Frozen in Time (24 page)

“Absent a photograph of the actual crash site,” he says, “that is the best piece of data that we have because it was drawn by an eyewitness. The more study we’ve done of the charts and the satellite images of this area, the more that Balchen’s ‘X’ basically is our greatest point for re-creating what happened that fateful day. Based on that and what we know about the ice movement, and the lay of the terrain now, Balchen’s ‘X’ has a lot more credibility as we’re out here.”

Jim has an explanation for the maps’ missing swath of land. “Now I’m thinking he omitted that on purpose, because that’s a lot of detail that didn’t need to be in there. He was just trying to show where the aircraft was.”

Later, Jim and I hike a half mile to the end of the
nunatak
to look over the crevasse field that contains the Essex Three/Balchen X sites. Returning to his pilot roots, Jim balances on the rocks and imagines how John Pritchard might have ended up there. “He’s coming down the fjord, he’s calling for magnetic orientation, trying to get a bearing to the ship.” Jim points to a rock outcropping at the edge of the water. “I would estimate that he would see this upper cliff, and as soon as he thought he was clear, he’s going to turn to the bearing that the ship gives him, which I assume that he has heard.”

Jim pulls out his iPhone and uses a digital compass to find the direction to Comanche Bay. The compass bearing from where we stand is 115 degrees true, or exactly the course the
Northland
tried to give Pritchard. “At 115 degrees,” Jim continues, “he would turn and be going in that direction, which is into that ridge”—a snow-covered hill several hundred feet high—“which he would not be able to discern. I’m just curious, if he hits here, bearing 115 into this ridge, where would he be on this slope seventy years later?” Jim is equally pleased that the area fits witness descriptions that the crash site was an open field sloping half a mile to the water.

The possible value of Balchen’s X is one subject on which Jim and Lou agree. Lou has been telling me for months that the Essex Three point of interest aligns with Balchen’s X and holds special allure for him. Yet both men know that the under-ice anomaly spotted by airborne radar at Essex Three might be nothing more than a crevasse or pooled water atop bedrock. Also, even if Balchen was correct in 1943, the glacier’s movement might have carried the Duck’s wreckage a half mile or more, to the vicinity of Essex One, Essex Two, or the new CRREL target points A, B, and K.

The bottom line is that unless Jaana’s ground-penetrating, boots-on-the-ice radar reveals a powerful image of an anomaly roughly the size of a crushed Duck, all the planning and speculation in the world won’t matter.

A
LMOST FROM THE
moment she stepped off the helicopter, Jaana has been linked by a rope umbilical cord to safety team members, most frequently John Bradley and Frank Marley. Their first task has been to use a handheld GPS receiver that John brought with him to translate the mission plan’s points of interest from latitude and longitude coordinates to actual places on the glacier. When the coordinates on John’s GPS match those of a POI, the team plants an orange flag at the spot, as a reference point for when they return with Jaana’s radar to sweep the area.

When safety team member Nick Bratton joins the flag-placement teams, the size and conditions of the Koge Bay glacier worry him. He writes in his journal, “My first foray onto the ice was a cautious one. I’ve spent lots of time on lots of big glaciers, but this was on a different scale altogether. Words cannot describe how incredibly enormous this glacier was. From our camp the ice stretched to the north and west as far as the eye could see.” Nick is troubled that our campsite is in a transition zone, an unpredictable place where snow is in the midst of becoming glacial ice. He recounts his first survey trek to his journal: “Most crevasses were visible but filled with snow, so the depth and strength of the snow bridges were unknown. As for the unseen crevasses, who knows how many there were? Those are always the real danger. You rarely fall into a crevasse you can see. The hidden ones are what get you.”

After flagging the first few points of interest, Jaana begins her radar work in earnest during her second day on the glacier, Friday, August 24. First on her list are Essex One, Essex Two, and Point K, which is between those two Essex points. Dragging the dragon-tail antenna behind her, she clomps back and forth over each site, watching the screen on a control unit that hangs from a harness at her waist. If she notices any anomalies, she can circle back for another look. The control unit also records the radar readings and location coordinates for analysis back at base camp.

Jaana explains that the radar takes a cone-shaped view of the glacier down to the bedrock, more than a hundred feet below. Any interruption in the solid ice appears on the screen as shapes called hyperbolas, which to the untrained eye resemble flatter versions of McDonald’s golden arches. One problem is that crevasses create hyperbolas similar to ones made by, say, the wreckage of an amphibious World War II Coast Guard biplane. Jaana’s expertise enables her to distinguish between a crack and a Duck.

