Frozen in Time

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Food was a frequent subject. They told stories of Christmas dinners, and they raised their right hands and vowed never to leave anything untouched if they ever saw a full plate again. The bomber carried a cargo of cigarettes, so they smoked like fiends. Nash had been a nonsmoker, but he picked up the habit fast.

  During the first two days, Weaver fiddled with the radio, with no luck. Late on the third night, the wind died down enough for Nash to take his sextant outside and calculate their position. He placed them fifteen miles inland from the Atlantic and 110 miles from any airbase or known location on their maps.

  Driven by courage, self-preservation, optimistic youth, hypothermia, fear of dying without trying, or some combination, the three Canadians hatched a plan. Using Goodlet’s pocketknife, they cut plywood cargo boxes and the pilot’s seat into crude snowshoes. Then they inflated the plane’s rubber dinghy, intending to drag it fifteen miles over snow and around crevasses to reach the water. Once there, they intended to climb in and paddle one hundred–plus miles to the nearest settlement. As implausible as the plan sounded, they concluded that it was their best chance. They gathered a flare gun with a box of cartridges, three pyrotechnic marine distress signals, their iron biscuits, and all the cigarettes they could carry.

  Before setting off, Weaver tried the radio one last time. Unexpectedly, a weak signal reached a Canadian airport. Weaver sent three SOS calls and gave the position Nash had calculated by sextant. His fingers froze, so he pounded his coded message on the transmitter key with his fist. On the third SOS try, before the batteries gave out, the airport responded that the message had gone through.

  Expecting that help was on the way, they postponed their journey. But after two days, with no sign of rescuers and their biscuit rations reduced to one-quarter a day, they stopped waiting. They inflated the dinghy, destroyed their plane’s bombsight, and burned all papers that might be useful if an enemy happened upon the abandoned bomber.

  Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver leaped into the wind and snow but didn’t get far. After two hours of pulling the dinghy, they’d traveled a quarter mile. Dejected, they turned back and spent the night in the plane, smoking cigarettes and smacking each other’s arms and legs to keep blood circulating. Their mouths grew bloody and sore from sucking shards of ice and snow.

  The next day, Greenland’s weather took a strange turn: the temperature soared by about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, heated by a warm breeze called a foehn or “rain shadow” wind. The warmth made for mushy trekking, but it encouraged Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver to try again, this time with no turning back. They made good progress, but when night fell, Greenland’s punishing cold winds returned, freezing their flying suits to their bodies like icy armor. For the next seventeen hours of darkness, they huddled under the inflated dinghy, praying. Weaver promised to become a regular Sunday churchgoer if he ever again found himself in a place with churches. They’d slept just a few hours since the crash, yet none of them could nod off.

  The following morning the weather broke and the skies were clear. They resumed their journey at daylight, heading east toward the coast. While veering a mile off course to avoid a crevasse, they heard the unmistakable sound of an airplane engine. The Canadians dove into the dinghy for their supplies. The flare gun proved useless—the firing mechanism had broken in the cold. The first marine signal was a dud. So was the second. But the third and last one worked, lighting the sky. The search plane wagged its wings in salute. The date was November 18, 1942, eight days after the crash. They’d been found.

  The search pilot reported that the men had traveled a remarkable seventeen miles northeast on foot from their downed plane. He circled low over them. Soon the trio saw small parachutes open, drifting to earth like milkweed seeds. The crates beneath the chutes carried food, clothing, sleeping bags, snowshoes, one hundred feet of rope, and a bottle of Scotch.

  Nash had never touched liquor, but just as he’d become a smoker, now he grabbed the Scotch. Half mad with thirst, he plucked out the cork and drank eight ounces—on an empty stomach and no sleep for days. Within minutes, Nash had sprawled onto his bottom. His eyes rolled around his head—Weaver thought they looked like marbles in a milk bottle. Down for the count, Nash slumped onto his side and passed out. His companions couldn’t wake him, so they dressed him in dry clothes and a parka, then stuffed him in a sleeping bag. Goodlet and Weaver put on dry clothes, too, then gorged on K rations from breakfast to dinner. After an hour of sleep, they woke up retching, having overwhelmed their shrunken stomachs. Nash woke and followed them down the binge-purge path.

