suffer catastrophic stress and break into pieces during a hard landing on snow and ice. Smith also knew that the most challenging part of the rescue might not be the belly landing, but the very act of flying over Greenland in the midst of winter. Pritchard and the Duck had done fine in landings and takeoffs, but they went down as a result of storms and fog. In fact, Smith had already squashed discussion of sending the Coast Guard cutter North Star close enough to the east coast to use its Grumman Duck for a rescue attempt. He didn’t want to lose more men and planes to Greenland’s weather.