Frozen in Time (18 page)
Authors: Mitchell Zuckoff
Tetley radioed their revised plan to the
Northland
: “Lieutenant O’Hara very ill. Leaving with him . . . within an hour.” He didn’t wait for approval, and he never formally received it. But he did get tacit support when the
Northland
instructed the men at Ice Cap Station to turn on their lights as a beacon.
Having already traveled the thirty miles between the PN9E and Ice Cap Station, Tetley thought they could make the trip in a single day. This time, though, he’d follow a route recommended by Colonel Balchen, who’d mapped it out from the air. Balchen’s course steered them to the north, away from the crevasses. In case the trip took longer than he anticipated, Tetley gathered three days’ rations, sleeping bags, a shovel, and a tent. That left the men in the snow cave equipped with Tetley’s stove, fuel, a second shovel, his walkie-talkie, and other supplies if his return was delayed. One piece of bad news was that Wedel couldn’t start the generator, so he couldn’t leave the cave dwellers with three fully charged batteries for the radio, as he’d hoped.
The thought of taking action energized them all. Before they parted, they joked around and wished each other well. Tetley and Spencer said they’d be back within two days, to celebrate Monteverde’s twenty-eighth birthday on December 9.
Shortly before the foursome left, Spina spotted a plane circling in the distance, to the south of their location. He and the others thought it was a plane to guide the travel group toward Ice Cap Station. But when Tetley radioed the
Northland
, he was told that the plane was Pappy Turner’s B-17, circling over the wrecked Duck in an unsuccessful search for signs of life.
The men at the PN9E stood in silence until Tetley said it was time to leave. Monteverde, Best, and Spina watched until they were out of sight.
T
HE FOUR TRAVELERS
set off with Spencer out front on snowshoes, like a point man on jungle patrol. Before each step, he tapped the ground to search for ice bridges. Spencer was ideal for the job, knowing the danger they posed. Behind him, Tetley drove the motorsled, pulling O’Hara and their supplies on the attached tow sled. Wedel walked behind or alongside them on snowshoes. To play it safe, they plowed slowly for about a mile and a half through what they thought was the most heavily crevassed area. They stopped at a steep rise with an ice trough beyond it. Tetley believed that this marked the end of the crevasse field.
Tetley announced that he would gun the motorsled’s engine and race up the slope, so it wouldn’t stall and slide backward. He wanted Spencer and Wedel to join O’Hara on the tow sled, to spare them a difficult climb. Several yards out front, Spencer knelt to unstrap his snowshoes. Tetley climbed off the motorsled to one side, while Wedel removed his snowshoes near O’Hara and the tow sled.
Tetley told the others that he, Wedel, and Spencer would give the motorsled a hard push, after which Tetley would climb aboard. Spencer and Wedel would hop onto the trailing tow sled, like a bobsled team. Before getting started, Tetley and Wedel talked with O’Hara on the tow sled, as they waited for Spencer to join them.
Unknowingly, Tetley had parked the tow sled atop a crevasse covered by an ice bridge two feet thick, too thick for Spencer to have discovered it with his tapping and poking method. An ice bridge that thick has areas of varying strength, some able to carry weight and some not.
Spencer had walked over the bridge without incident. The motorsled had driven over it safely, and the tow sled had stopped on a solid area of the bridge. But as Wedel moved into position for the uphill charge, he stepped on a weak spot. Making matters worse, he had just removed the snowshoes that distributed his weight over a larger area.
Without warning, the ice bridge gave way, opening like a trapdoor beneath Wedel’s feet. He screamed and grasped for something to hold on to. Realizing what was happening, O’Hara yelled for help. He felt Wedel’s mittened hands slide desperately over his legs but was unable to grab him. For an instant, Wedel gained a tenuous grip on the tow sled, but it wasn’t enough. He dropped through the hole and into the waiting crevasse.
Tetley leaped onto the motorsled and drove forward to get the tow sled off the snow bridge. He and Spencer roped themselves to the motorsled and crawled on their stomachs to the edge of the hole. A short way down, they could see dark marks on a narrow ledge and more on the opposite wall. Wedel had apparently bounced from one side of the crevasse to the other on his way down. The two men stared and called into the abyss but couldn’t see Wedel and couldn’t tell how deep the crevasse went. It looked bottomless to Spencer.
They remained there for more than an hour, yelling for Wedel. No response. As the ranking officer, Spencer decided that they couldn’t risk trying to climb down into the crevasse. There was nothing more they could do. It was time to leave.
Greenland had claimed its second victim from the B-17 PN9E crew, its tenth overall since the crash of the C-53. The death roll now read McDowell, Springer, Manahan, Everett, and Johannessen from the C-53; Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth from the Duck; and Demorest and Wedel from falling into crevasses.
Clarence Wedel had boarded the bomber as a passenger en route to England. He had kept the downed plane’s generator working beyond all expectations. He would never celebrate his first wedding anniversary, on Christmas, less than three weeks away. He’d never meet his daughter, Reba, who’d be born the following month. As a toddler in May 1944, she’d sit on her mother’s lap when her father would posthumously receive the Legion of Merit. The medal honored Wedel for “his initiative and perseverance under most difficult climatic conditions” and for displaying “a high devotion to duty and complete disregard for his own safety.”
D
OWNHEARTED
, D
ON
T
ETLEY,
Harry Spencer, and Bill O’Hara discussed returning to the PN9E and taking another man to replace Wedel. But that would eat up time and require another trip across the crevasse field. Also, it might leave them shorthanded for the second trip between the bomber and Ice Cap Station. Spencer decided that they should stick to the task of getting O’Hara help as soon as possible. They pressed on.
The trio moved tentatively, fearful of more hidden crevasses. The terrain was tougher, too, and they stopped frequently. Each time, Tetley killed the motorsled’s engine to save gasoline. Soon, however, he had trouble starting it again. Without Wedel’s mechanical wizardry, the motorsled became increasingly stubborn. The machine’s lubricating oil grew thick from the cold, and soon it congealed. The oil line to the engine broke.
Tetley had been worried about the oil even before leaving the PN9E, and he’d requested that a gallon of a different grade of lubricating oil be dropped during a supply run. The oil hadn’t arrived, but they’d left anyway because of the break in the weather. As he tried to fix the oil line, Tetley damaged the sled’s gas line. They were about six miles northeast of the PN9E when the motorsled’s engine quit altogether.
Now there were two groups of stranded men, three in the igloo under the wing of the PN9E, unaware that they were waiting for a motorsled that would never return; and three six miles away on the ice cap, one of them gravely ill and unable to move on his own. Any thought of carrying O’Hara back to the bomber was dismissed as folly. They’d stay put.
So much had happened in the month since the crash, and so much of it bad, that Spencer, Tetley, and O’Hara saw no point in bemoaning their new plight: no shelter, no radio, no walkie-talkie, no stove, few rations, and a crippled man who needed immediate aid to save his feet and perhaps his life. Plus, a blizzard was bearing down on them, a fitting start to Greenland’s killing season. They focused on the lone piece of good news: they were alive. With a new storm and long hours of darkness descending, Spencer and Tetley went to work to stay that way.
First, Spencer set up a tent and carried O’Hara inside it with him. Tetley dug himself a hole in the snow and crawled in.
B
ACK AT THE
bomber, in the ice cave under the wing, Monteverde’s birthday came and went, unmarked by the celebration they’d hoped for. Without the generator, they had no light. The radio batteries grew weak. By December 11, four days after the others left, the batteries were dead, cutting their radio lifeline to Pappy Turner’s supply plane and the Bluie Army bases. The walkie-talkie that Tetley had left behind was tuned to the wrong frequency, with no way to adjust it.
