Frozen in Time (11 page)

After floundering through two years as a communications and theater arts major at a small college in Indiana, Lou returned home. He took photography courses at Cornell Capa’s International Center for Photography in Manhattan, at New York University, and at the Maine Photographic Workshops. A career as a commercial photographer followed, along with marriage and three sons.

“In 1989, I was married and we’d just bought a house in Plainfield, New Jersey. I always had CNN on in the background. I was walking from one room to another, and I heard that a group of American explorers were going to Greenland to search for the Lost Squadron. I was stuck and bogged down doing commercial stuff. This was the type of story I always wanted to tell. Also, I always wanted to do something adventurous. Not just adventure for adventure’s sake. I was fascinated with World War II. This was about rediscovering the past, adventure with a purpose. I called CNN and tried to find out who these people were.”

He tracked down Norman Vaughan, a renowned explorer who’d been a dogsled leader during Admiral Richard Byrd’s 1928 expedition to Antarctica. During World War II Vaughan served as a lieutenant colonel, and in July 1942 he took part in the rescue of the twenty-five men of the Lost Squadron. When Lou began searching for Vaughan, the explorer was past his eightieth birthday yet still competed in Alaska’s Iditarod dogsled race. In his spare time, Vaughan had joined a team that intended to retrieve one of the Lost Squadron’s six P-38 Lightning fighter planes, buried under more than two hundred feet of snow and ice.

LOU SAPIENZA IN GREENLAND IN 1992 WITH A .50-CALIBER MACHINE GUN FROM
GLACIER GIRL.
(COURTESY OF LOU SAPIENZA.)

Lou wrote a passionate letter making his pitch: he would serve as the expedition’s official photographer and do whatever else was needed, including cooking and hauling equipment, to take part in the mission. It worked. “They told me, ‘We’ve got a lot of good photographers who want to go. You wrote a better letter.’ ”

“My first trip to Greenland,” Lou says, “we were out there about fourteen days. I was told, ‘Wear what you normally wear when you go skiing.’ I had never been skiing. I wore jeans and imitation Sorel boots, and I started going hypothermic. The boots soaked through. I had to wrap my feet in plastic bags. I learned that if your feet ain’t happy, you ain’t happy. When I was invited to go back to Greenland the next time, I got sponsors, and we had two pairs of real boots for everybody.”

When Lou joined the team, Vaughan and other expedition members had already made four unsuccessful trips to Greenland in pursuit of their prize. Lou participated in the last three expeditions, including a climactic 1992 effort in which they drilled and melted through almost a football field of ice, to a depth of some 268 feet. They created an otherworldly ice cavern around a P-38 Lightning, disassembled it, and hauled it piece by piece to the surface. That plane became
Glacier Girl
, and Lou’s photos became the visual record of the expedition.

Lou returned to his life, got divorced, had a long relationship, broke up, met someone else, got married and divorced again. Through it all, he never shook the idea that he had found his true calling. He read a magazine article about three navy fliers buried in 1946 under the ice in Antarctica, inside a flying boat called the
George 1
. Lou located the men’s families and offered his services. “I told them, ‘We’ve done this before. I know how to get them.’ ” The navy still hasn’t signed on, saying the search would be too dangerous. But Lou won’t give up, which is why the
George 1
mission is embroidered on one of his patches.

“If you tell me it can’t be done and I know it can be done, I don’t take that kind of answer very lightly,” Lou says. “I feel like I can’t turn my back on the families. As long as I’m alive, these men are coming home.”

While promoting his plan for a
George 1
expedition, Lou presented his case to the government’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, which works with DPMO to recover unaccounted-for American service members. JPAC wasn’t ready to pay for the
George 1
project, but through a roundabout series of contacts, the agency put him in touch with the Coast Guard’s Duck Hunt team. A public-private partnership was born.

“We went from there,” Lou says. “They wanted me to provide positive, verifiable proof that we knew where the Duck was.” They went to Greenland in September 2010, where Lou and his team investigated a site that a previous Coast Guard contractor had identified as the likely resting place for the Duck. That location proved to be a dud, so Lou regrouped.

GLACIER GIRL
SOME 268 FEET UNDER THE ICE CAP.
(COURTESY OF LOU SAPIENZA.)

He returned home to a town on eastern Long Island, New York, where he lives with his twenty-two-year-old son, Ryan, and his dachshund, Sarge. Convinced that he could succeed, Lou deepened his research and focused on winning support to finish the job. As months passed with no sign he’d get a green light, Lou forced himself to remain upbeat. In private moments, though, he’d acknowledge that several years had passed since he’d earned a steady paycheck. The little money he had left was going into planning the Duck Hunt. He was surviving on savings, an inheritance, a supportive girlfriend, and faith.

“The biggest thing is faith,” Lou says. “Faith in the national commitment to leave no man behind.

“One of the things I’ve realized is that this screwy life that I’ve had was all leading up to being able to put an expedition together to Greenland,” he says. “I bring certain skill sets to this that a lot of people don’t have, and I’m able to get it done. If they’re there, we will find them. If the families and the Coast Guard want these men home, that’s good enough for me. It’s the ultimate way to honor these men and what they did to bring them home to their families.”

9

SHORT SNORTERS

NOVEMBER 1942

S
TORMY WEATHER RETURNED
to Koge Bay from November 13 to 16, the four days following Harry Spencer’s rescue from the crevasse. Driving sleet and snow kept the nine men of the PN9E trapped inside the remains of their bomber. Wedged together in their cocoon of silk parachute cloth, they had all day and night to think, and to worry.

They salvaged what they could from the front end of the bomber, ripping up the floor in the radio compartment and moving it to the tail to create more room for sleep. They tore out cabin insulation for bedding. They dug through the snow near the wreck and found crew members’ personal belongings, including several garment bags containing clothes, cigarettes, candy, and gum to share.

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.

S
HORT
S
NORTERS 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.

A
FTER 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 surroundings; 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.