As she scans the first points of interest, Jaana adjusts her route to avoid surface crevasses, but she and her safety minders try to walk in lines as straight as possible over the crunchy snow, to create overlapping cones of radar and to create a complete image of what lies beneath each point of interest.

Anticipation rises when Jaana, Frank, and John return to base camp for lunch. Inside the dome, Jaana transfers the data to her laptop computer, but nothing on her screen from the first three points of interest looks like an airplane. These were among the most promising sites, and the bad news spreads. Disappointed expedition members wander in and out of the dome, hoping that Jaana finds something unexpected during her closer look. When she doesn’t, Lou is deflated. “I feel like walking out there and seeing where the Duck might have flown into the glacier,” he says. “I want to appeal to the spirits of Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth, to ask that they help us find them.”

Nick’s concerns about safety grow when he sees Jaana’s data. Under what appears to be solid stretches of glacier ice, the radar shows fractures deep and not-so-deep beneath our feet. “Shit like that worries me,” Nick tells his journal. “There is no way to mitigate that. Walk fast.”

As lunch ends, whispers race through camp that there’s a problem with our GPS receivers, which means that the flag placements for the points of interest are in the wrong places. On one hand, the good news is that if Jaana repeats the radar survey in the right locations, she might get better results. But a bigger worry emerges: if the GPS receivers don’t work, we can’t know where the flags properly belong. A mistaken GPS reading that places a point of interest flag as little as thirty yards from its correct location might be enough to ruin the search. In that case, Jaana might as well take a drunkard’s walk across the glacier, randomly taking radar readings. That approach would have about the same chance of success as shooting an arrow into the air blindfolded and expecting it to pierce an apple on Lou’s head.

JOHN BRADLEY LEADS THE RADAR TEAM ONTO THE GLACIER, FOLLOWED BY JAANA GUSTAFSSON, WITH THE GROUND-PENETRATING RADAR DEVICE, AND FRANK MARLEY.
(MITCHELL ZUCKOFF PHOTOGRAPH.)

Tensions rise as word of the GPS problem spreads. Jim fumes that we’ve been relying on small personal GPS devices, yet two highly accurate Trimble-brand GPS receivers sit idle in the dome tent. “We’re talking about mission-critical technology, and no one knows how to operate the Trimbles,” Jim says.

Lou says he thought that Jaana or Bil would know how to use the Trimbles, but it turns out neither does. At the moment, we’re forced to rely on unreliable personal GPS units. For instance, John Bradley’s GPS unit places Essex Two on a rocky slope instead of where everyone agrees it belongs, in a wide-open area of the glacier.

The GPS issue compounds Jim’s irritation that no one from North South Polar knows how to operate a metal-detecting magnetometer that Lou brought. The magnetometer job falls to Terri Lisman, the geophysicist from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, who’s part of the Coast Guard team. Terri gamely reads the manual and assembles the unit. She follows Jaana to the erroneous points of interest and, not surprisingly, detects no metal under the ice.

I find Lou near the kitchen tent to be sure he’s aware of Jim’s exasperation. He says he’s already on top of the issue. “If we don’t have GPS,” Lou says, “we’ve got nothin’.” He asks Alberto Behar to apply his PhD in electrical engineering to the task of figuring out the Trimble units. Lou considers this par for the course on such a complex mission. “It’s easy to point fingers and blame. The crew of the PN9E could have done the same thing. But they had to survive, and we have to succeed. They worked together. I wish Jim had come up to me and said, ‘Lou, how do we work together to fix this?’ ”

Although Lou is the mission’s civilian leader, frustration among the North South Polar and Coast Guard team members congeals around Steve Katz, Lou’s second-in-command, whose job is to direct personnel and keep the mission on track. Privately, expedition workers complain that Steve seems unfamiliar with the mission plan, issues confusing and sometimes contradictory orders, and appears unsure how to address the GPS crisis. For his part, Steve says his army experience has taught him to expect grousing from the ranks when things get rough.

Yet soon I can’t walk more than a few feet without someone pulling me aside to criticize Steve’s leadership and preparedness. I wonder if team members’ widespread doubts are by themselves evidence that Steve is outside his element and is losing control of the troops. Still, he seems untroubled, and later he relaxes alone on the
nunatak
, smoking a cigar.

As frustration deepens over the inaccurate GPS readings, nerves get frayed, patience wears thin, and an old word gets a new meaning. In its original use, an icehole is a shaft that WeeGee melts into the glacier using the Hotsy. Or, more accurately, it’s a shaft that he
would
melt if we knew where to search. As hours slip past with little progress,
icehole
is repurposed as a term of disparagement, used to describe anyone seen as not carrying his or her weight or doing his or her job. As in, “He’s being an icehole.” The phrase gets a workout.

After lunch, Jim and Steve hike up the glacier toward Essex One and Essex Two to visually compare the flags’ GPS-dictated locations with the points as they appear on the mission map. While they’re out, Bil Thuma calculates the distance between base camp and the flags’ proper locations, to determine how far off the GPS-determined placements might be. By nightfall, when Bil’s calculations are complete and everyone is back in camp, the expedition’s leaders reach a dismaying conclusion: the flag placements are up to several hundred yards from where they belong. Worse, with two days gone and less than five days remaining, no one knows how to fix the problem.

I pass WeeGee on the way to my sleeping tent.

“So, Mitch,” he asks, “how does it end?”

21

CROSSED WIRES

FEBRUARY–MARCH 1943

T
HE WIND WAS
screeching, the snow was blowing, and temperatures on the glacier were subhuman. Armand Monteverde and Paul Spina knew that if their delusional companion Clint Best remained outside their snow cave, death would come quickly. Yet they feared that if they followed him into the pitch-black night, they might die alongside him.

Spina urged Monteverde to shine the flashlight around the tunnel entrance, so Best might see the beacon and follow it back inside. Monteverde moved to the doorway with the light, but before he reached the entrance they heard a crash. Unable to see in the dark, Best had somehow tripped and fallen headfirst back into the tunnel. His companions rushed to him and saw that his face and hands were a deathly shade of blue. Monteverde pulled Best inside and, with Spina’s help, wrapped him in a sleeping bag.

Half afraid and half angry, their emotions overflowing, Monteverde and Spina yelled at Best, and he began to cry. Still gripped by delusions, he told them that he’d gone outside to get their car, because neither of them had had brains enough to move it into the garage before the engine froze. It was hard for Monteverde and Spina to stay mad at him after that.

The pilot and the engineer stayed up all night with Best, praying that Pappy Turner would fly over in the morning with supplies, advice, and news about the next rescue attempt. Turner’s B-17 did come, but it made only one supply drop and flew off before they could connect on the walkie-talkie. Monteverde uncovered the entrance to the tunnel and found a package just feet away, as though Turner and his crew were milkmen who delivered to the front step. Inside were rare treats: roast beef sandwiches, cookies, candy, and toothbrushes with paste. Monteverde and Spina thawed out the sandwiches and brushed their teeth for what seemed like hours. Best’s mental state remained unchanged. Still unhinged, he wouldn’t eat. They took turns watching him all day and night.

Turner flew over again the following day, and this time Monteverde and Spina described Best’s breakdown over the walkie-talkie. Turner said he’d speak with a medical officer at Bluie East Two and return with medicine and instructions. Before leaving, Turner dropped bacon, ham, candy, and cigarettes. One package also included candles, which they needed to watch Best at night.

The medicine arrived as promised. Antipsychotic drugs were a hit-and-miss proposition in 1943, so the pills Turner dropped might have been barbiturates, widely used at the time as powerful sedatives and anticonvulsants. After taking the pills, Best slept for about four hours and stopped shaking and sweating. When he woke, he looked and seemed more like himself. Best wolfed down bacon sandwiches and seemed to reclaim his right mind.

That night, Best offered to reprise his role as camp cook. All was well at first as he prepared their meal, but then he grew quiet and unnaturally still. Monteverde called to him but got no reply, so he tucked Best into his sleeping bag. Aware that he was sinking into a new delusion, Best told them that “his wires were getting crossed again,” as Spina put it. He asked for another pill, which put him to sleep.

W
ITH
B
EST UNRAVELED
and Spina’s arm still ailing, Monteverde was the only one who could look for the supply plane or rid their hole of trash and waste. The heavy snows of February piled on top of their quarters, turning the tunnel passageway to the surface into a narrow, icy chimney. One day while trying to shimmy up to go outside, Monteverde became stuck halfway, his arms pinned to his sides and his ice-logged clothes making it impossible to wriggle free. Best couldn’t rouse himself to help, so Spina used his good arm to grab one of Monteverde’s thrashing legs and pull him back down.

Another time, Monteverde was gone awhile, so Spina poked his head outside to look for him. Fear swept over Spina as he saw nothing but an empty, endless glacier. He yelled for Monteverde but heard no answer. Verging on panic, Spina thought that Monteverde had fallen into a crevasse. Roused from sleep by Spina’s yells, a now-clearheaded Best told Spina not to go outside. Best knew that Spina had spent most of the past three months inside the PN9E tail or the snow cave, so he might not recognize hidden crevasses. As Best got dressed to search for their leader, Monteverde appeared in the tunnel entrance. He explained that he’d gone down into a sunken ice bridge to retrieve a can of precious kerosene for a new stove that Turner had dropped. He said he didn’t answer Spina’s cries because he feared that Spina would hear his voice and think it was coming from a crevasse, then race outside to rescue him.

After that, Monteverde and Spina developed a routine in which Monteverde went outside to haul in the packages to the entrance and Spina pulled them into the cave with his good hand. As weeks passed, the food supplies became plentiful and more elaborate, with deliveries that included a dozen roast chickens, pork chops, and cooked steaks. One night when Monteverde and Spina dove in to a chicken feast, Best told them he didn’t feel well and needed another pill. Again it put him to sleep.

When the weather eased in early March, Turner’s B-17 returned bearing a natural remedy for Best’s troubled mind: letters from home. When they learned by walkie-talkie about the incoming mail, all three men went outside to watch as Turner circled overhead, lining up for a low and careful drop of the irreplaceable cargo. They pounced on the package as soon as it hit. Best got the lion’s share, but there were letters for all three. Each man read them again and again, sharing the best parts with the others. A favorite passage came in a letter from Monteverde’s family. It said the War Department wouldn’t reveal where his plane crashed, but the family pieced together enough clues to conclude that he was stuck in a place with lots of ice. Monteverde’s relatives in sunny California advised him to be patient and wait for it to melt. The trio laughed at the thought, knowing that if they followed that advice they’d be stuck in Greenland for several millennia.

Whether a result of the pills, the letters, or something else, Best climbed from the depths of despair and regained his hold on reality. He continued to feel downhearted, but he no longer showed signs of being delusional.

Life settled into a tedious routine in the PN9E cave. The men had enough food and an endless supply of snow to melt for water. They had reading material and candles to read by. They read aloud, each man taking a turn until his hands ached from the cold while holding a book or magazine outside his sleeping bag. Then he’d hand off to the next man in their reading circle.

Their favorite selection was an essay in
Reader’s Digest
about the power of prayer. One section seemed especially apt for their predicament:

It is the only power in the world that seems to overcome the so-called “laws of nature”; the occasions on which prayer has dramatically done this have been termed “miracles.” But constant, quieter miracles take place hourly in the hearts of men and women who have discovered that prayer supplies them with a steady flow of sustaining power in their daily lives.

The essay renewed their hope, and they read it again and again.

O
N A DAY
clear enough for a supply flight, Pappy Turner told the survivors that Bernt Balchen and Barney Dunlop would try another rescue attempt with a PBY Catalina. The plan called for the rescuers to land briefly near the now-empty Motorsled Camp. Then, a dogsled team would snake its way through the crevasse field to the PN9E crash site and guide or carry the three remaining crewmen back to the Motorsled Camp. The PBY would then fly them all to Bluie East Two.

Several weeks of storms intervened, and the PN9E trio went for a long stretch without fresh supplies. Temperatures fell and winds raged at up to 125 miles per hour. The three men had a cache of food, but they wouldn’t leave their sleeping bags to cook or even thaw it. They lived on concentrated chocolate bars. Their candles ran out and their sleeping bags froze.

When Turner flew overhead after the storms eased, he told the survivors that some of the men at the base had bet that Greenland’s weather had finally killed them. It sounded heartless, but he meant it as praise for their endurance. Turner rewarded their stubborn refusal to die with gallons of strawberry jam that Spina had requested; new sleeping bags; three air mattresses; and a bottle of whiskey. This time Spina took sips, not gulps.

On March 17, 1943, the planners at Bluie East Two concluded that the weather was clear enough to try a second Dumbo-on-ice landing. Along for the trip with Balchen, Dunlop, and their volunteer crew were the trail team of Captain Harold Strong and sergeants Joseph Healey and Hendrik “Dutch” Dolleman, three men who’d come to Greenland with a wealth of experience on ice.

Healey had grown up in Boston’s Irish-American enclave of Dorchester. Tall and strong, as a teenager he’d been a second mate aboard the supply ship
Jacob Ruppert
during Admiral Byrd’s 1933–1935 Antarctic expedition. Healey joined Byrd again for a 1939–1941 polar journey, this time as a dog wrangler. During the latter expedition he received a singular if obscure honor: on the east coast of Antarctica, in a place called Palmer Land, on the north side of the entrance to a body of water called Lamplugh Inlet, lies a square-shaped outcropping of rock named Cape Healey. Six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Healey left Byrd’s service and joined the U.S. Army as a sled dog trainer.

Dolleman was born in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States with his parents. After a boyhood in Manchester, New Hampshire, he joined the U.S. Army, which sent him to Antarctica on a scientific expedition to study penguins. Short and lean, days away from his thirty-seventh birthday, Dolleman also was the namesake of a little-known land mass. Off the east coast of Palmer Land in Antarctica lies the ice-covered, thirteen-mile-long Dolleman Island. After his army-sponsored penguin studies, Dolleman was sent to Greenland.

Of the three, the most exotic backstory belonged to Strong. A native of Gloucester, Massachusetts, the forty-year-old Strong graduated from Princeton in 1924, then spent two years studying art and architecture in Europe. He returned to the United States in time to make a killing in the stock market, cashing out before the 1929 crash. Flush with cash, Strong and a friend went to Alaska to herd reindeer for two years. On a trip home they saw the ongoing effects of the Great Depression, so they returned to Alaska and worked for five more years in the 1930s as fur traders, buying fox pelts from Inuit hunters along a twelve-hundred-mile circuit they traveled by dogsled. Later, incongruously, Strong worked as a wallpaper executive in Texas before growing bored of civilized life. He joined the Army Air Forces in 1942, and his peculiar expertise earned him a spot on an Arctic search-and-rescue team in Greenland. Muscular, tanned, tall, and square-jawed, Strong cut a dashing figure as he cruised around Bluie West One in a Jeep pulled by a team of huskies. For a valet, Strong employed a huge black Newfoundland dog equipped with saddlebags to carry his lunch and his holstered .38.

FROM LEFT, SERGEANT JOSEPH HEALEY, COLONEL BERNT BALCHEN, CAPTAIN HAROLD STRONG, AND SERGEANT HENDRIK “DUTCH” DOLLEMAN.
(U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH.)

F
LYING SOUTH FROM
Bluie East Two, Barney Dunlop lined up to land the PBY Catalina one hundred yards to the right of the Motorsled Camp. As he descended, the clear weather several thousand feet above Greenland became what Balchen called “an opaque sheet of driving snow particles, whipped up by the wind. Our visibility is no more than fifty feet, and the blowing snow is so thick that we can barely see our tip floats.”

Dunlop fought the elements and slid the Dumbo to a stop about five hundred yards from where he’d intended, but in one piece. The three-man trail party climbed out with their dogs, sleds, and gear. Before heading toward the PN9E, they rocked the plane free from the glacier’s grasp. With the windshield coated by ice and winds toying with the rudder, Dunlop returned to the air with little more than a prayer to guide him. Soon he cleared the weather and returned to the base.

Strong, Dolleman, and Healey could only manage part of the six-mile journey before darkness fell, so they camped that night on the ice. The following day, Turner’s B-17 flew one pass after another to guide the dogsled team toward the PN9E wreck.

Monteverde, Spina, and Best knew from walkie-talkie chatter that the rescue team was approaching. They climbed up their igloo’s ice chimney and made a smoky oil fire on the glacier to serve as a beacon. They made extra coffee and assembled ham sandwiches, as though waiting for neighbors to drop in for lunch. The three survivors stared into the blinding white distance as tiny black specks grew larger. They grew impatient as long stretches passed without any apparent progress. Going was slow, as the men on the trail team avoided crevasses and repeatedly lifted their sleds past waves of
sastrugi.
Several times the sleds overturned as they hauled them through deep drifts, tiring and slowing them further.