Clint Best was the least injured of the three, but the weeks of isolation had left him deeply depressed. Monteverde could move around, though he suffered from painful bouts of frostbite on his hands and feet. The breaks in Spina’s arm, still not healed, slowed circulation in his right hand, making him susceptible to sharp aches from the merciless cold. The fingernails on his right hand had fallen off, leaving him sensitive to pain. There was little for them to do but collect supplies, tend to their injuries, and keep each other from going stir-crazy. At least they could try.
DECEMBER 1942
T
HE TIME HAD
come for the
Northland
to leave.
Lieutenant Commander Frank Pollard acknowledged in a message to Rear Admiral “Iceberg” Smith that the ship lacked “sufficient fuel and supplies for wintering in Comanche Bay.” A message sent earlier by Pollard, seeking Smith’s guidance, revealed how conflicted he felt between wanting to stay and needing to go: “
Northland
desires to continue rescue operations as long as probability exists of assisting B-17 and
Northland
plane personnel.” On the other hand, the message continued: “Paramount regard for
Northland
safety under present circumstances necessarily entails immediate abandonment of rescue operations because [of] inevitable risk attached to such operations. Orders are requested.”
The ship almost waited too long to leave the coastline, forcing it to break through a five-mile-wide belt of pack ice to reach open water. Once there, the
Northland
was out of range of radio communications from the men on the ice or at the army’s bases and stations, ending the ship’s direct involvement in the rescue efforts. Yet the
Northland
left a great deal in its wake.
Still ashore were the remains of the rescue team of Pritchard and Bottoms, as well as their passenger, Howarth, and also the wreckage of the Duck. Also left behind were five members of the
Northland
’s crew, led by an intrepid twenty-two-year-old ensign named Richard Fuller. The Coast Guardsmen under Fuller’s command, all fellow volunteers, went ashore by boat at Beach Head Station on December 4. They hoped to help Monteverde’s PN9E crew and recover the bodies from the Duck. They might also have looked for McDowell’s C-53, but the cargo plane remained lost, likely buried under snow with the bodies of its crew.
Fuller and his team made several valiant attempts to reach the B-17 and the Duck, but were unable to reach either plane. It wasn’t for lack of trying. The rescue effort, supposed to last no more than two weeks, turned into a five-month ordeal. Over the winter of 1942–1943, much of their time was spent trapped at Beach Head Station, a wooden hut described by Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Gerard Hearn as “an overgrown crate, about thirty feet square.” With Fuller and Hearn were Stanley Preble, a seaman; Harold Green, a fireman; and Donald Drisko, a mechanic.
Fuller and dogsledder Johan Johansen also holed up at Ice Cap Station during the rescue attempts. When the stove vents there filled with snow, they lived in fear of death by carbon monoxide poisoning. Their kerosene ran out, and they spent long stretches in the dark or in flickering candlelight. Over time and repeated blizzards, the flat-roofed shack was buried in snow. Fuller suffered a frostbitten foot, and three of his toes turned black, though he later recovered. Their radio died, two inches of water pooled on the floor, and nine dogs on their sled team froze to death. The men shared their quarters with the remaining six dogs, whose wastes turned the station into a reeking kennel.
They spent days tucked in their bunks for warmth. They emerged to play cards by the light of a single candle, or to use a snow tunnel they’d carved for a latrine. Ice Cap Station was eventually deemed unfit for human habitation and they rejoined the other men at Beach Head Station. Conditions were little better there, a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot shack so covered by snow that their only access was through an attic loft window.
By the time they were picked up the following spring, the Coast Guardsmen had spent more than five months in conditions hardly better than those of the men they’d hoped to help. Perhaps most frustrating, they initially were given the wrong coordinates to search for the Duck; even when the location was corrected, Fuller’s team wasn’t told. Nevertheless, Fuller received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and all five received commendations for “courage, energetic and cheerful cooperation, and devotion to duty.” The official Coast Guard history of the war gently acknowledged that they never found the downed air crews: “This expedition had to be evaluated more in terms of heroism than accomplishment.”