  The Canadians found a note among the supplies instructing them to tie themselves together and continue toward the water. The men’s northeasterly path was taking them toward a notch in Greenland’s coast known as the Anoretok Fjord.

  Based on the search pilot’s report, a plan emerged for the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Northland to fight through the ice and meet the Canadians at the fjord. Before joining the rescue effort, the Northland had been transporting freight and bringing about eighty U.S. soldiers to the new airbase at Bluie East Two.

  Why the Northland hadn’t been involved in the rescue effort sooner—not only for the Canadians, but also for McDowell’s and Monteverde’s lost American crews—was never explained. One possible reason was the ossified competition among military branches. Officials of the U.S. Army Air Forces were overseeing the C-53 and B-17 searches, and the service had recently established rescue stations along Greenland’s east coast. A successful rescue would prove the value of the stations and the skills of army men, with bragging rights as a bonus. The army had no incentive to hand the Coast Guard the mission, and the potential rewards, unless absolutely necessary.

  As the Northland headed toward a rendezvous point with the Canadians, the pilot of the ship’s amphibious Grumman Duck took flight. Hoping to make sure the three frozen travelers were headed toward the correct fjord, Lieutenant John Pritchard scoured the ice cap. Pritchard spotted the men’s trail of snowshoe tracks, which he thought looked less than two days old. But despite one pass after another, he couldn’t find Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver.

  Bound together, the Canadians used the airdropped snowshoes to quicken their pace. They stopped when it got dark, afraid of yawning crevasses, only to be drenched by sleet and rain. Rather than wallow in slush, they stood through the long night like napping horses, holding sleeping bags over their heads for protection. Heavy fog the next morning held the same risk of crevasses, so they spent much of the day massaging their feet, using the Scotch as rubbing alcohol. When the sky cleared, they continued eastward toward the sea. Too exhausted to stand, that night they lay down on the ice with their arms wrapped around each other. Soon they were frozen together, and it took all their fading strength to pry themselves apart. Once separated, Weaver pulled off his right boot and found his foot had frozen solid, leaving the skin white, waxy, and numb.

  The closer the trio got to the water, the more crevasses they encountered. They felt the glacier heaving beneath their feet and heard the thunder of icebergs calving nearby. Doubts rose in their minds whether they’d survive. Nash suggested that they sing a hymn but they didn’t know one. Instead they crooned “God Save the King” and a hit song, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” about a chaplain who took up arms during the Pearl Harbor attack. Their lips bled as they sang, but it raised their spirits through the night.

  The next morning, a hard crust on the glacier made their snowshoes feel like skates as they glided toward the water. Looking out to the sea, they spotted what looked like a rowboat. It was the Northland, perhaps ten miles from shore, too far for the Canadians to attract the crew’s attention.

  Setting aside their pain and hunger, their thirst and exhaustion, they raced the last two miles to a sheer ice cliff at the water’s edge. Using a lighter he’d filled with alcohol from the plane’s radiator, Goodlet tried to set fire to their parkas to signal the ship. But the coats were too wet to burn. The three men were literally and f
iguratively at the edge of a cliff. Their flare gun was broken, their marine signals spent. They had nowhere to go. Their one hope was that the crew of the Northland would see them. The sky was clear and moonlit, filled with stars beyond number.

  The Northland fired flares and illuminating shells, a light show that reminded Weaver of fireworks for the queen’s birthday. The ship came closer to shore and swept its powerful spotlights back and forth along the coast. The trio danced and waved their parkas each time the spotlights hit them, but the lights never stopped. The men were too small and the ship was too far. The Canadians saw the Duck take flight from the water near the Northland, but still the trio saw no indication that their would-be rescuers had spotted them. Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver watched as the Duck returned to the ship.

  THE NORTHLAND IN ICE DURING WORLD WAR II. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

  The Northland was in dangerous waters, in heavy pack ice with icebergs and growlers all around. With no sign of the lost men, the Northland’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Frank Pollard, had to focus on the safety of his own men. The Canadians stared into the darkness as the ship steamed away from the coast.

  Thirteen days had passed since their crash, five since they’d been spotted from the air. They were weak, wet, freezing, and out of food. They knew they’d never survive a trek back to the plane, and they saw no point in trying. They doubted they’d live through even one more night of 40-below-zero cold. Desperate, with nothing to lose, Goodlet thought they should try again to light their parkas. If it didn’t work and the coats were ruined, death by hypothermia would come mercifully sooner.

  They tore the coats into strips to help them burn. Goodlet’s lighter was low on fuel, so it took repeated spins of the wheel to raise sparks. When it lit, he touched the flame to the parka strips. This time the fabric caught fire, and the men stoked the remnants of their coats into a glowing, smoky blaze. But soon the flames died into darkness.

  The Northland’s crew hadn’t wanted to give up on the Canadians. Some kept looking back toward shore, hoping for a sign of life. Before the little parka fire went out, it caught the eye of the ship’s chief gunner’s mate, who’d been watching through binoculars.

  “I just saw a light,” he told Ensign Charles Dorian, who rushed to the bridge to tell the captain. Pollard spun the Northland back toward shore. He ordered his men to turn on the ship’s big searchlight and shoot a half-dozen “star shells” that turned night into day as they fell to earth.

  At the edge of the ice cliff, the three men yelled with joy and relief. Giddy and renewed, they pounded on each other’s backs. Weaver read a Morse code message from the ship’s blinking signal lamp: “Move back from edge of glacier and bear south to meet landing party.”

  On the Northland, Pollard faced two decisions: who would carry out the rescue and how it would be accomplished. He settled on a plan that called for a small team to pilot a motorboat through the ice-filled waters, reach the shoreline, climb a glacier, avoid crevasses, guide or carry the three men back down the glacier, and get them to the ship in one piece. The dangers were too many to count, but no better ideas emerged.

  Frustrated that he hadn’t been able to find the Canadians in his Duck, John Pritchard volunteered to lead the mission. Equipped with skis and snowshoes, the lieutenant and a ten-man team reached the shore by boat, roped themselves together, and found a back way to scale the icy cliff. Pritchard led his men across a heavily crevassed section of the unstable glacier. By shouting and flashing searchlights, they located Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver. A photograph of the meeting commemorated the happy occasion.

  With darkness upon them and the glacier pouring chunks of itself into the water, the rescuers and the Canadians rushed back in the direction of the motorboat. Pritchard led the group down the face of the cliff, which seemed intent on tossing them into the sea. When everyone was safely aboard, Pritchard and his crew steered the motorboat through the dark to the Northland’s side.

  When the Canadians stepped aboard the cutter, they were feted, fed, and coddled so thoroughly that Weaver said they felt like newborns. Pollard, the Northland’s captain, told the men he’d written them off as dead before the lookout spotted their burning parkas. The ship’s doctor treated their frostbite and windburns. He diagnosed the mental effects of hypothermia, a confusion that Weaver described as “twilight between sanity and insanity.” The doctor told them they were within a day of cracking altogether. On the bright side, Weaver said, their blurred judgment had allowed them to persevere when logic, hunger, thirst, and exhaustion might otherwise have made them curl up on the ice and die.

  JOHN PRITCHARD, FAR RIGHT WITH ROPE AND POLE, AFTER LEADING THE RESCUE OF THREE CANADIAN AIRMEN WHOSE PLANE WENT DOWN ON THE ICE CAP. CANADIAN PILOT DAVID GOODLET IS FRONT LEFT, IN A FLIGHT SUIT; TO HIS LEFT, IN A BORROWED COAT, IS FLIGHT SERGEANT ARTHUR WEAVER. NAVIGATOR AL NASH IS IN THE ROW BEHIND THEM, IN A PARKA. IN THE BACK ROW, SECOND FROM LEFT WITH A CIGARETTE, IS ENSIGN RICHARD FULLER, WHO WOULD SPEND FIVE MONTHS LEADING ANOTHER RESCUE TEAM ON THE ICE CAP. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

  All three were thin and hollow-eyed. Sleep would be a problem for the foreseeable future; they’d startle awake from shivering nightmares in which they were back on the glacier. But they were safe.

