Frozen in Time (7 page)

Later, the military would declare that the crash was caused by “lack of depth perception due to blending of overcast and heavy blowing snow.” It was a formal way of saying “flying in milk.” In the military way of things, Monteverde received sixty percent of the blame, while the weather was faulted for the remaining forty percent. “The pilot is considered to be responsible for this accident,” the official investigation found, “in that he flew over the Ice Cap under an overcast contrary to instructions” during preflight briefings. It continued: “He was overzealous in attempting a hazardous operation and did not have the proper training to accomplish the mission safely.” The review board recommended that in the future, pilots like Monteverde “not be sent over this route classified as experienced with the small amount of time shown by this Officer.”

He never publicly objected to the finding, but to a large extent Monteverde was blamed for forces beyond his control. He’d been found guilty of being inexperienced, for following orders to conduct a search in bad weather, and for failing to transform himself from a ferry pilot on his first overseas mission into a grizzled Arctic search pilot familiar with the treachery of lost horizons.

For now, though, worrying about blame took a back seat to survival. Monteverde and his crew had been sent over the ice cap to find a crashed C-53. Instead, for the second time in four days, an American military plane had gone down in an undetermined location on the frozen, largely uncharted east coast of Greenland. When the top brass at Bluie West One awoke that morning, five American airmen had been in danger of freezing or starving to death. Now the number was fourteen.

M
ONTEVERDE AND HIS
crew didn’t know it yet, but the PN9E had come to rest about seven miles north of the Koge Bay fjord, on a glacier approximately four thousand feet above sea level. On a clear day, the landscape looked from the sky like an unbroken sheet of ice. But up close, it was scarred by windblown waves of snow called
sastrugi
and crisscrossed by deep crevasses. Many crevasses were covered by natural bridges of accumulating snow and ice that made them impossible to see and therefore doubly dangerous. Some ice bridges were strong enough to bear a man’s weight. Some weren’t.

By luck or momentum, both parts of the broken bomber had somehow glided over a long stretch of the crevasse field. Now, at rest, the bomber’s tail sat motionless near the edge of a crevasse that split the ice to an unknown depth. If the crevasse widened, or if the PN9E’s rear end slid backward, all nine men who’d taken refuge inside would fall with it into the chasm.

A more immediate worry was the cold. They had no heat, no light, no stove. They had no sleeping bags, no heavy clothing, no Arctic survival gear. A few seconds outside would coat a man’s face with frost. In minutes, blood would rush from his extremities to his core. Exposed skin would die. In the sky, the men on a B-17 were warriors. On the ground, they were frozen sardines in a busted-open can.

They had no way to call for help: the crash had badly damaged the radio. The crew was afraid to even try it, fearing that sparks would ignite the spilled fuel they could smell all around them. Unlike the C-53 crew, the men of the PN9E couldn’t enjoy morale-boosting, potentially lifesaving contact with the outside world. Unless, that is, radioman Lolly Howarth could repair the smashed equipment, piece together a jury-rigged transmitter, or find an emergency transmitter buried in the wreckage. His crewmates weren’t counting on it. They stacked the broken radio gear at the open end of the tail section. The equipment didn’t work, so the heavy black boxes could at least act as a windbreak.

When engineer Paul Spina regained his senses in the tail section, he found his crewmates crowded around him, rubbing his frozen hands and feet. Monteverde located a first aid kit and put his Boy Scout training to use. For a half hour, he pulled and twisted on the engineer’s arm so the broken bones would line up and knit together. Spina tolerated the rough treatment without complaint or painkillers, and Monteverde admired the small man’s toughness. For a splint, Monteverde used a piece of aluminum that Spencer tore from the interior of the ruined plane. Even wrapped in parachute cloth, it felt cold against Spina’s skin, but it kept his arm straight. Then Monteverde went man to man, tending wounds with the first aid kit.

As Monteverde ministered to them, crewmen gathered supplies and counted rations. Hoping to make an insulated nest on the floor of the tail section, they arranged seat cushions, blankets, window covers, travel bags, and unfurled parachutes. They found a heavy canvas tarp, normally used to cover the plane’s nose between flights, and draped it over the open end of their quarters. They were shivering and wet, but at least the wind and snow wouldn’t roam unchecked through the PN9E’s tail. Spina marveled that the tarp was in the plane to begin with; it was supposed to have been stripped off before takeoff and left behind at the base. Without it, he thought, Greenland would have made quick work of them.

Tenuous connections to the outside world raised the crash survivors’ spirits. Woody Puryear expected to be on the B-17 for a few hours at most, to search for his missing friends in the C-53. Now he swelled with pride when he pulled a silk parachute from its pack and saw the words “Made in Lexington, Kentucky.” Puryear was a strapping, twenty-five-year-old country boy, more than six feet tall and 210 pounds. Before the war, he’d worked as a meat cutter and electric lineman in his hometown of Campbellsville, Kentucky. Lexington was the big city, some sixty miles away. But in a shattered B-17 on Greenland’s ice cap, Lexington was a link to family and friends. The parachute label made Puryear pensive. “Memories of home,” he’d say, “are best when you’re far away—when you don’t know whether you’ll ever get home again.”

The men knew they’d soon be painfully thirsty and hungry. Monteverde blamed the shock of the crash for making them all parched. But all the liquids on board were frozen. Best and Puryear had brought along a thermos filled with hot coffee, but now they opened it to find a block of brown ice. With no way to melt it, the crew ate dry snow. It kept them hydrated, but it made their throats scratchy and wouldn’t quench their thirst, no matter how much they swallowed. Spina’s hands were too frozen for him to feed himself, so the others filled his mouth with snow.