MEMBERS OF A RESCUE TEAM STAND ON THE ROOF OF SNOW-COVERED BEACH HEAD STATION.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)
B
ECAUSE OF DWINDLING
daylight hours, Pappy Turner and the five men of his B-17 crew relocated from Greenland’s west coast to the unfinished base at Bluie East Two. There, they’d be less than 150 miles from the downed PN9E, minimizing nighttime flights from one coast to the other. Storms grounded Turner’s B-17 for two days after he spotted the downed Duck, but he was able to get his bomber back into the air on December 9.
By a stroke of good fortune, Turner and his crew spotted Spencer, Tetley, and O’Hara at what became known as the Motorsled Camp. With no way to communicate, the men on the ice couldn’t tell Turner’s B-17 what had happened to Wedel, so Turner and his crew didn’t know who or how many men they were helping. Among the supplies they dropped was the motor oil that Tetley had requested days earlier. Spencer and Tetley worked for days on the motorsled but couldn’t restart the engine. They abandoned it, and soon the machine was buried under several feet of snow.
Indeed, more snow was the one thing they could count on. Drifts piled up so high that O’Hara’s side of the small tent threatened to collapse and bury him alive. Spencer and Tetley spent that night taking turns shoveling it away from the canvas. When morning came, Spencer announced that they needed to prepare for the long haul. That dealt a blow to Tetley’s spirits, and he remained cooped up in his snow hole for several days.
In the meantime, Spencer, with a little help from O’Hara, dug an ice hole they could use for cooking. Then they dug an adjacent hole about three feet deep, with floor space about six feet by nine feet, to sleep and pass the days. With nothing else to do, they burrowed deep enough to create a six-foot ceiling in their ice den where Spencer could stand and stretch.
Tetley emerged from his funk and dug a passage from his hole to Spencer and O’Hara’s, the start of what turned into a warren of connected holes in the glacier. On the surface of the ice cap, they built a wall of snow blocks around a tunnel-like entrance and covered it with ice-encrusted sleeping bags, which served like the flap of a tent. They cooked beneath the entrance, so the heat from their stove wouldn’t melt the roof of their cave and send icy rivulets pouring onto their sleeping area.
Nighttime snowfalls drove down into the entrances, so Spencer kept his shovel with him to dig out every morning. Then he’d go to Tetley’s hole and dig him out, too. They expanded their quarters again, arranging their skis like an A-frame hut over a new opening to their subglacial home. The snow piled up around the skis, and the men turned the frozen tepee into a cold storage room for rations and other supplies.
Pappy Turner’s crew dropped provisions whenever possible, but the Motorsled Camp men couldn’t always collect them. One day, with two K rations remaining, they decided to eat everything and take their chances until the next drop. Their stove was unreliable, so Tetley babied it to keep the flame alive. But hypothermia made him sluggish, and as he warmed their last meal he knocked over the stove, spilling their rations into a nasty mixture of snow and gasoline. They ate what they could and made coffee, but then that spilled, too. Fortunately, Turner returned the next day with fresh rations. Their food supply ran low again as Christmas approached, but the Motorsled Camp crew ignored the risk. They ate full shares, sang carols, and tried to make the best of it. Pappy Turner’s B-17 returned three days later to restock their storehouse.
They’d found a way to survive, but O’Hara’s feet continued to get worse. A bout of diarrhea cost him more weight, and he was often sluggish. Yet he held on without complaint. Back when their B-17 first crashed and O’Hara could go outside, he marveled at how the night sky glowed with the aurora borealis. But as weeks of misery dragged on without end, the northern lights seemed to taunt him with their liquid beauty. O’Hara dreamed of shooting them from the sky.
I
N THE SNOW
cave beneath the PN9E’s right wing, Monteverde, Spina, and Best settled into their own routine.
Much of their day, and much of their energy, revolved around making trips outside to collect supplies dropped by Turner’s B-17. Inside their igloo, they tried to be creative with their rations, at one point using chocolate and malted milk to make snow-based ice cream. They improvised a recipe for fudge, too.
The trio lived every moment with the pain of being wet to the skin and cold to the bone, of weakened muscles that ached from shivering, of stiffened joints locked like rusted machinery. Candles that Turner dropped rarely lasted long, making the twenty-hour Arctic nights seem even longer. During storms, entire days passed when they didn’t see light. Like the men at the Motorsled Camp, Monteverde, Spina, and Best had no working radio or walkie-talkie, so they couldn’t communicate with anyone but each other. They couldn’t ask for items they wanted or needed, and they couldn’t enjoy the comforting sound of a voice, or even a coded message, from beyond their frozen room. Turner and his B-17 supply crew weren’t even certain that all three men were still alive. When they flew overhead, they might see one or two emerge from under the wing to collect the dropped packages. They could only hope that the third was resting inside.
Monteverde and Spina struggled but bore up under the deprivations, the boredom, and the stress. But Clint Best’s mind bent under the strain.
F
ROM HIS POST
at Bluie West Eight, Colonel Bernt Balchen closely tracked the failed efforts to reach the stranded men by land. On December 1, he wrote in his log, two dogsled teams left Beach Head Station for Ice Cap Station, intending to go from there to the PN9E. But they turned back because an army lieutenant leading one of the teams couldn’t control his dogs. Two days later, another search team left Ice Cap Station but returned because they “saw lights moving toward station [and] decided Tetley had returned.” They were mistaken. Another attempt began four days later, but returned as a result of bad weather and rough terrain. Three dogs died and one ran off during that effort. On and on it went, with dogsleds and motorsleds breaking down or bogging down; dogs running off or dying; men suffering from frozen feet; and storms making travel and navigation impossible.
As days stretched into weeks, the inability to retrieve Tetley and the five remaining survivors of the PN9E crash stirred worry, frustration, and embarrassment not only in Greenland but throughout the military. Brainstorming about possible ways to bring the men home reached the highest levels of the U.S. Army and Navy, though at least some ideas reflected a lack of understanding about the severe conditions on Greenland’s ice cap.
Military planners discussed using helicopters, not realizing that storms would spin the whirlybirds like tops before smashing them to pieces. Another idea proposed by army leaders was to drop large cargo gliders onto the ice. Under that plan, the six men would climb aboard, and then low-flying planes would snatch the gliders back into the air with hooks hanging from their bellies. As crazy as it sounded, the idea was only half nuts. In fact, the Army Air Forces would employ a glider drop-and-snatch scheme in June 1945 in Dutch New Guinea. The targets of that rescue were three plane crash survivors, one a beautiful member of the Women’s Army Corps, who were stranded among Stone Age tribesmen in a remote valley known as Shangri-La.
“Has Army considered use of auto-gyro or helicopter as means of rescuing personnel in Greenland?” the navy’s commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet inquired. Two hours later, a reply came from Admiral Ernest J. King, the navy’s overall commander in chief: “Army has considered use of auto-gyro helicopter and gliders, but has rejected their use as impracticable under existing high-wind conditions.”
None of these discussions were known or even hinted at outside government and military circles. Newspaper reporters and radio correspondents were covering every aspect of the war, and journalists would have salivated at the prospect of telling stories of multiple Greenland plane crashes and heroic rescue attempts. The ongoing drama of six servicemen trapped in ice caves six miles apart would have been like catnip to battle-weary newsmen and newswomen.
But all war-related events in and around Greenland were Allied military secrets, and no stories leaked into newspapers or onto the airwaves. If the Nazis learned from news reports about a B-17 bomber lost on the ice, the thinking went, they might try to find it, kill its crew, and steal its Norden Bombsight. Or, if the enemy knew that the
Northland
was anchored in Comanche Bay, the ship would have made an appetizing torpedo target for a U-Boat.
Even when family members were told that their husbands, sons, or brothers were missing or killed on the ice cap, they were instructed not to share any details until the military made the news public. Loose lips sink ships, they were told, and they listened.