Frozen in Time (17 page)

One more memory: when Bud was a boy he learned to play the trumpet, but the one song he could never play was “Taps.”

“I played it once and she totally broke up. I never did play it again. I knew why.”

J
ERRY HOWARTH WAS
born in the same four-room log cabin in Wausaukee, Wisconsin, as his uncle Loren “Lolly” Howarth. Jerry was not yet two years old when the Duck crashed, so all he knew of his uncle were stories from his father, Loren’s younger brother.

“Loren was basically a country boy,” Jerry says. “Everybody worked together on the family farm. Lived off the land. There wasn’t much money to make. They’d hunt and fish. Deer, mostly. Duck, too.

“Everybody said he was awful quiet.”

There’s pride in his voice when Jerry says Loren was the first member of the family to go to college. “He washed dishes and worked in restaurants to make his way.”

As Loren Howarth’s PNOK, Jerry provided the Coast Guard’s John Long with a wristwatch that belonged to one of Loren Howarth’s brothers, from which a DNA sample was taken. “I wish my dad and his brothers and all of them were still here, but it’s a good idea to bring him home where he belongs.”

Marc Storch, a cousin by marriage, is the family historian and the keeper of Loren Howarth’s Legion of Merit, which he inherited from Loren’s widow, Irene.

“When she first showed it to me, she said it was Lolly’s and she smiled,” he says. “She said, ‘He was such a sweet boy.’ Remember, Irene was talking about someone who stopped growing old in 1942. There she is at one hundred and one years old. Lolly never got any further than his twenties. So Irene, eighty years later, is still seeing that boy, that young man.

“It means so much that Lolly could come home and be close to where his family is,” Marc says. “Even though it’s only a physical reuniting, having his remains back here would be important to those who remember him. It would also be important to those who know what he did to help save his crew.

“People should know about that, and what it cost him.”

14

GLACIER WORMS

DECEMBER 1942

A
S NOVEMBER TURNED
to December 1942, the days grew shorter, the nights colder, the survivors’ hopes dimmer. The six icebound members of the PN9E crew, now joined by Don Tetley, faced the awful truth that their two best chances for rescue had gone down with Max Demorest’s motorsled and John Pritchard’s Duck.

Their spirits fell even lower during the first week of the new month. Heavy storms with windblown snow made it almost impossible to leave the bomber’s tail. Rations ran low as no supply planes could reach them.

In addition to Tetley, the remaining men trapped on the ice were pilot Armand Monteverde; copilot Harry Spencer; navigator William “Bill” O’Hara; engineer Paul Spina; passenger Clarence Wedel; and volunteer searcher Alfred “Clint” Best.

Time and hardship had revealed Monteverde to be confident enough to take advice freely and to give orders only when necessary. Spina considered “Lieutenant Monty” to be a hero for the way he held them together.

Although Spencer was the youngest crew member, he had the traits and the touch of a natural leader. Even after falling into the crevasse, he was the strongest and most capable among them, a likable fellow with sensitive radar for when one of his crewmates needed an extra ration or a supportive shoulder.

To a man, they admired O’Hara for his tough-guy stoicism, even as his numb, discolored feet worsened and the blackness spread up his legs.

They valued Spina for his relentless good cheer despite his injuries and agonizing frostbite. Even when Spina moaned about pain in his hands and feet, he did so with the timing of a vaudeville comic. Spina’s comfort in tight quarters might be traced to the fact that he was the third of seven children of a homemaker and an Italian immigrant factory worker.

Wedel, a stranger to the others just weeks earlier, had earned respect for his mechanical ingenuity, somehow fixing their temperamental generator despite frozen parts. Powerfully built, with dark, wavy hair, a cleft chin, and bright blue eyes, the thirty-five-year-old Wedel was one of the more unusual privates in the U.S. Army.

PRIVATE CLARENCE WEDEL.
(COURTESY OF REBA GREATHEAD.)