SERGEANT LLOYD “WOODY” PURYEAR, VOLUNTEER SEARCHER ABOARD THE PN9E.
(COURTESY OF JEAN SPINA.)

Darkness came early in November, so the nine men settled in for the night in their rounded metal cell. When whole, the B-17 stretched seventy-four feet. The torn-open rear section was about half that, and much of the interior space was unusable. The bomber’s curved walls, with ribs made of aluminum alloy, narrowed increasingly the closer a man got to the tail. The floor consisted of catwalks normally used by the waist and tail gunners to move through the B-17’s rear, or aft, section. Now, the catwalks were the only level places on which to lie down. That meant the nine-man crew of the PN9E had to squeeze onto a platform about fifteen feet long and three feet wide, or about five square feet per man. They tumbled on each other like a litter of puppies, some pressed against the plane’s cold, hard ribs.

They wrapped themselves in blankets of cut-up parachute cloth and everything soft they could salvage. They wriggled their toes to keep them from freezing. With each breath they inhaled fumes of splattered fuel. Men wanted to smoke cigarettes, but Monteverde forbade it, fearing that they’d explode their quarters. Spina’s friends pressed themselves against him on both sides for body heat. Stretching their legs had to be done in turn. Moving through the scrum was almost impossible, so to change position they grabbed onto the metal butts of the .50-caliber machine guns and used them like subway handholds. When night fell, the pitch-black shelter rang with calls of men trying to avoid stepping on each other: “Is that all right? Am I missing you all right?”

Before they sought the relief of sleep, Monteverde made a modest announcement: “This is as new to me as it is to you. According to regulations, I am in charge. But I want any and all suggestions you might happen to think of. We will work it out together.”

A
FTER A FITFUL
night, they awoke the next morning, Tuesday, November 10, 1942, and rearranged their den for greater warmth and comfort. They found canvas wing covers and added them to the tarp curtain at the open end of the tail section, but the effort to make the compartment weather-tight was futile. Cold wind and fine snow shot through every crack between the tarps. Even the seams of their clothing weren’t tight enough to block the sting of wind-driven snow.

The day was too stormy to leave the plane and investigate their surroundings, but several men scrounged around the wreckage. Inside the crushed radio compartment, they stumbled upon the most valuable item of all: an emergency radio transmitter. Waterproof, weighing thirty-five pounds, and painted bright yellow, the radio came with a metal-frame box kite and a reel with eight hundred feet of antenna wire. Unlike the crew of the C-53, which didn’t have an emergency radio on board, the men aboard the PN9E wouldn’t need to rely on their plane’s dying batteries. Power for the transmitter came from a hand-cranked generator built into the housing. The radio had curved sides that allowed a seated man to hold it between his thighs while turning the power crank. The idea was that an airman whose plane ditched in the ocean would sit in a life raft and crank out rescue calls. The radio’s hourglass design spawned its affectionate nickname, the “Gibson Girl,” after the curvy women in drawings by fashion artist Charles Gibson. One problem was that a Gibson Girl spoke but didn’t listen; the radio was a transmitter but not a receiver. Still, a lost man with a Gibson Girl between his legs had a fighting chance at survival.

The wind was too strong to fly the antenna kite their first full day on the ice. But in the following days, Lolly Howarth, the radio operator, flew it whenever the storm died down. Though unsure whether the radio transmitter worked, or whether anyone received its message, Howarth sent steady streams of SOS signals at the universal maritime distress frequency of 500 kilohertz. Serious and quiet, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring actor from Wausaukee, Wisconsin, Howarth soon began worrying that the Gibson Girl wouldn’t save them, after all. He eyed the plane’s damaged radio equipment and wondered if he could fix it. The sooner, the better.

CORPORAL LOREN “LOLLY” HOWARTH, RADIO OPERATOR ABOARD THE PN9E.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

An inventory revealed enough K rations—canned meats, biscuits, cereal bars, gum, and other staples—for one man to survive thirty-six days. That meant four days’ worth of meals for the nine of them. Monteverde intended to stretch the rations for ten days, knowing that even that might not be long enough.

Each box of K rations included a four-pack of cigarettes. But as much as the tobacco might have relieved hunger, Monteverde continued to ban it for fear of igniting the leaked fuel. They also found six boxes of U.S. Army Field Ration D, the military’s code name for chocolate bars. The D rations were included in three “jungle kits” given to the officers: Monteverde, Spencer, and O’Hara. One quirk was that D-ration chocolate sacrificed flavor for heat resistance, so the bars wouldn’t melt in soldiers’ packs. That was the least of the PN9E crew’s worries.

It might seem like backward military logic to give jungle supplies to men flying the Snowball Route over Greenland. But no one complained: the kits also contained long bolo knives that could chop snow and ice.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
November 11, brought no respite from driving snow and subzero temperatures. Cold in Greenland is almost a living thing, a tormenting force that robs strapping men of strength, denies them rest, and refuses them comfort. In time, it kills like a python, squeezing life from its victims.

Again the crew hunkered down. They savored the reduced rations Monteverde distributed and ate as much dry snow as they could swallow. The big treat of the day was a few squares of chocolate. A cycle developed in which their hands and feet froze and then thawed, each time triggering a burning, aching sensation. When it happened, they’d say their extremities had “stoved up.” Navigator Bill O’Hara suffered the most from its effects, particularly in his feet.