  The Canadian trio spent the next six weeks aboard the Northland, celebrating their unlikely survival and regaining their health. Later they told their story to reporters, posed for photos, and saw their tale recounted in magazine stories and a comic book called Lost in the Arctic.

  Asked what kept them going, Weaver said, “Dave had his wife and baby daughter. Al was worried about his mother, alone out in Winnipeg. And I had my wife. Do you see what I mean? We had something to live for.”

  John Pritchard’s heroism didn’t go unnoticed. The unassuming young lieutenant was a Coast Guard search pilot, yet he captained a motorboat and climbed a glacier to rescue three men, jeopardizing his own life. He and the Northland’s captain, Frank Pollard, each earned the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, the second-highest noncombat award for bravery.

  Pritchard’s citation read, in part, “Lieutenant Pritchard’s intelligent planning, fearless leadership, and great personal valor aided materially in the gallant rescue of the stranded men, and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”

  IN THE TAIL section of the PN9E, no such celebrations were under way.

  The men of Monteverde’s crew didn’t know that the Canadians had walked off the ice, or even that they’d crashed. It wouldn’t have mattered. After Harry Spencer’s fall into the crevasse, walking toward the water wasn’t an option for them.

  On the other hand, Monteverde, Spencer, and O’Hara discussed whether some or all of them might walk to a weather station in the opposite direction from the water that they’d noticed on a map salvaged from the cockpit. Spina joined the conversation and pronounced the idea suicidal. He told them he’d rather remain with the plane than freeze to death along the way. After a long talk, everyone agreed.

  For military planners, the Northland’s success in reaching Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver demonstrated that the Coast Guard needed to be more heavily involved in the search for Monteverde’s B-17 and McDowell’s C-53, lost for fourteen and eighteen days, respectively. After the Canadians’ rescue, the ship received a congratulatory message from “Iceberg” Smith, the rear admiral who commanded the Greenland Patrol: “Well done. Suggest Northland proceed . . . for search of Baker Seventeen [the B-17 PN9E] and . . . Cast Five Three [the C-53].”

  The two American crews still on the ice cap hadn’t been forgotten, and Pritchard and the Duck might have another chance to bring lost men home.

  8

  THE HOLY GRAIL

  JANUARY 2012

  IF THE PENTAGON is a battleship, Coast Guard Headquarters is a tugboat. Located near the mouth of the Anacostia River, in a far southwest corner of Washington, D.C., the headquarters building is like the service itself: modest, practical, wit
hout flash or self-importance.

  The main lobby resembles the entrance to a struggling small-city hospital. On this bright winter day, the smell of glue is overpowering, wafting from a nearby hallway where workmen repair broken floor tiles. A portly janitor swabs the floor. A bored security guard leans back in his chair and talks movies with a colleague.

  Into the lobby blows the Duck Hunter, Lou Sapienza. He’s here to press his case yet again with Defense Department officials for money to support his plan to lead a team to Greenland, find the lost Duck, and recover the remains of its three occupants. Lou’s unmistakable voice precedes him, bouncing off the walls as he saunters through the lone metal detector.

  More so than on his last visit to Washington, three months ago, Lou is in seemingly friendly waters here. The Duck’s heroic story is braided into Coast Guard lore, and the service’s top brass would like Lou to succeed. The headquarters building, tired as it may be, is home to an elaborate scale model of the little plane, and talk has percolated here for years about exhuming the real thing from under the ice cap.

  Still, money is tight, and there’s only so much the Coast Guard can do. That’s why Lou’s real audience today are military and civilian members of the Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, DPMO, the same men and women who poured cold water on him in October.

  AS A MILITARY service, the Coast Guard is something of an odd duck itself. It has a Swiss Army–knife mission of law enforcement, humanitarian relief, and military tasks, including coastal security, drug interdiction, search and rescue, marine safety, and environmental protection. Those roles aren’t a natural fit for the Defense Department, so the Coast Guard has bounced over the years from the Treasury Department to the Transportation Department to its current home in the Department of Homeland Security. And yet, at times of war, the Coast Guard can be swallowed by the navy, as it was during World War II.