Born on a Kansas farm, the eldest of ten children, he was raised a Dunkard, a tiny Christian denomination of pacifists whose members, like Mennonites and Quakers, could claim exemption from military service. But Wedel believed that it was wrong to use his religion to avoid the war. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Wedel left the welding business he owned with his father and enlisted. He left behind his pregnant wife, Helen, a violinist ten years his junior whom he’d married on Christmas Day 1941. The two shared a love of dancing, and they’d spent their honeymoon in the “big city” of Wichita, at a nightclub named after their favorite song, “Blue Moon.”

Clint Best was easygoing and introverted. He had no bluster or bravado, and he won praise for mixing the crew’s monotonous rations into creative meals. But Best was no outdoorsman, and he was perhaps the least suited among them for the deprivations of Arctic survival. The son of a traveling shoe salesman turned grocer, Best was happiest working inside with numbers. Equipped with a layer of padding from years at a desk, the brown-haired, blue-eyed Best had worked as a bookkeeper for a wholesale distribution company in Memphis before the war.
During the five months he’d been in Greenland, cracking codes in a heated office at Bluie West One had been a perfect fit. Being cold, hungry, and trapped in an oversize icebox, watching men disappear into crevasses and going down in airplanes, was torment for the cryptographer turned volunteer searcher. As days passed, Best retreated into his own thoughts.

TECH SERGEANT ALFRED “CLINT” BEST.
(COURTESY OF ROBERT BEST.)

The newest member of their band was Tetley, a wiry Texan who fit the stereotype of the quiet cowboy. After Demorest’s death, Tetley drove his motorsled over the crevasse-free ski tracks and parked alongside the wrecked PN9E. He’d been trained by Demorest in Arctic life, and even a short time in the cramped tail section made him seek alternative lodgings. It wasn’t the crowding—he was used to that from living at Beach Head Station and Ice Cap Station—it was the precarious position of the fuselage. Although secured with ropes to the front half of the plane, the tail perched over an expanding crevasse similar to the one that killed Demorest. On Tetley’s first night in the fuselage, he was startled when the tail section shifted. Fearful of sliding into the abyss, he climbed out of his sleeping bag and declared: “I’m going out and dig myself a hole [to] crawl in.”

SERGEANT DON TETLEY.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

W
ITH MORE STRENGTH
and energy than the others, Tetley dedicated himself to the tasks of improving their lodgings and plotting a way out. He converted the metal cover of the PN9E’s Norden Bombsight into a crude saw and carved out blocks of snow under the bomber’s unbroken right wing. Spencer and Wedel pitched in, using a jungle knife, a shovel from Tetley’s supplies, and tools from their mess kits.

Within several days they’d dug a “room” with walls of ice about fifteen feet long, eight feet wide, and more than four feet high. The roof was the metal underside of the wing. They couldn’t stand straight, but at least they could stop living like sardines and crevasse-bait. Upon moving from the tail section to the underwing snow cave, the seven men spread out sleeping bags to their full length. One drawback was that the ice underneath them melted from their body heat, soaking the sleeping bags with no way to dry them.

When they’d all moved in, Tetley set up his stove in the cave. The men held their breath when he lit it, fearing the fuel-filled wing above them. The metal pinged and moaned when it first heated, but it posed no danger. Wedel made the cave homier by stringing a lightbulb on a wire from his generator. The well-lit, white-walled room brightened their spirits.

With Howarth gone, Tetley became the new radioman, with Best as his assistant. They lacked Howarth’s communications knowledge, so they couldn’t get the transmitter to achieve its full range. They could send messages only by Morse code, but they could receive incoming voice transmissions. Despite Wedel’s unceasing efforts, the generator was unreliable, so the radio and the light were on-and-off pleasures.

The men blamed mechanical woes, missing items, and other unexplained troubles on “Glacier Worms.” There were, in fact, creatures called ice worms that lived in glaciers, though not in Greenland. But in the stranded men’s imaginations, Glacier Worms became the ice cap equivalent of gremlins: mischievous, mythical beasts that bedeviled airplanes in flight and, now, on the ice.

With their new quarters complete, the PN9E survivors cut the lines securing the bomber’s tail section. Their home for the previous four weeks slid into the crevasse with a thunderous roar and disappeared from sight.

A
FTER SEVERAL DAYS
of hoping the Duck might return, the men of the PN9E cast aside lingering dreams of being airlifted to safety. Winter was closing in and the cavalry wasn’t on the way. They reported a temperature of 16 degrees Fahrenheit and sent requests via the
Northland
for supply drops: “We need food. . . . Everyone OK, but weak.” They made other requests, as well: “If [supply] plane comes . . . we need flashlight batteries, laxatives, bandages, candles, and reading material.”

The supplies arrived in an airdrop from the B-17 flown by Captain Kenneth Turner. A Salt Lake City native approaching his fortieth birthday, Turner was mature, balding, and composed. He seemed ancient to the young flight crews he worked with, so everyone called him “Pappy.” Like the PN9E, Turner’s B-17 was in the temporary possession of the Air Transport Command on its way to England. Also like the PN9E, it had been diverted from its destiny as a weapon into the role of a search-and-supply lifesaver.

Supply drops by Turner and his crew satisfied the immediate needs of the men on the ice, but they couldn’t stop O’Hara from getting worse by the day. As Monteverde changed the dressings on the navigator’s feet, he grew convinced that little chance remained of saving them. O’Hara also was losing more weight than the rest of them. He could stomach only a few drops of thin soup. Spina needed expert medical care, as well, and the others worried that neither man might last long.

Despite the commitment by Pappy Turner and his crew to drop supplies whenever possible, the men in the snow cave feared that the approach of winter might block resupply efforts for weeks. While O’Hara was asleep, Tetley told the others that they were gambling with the navigator’s life if they thought they could spend the winter relying on supply drops and waiting for a rescue party. Monteverde agreed, so Tetley radioed the
Northland
with the first draft of a plan to take matters into their own hands.

“In case of emergency, we could travel light,” he tapped out in code. “We believe that our seven-man party could reach Ice Cap Station on our one motorsled. Would travel slightly altered course to avoid crevasses in this area. Could meet dogsled on trail.”

Initially, the ship instructed Tetley to sit tight and await another dogsled team heading their way. In the meantime, the
Northland
would send ashore its hospital corpsman to provide medical aid if the PN9E crew could reach Ice Cap Station or Beach Head Station with help from the dogsled team. But that plan soon changed. Again the dogsled turned back, unable to make it through the driving, drifting snow. So the men under the wing of the PN9E plotted to save themselves.

On December 7, the one-year anniversary of the United States’ entrance into the war, the weather broke. The sun shone and the wind died down. Such a rare fine day in Greenland might not appear again until spring. Monteverde concluded that O’Hara could wait no longer. He reasoned that hauling all seven of them to Ice Cap Station on the one remaining motorsled would be difficult at best, suicide at worst. But if they split up, maybe two smaller crews could survive separate trips.

At first, Monteverde wanted both O’Hara and Spina on the first outbound motorsled. But after discussions with Spencer, Tetley, and the others, he abandoned the idea of sending the two most seriously injured men onto the ice cap at the same time. Monteverde decided instead that the first group would be a four-man team: O’Hara, wrapped in a sleeping bag, would be strapped on the supply sled towed by the motorsled; Tetley would drive because he knew the machine and the route; Wedel would provide strength and mechanical skills if the sled broke down; and Spencer would be in command, doubling as the navigator if they got lost. With three able-bodied men and one badly injured man, Monteverde reasoned, they’d have enough muscle to push or tow the motorsled out of a snowbank. As soon as the weather allowed, Tetley would return on the motorsled for the three remaining men: Monteverde, Spina, and Best.

With an escape plan in place, they gathered for a group prayer. They offered the travelers good tidings; wished the men remaining behind a short stay; and whispered blessings for Demorest, Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth.