Frozen in Time

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Unfortunately for Lou, pretty much the one job not included in the Coast Guard’s mission statement and $10 billion annual budget is recovering lost World War II airmen and missing biplanes. That work is funded by a tiny fraction of a sliver of the U.S. Defense Department’s $525 billion annual budget.

  Still, Coast Guard officials have offered to consider using a C-130 Hercules transport plane to haul Lou, his team, and the necessary equipment to Greenland. The service also has provided advice, research assistance, general support, and a boardroom for this morning’s meeting.

  As he readies himself for his pitch, Lou seems oblivious to the skepticism that his contacts at DPMO have expressed in e-mails about the million-dollar price tag for a mission to find the Duck as well as McDowell’s C-53. Lou seems equally unaware that DPMO’s entire projected budget this year is about $22 million, and its staff consists of just forty-six military personnel and eighty-seven civilians. Maybe worst of all, DPMO’s already approved budget calls for the office to “deploy investigation teams to Serbia, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Tunisia.” Nowhere within a thousand miles of Greenland.

  What Lou doesn’t know can hurt him, but at the moment he’s in high spirits. His zip-up fleece jacket is adorned with five brightly colored patches, the most prominent one for the Duck Hunt. Another displays the logo of his expedition company, North South Polar Inc. Two more trumpet other potential recovery missions, one in Greenland for McDowell’s C-53, and one in Antarctica for a lost World War II–era navy plane called the George 1. The fifth patch is for the Fallen American Veterans Foundation, a nonprofit organization Lou created to pursue corporate and private sponsors who share his vision of recovering American MIAs from around the world.

  “Hey there!” he calls. I’m pressed against the patches in a hug.

  Since the last Washington meeting, Lou has been a round-the-clock dervish of research and logistics. On the research front, his priority has been to pinpoint where to dig and melt through the ice for the Duck and its men. To narrow the search, he’s been comparing historical documents and clues against data from modern technology, including sensor findings from NASA survey flights and ground-penetrating radar from U.S. military planes on their way home from Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s become an amateur authority on the flow of glaciers, knowing that in Greenland, anything from a pebble to a plane moves along with the ice in which it rests. Lou has also learned how ice and snow build up over the years in different parts of Greenland, which leads him to estimate that after seven decades at Koge Bay, the Duck is thirty to fifty feet below the surface.

  On the logistical side, Lou’s been pricing helicopter time from Air Greenland, evaluating cold-weather gear from possible sponsors, and choosing freeze-dried foods from a company beloved by apocalypse-minded survivalists. Its nitrogen-packed, enamel-coated cans of beef stew promise to taste good until 2037. I worry that it might take that long to raise the money needed for the Duck Hunt.

  Although Lou is point man for the search effort, he’s not its natural father. He adopted that role from a retired Coast Guard captain named Tom King, a barrel-chested, sixty-year-old fireplug of a man who suffered from a recurring nightmare about eBay.

  KING GREW UP in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with boyhood hopes of attending the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and captaining a submarine. By the time he assembled the required recommendations, the seas had shifted and he was instead headed toward the Air Force Academy. But his heart wasn’t in it. His high school German teacher suggested the Coast Guard. At seventeen, King caught sight of the Eagle, the Coast Guard’s three-masted cutter, known as “America’s Tall Ship.” A service that sailed such a magnificent ship was the place for him.

  During a thirty-year career, King rose to chief of the Coast Guard Office of Aviation Forces. After retiring in 2004, he launched an aviation and homeland security consulting firm. He also became involved with the Coast Guard Aviation Association, a fraternal group known jovially as the Ancient Order of the Pterodactyl, a title befitting members’ proud self-image as flying dinosaurs. Their motto: “Flying Since the World Was Flat.”

  His work with the Pterodactyls gave King time to reflect on the case of Lieutenant Jack Rittichier, the first Coast Guardsman killed in Vietnam. In June 1968, piloting a combat rescue helicopter known as a Jolly Green Giant, Rittichier was hovering over an injured Marine Corps pilot when North Vietnamese troops opened fire. He tried to land, but his craft exploded on impact. At the war’s end, Rittichier was the only member of the Coast Guard still declared missing in action from that conflict. A quarter century passed before a joint American-Vietnamese search team found his remains. In 2003 Rittichier was buried with honors on Coast Guard Hill at Arlington National Cemetery, a hallowed section normally reserved for top commanders. Delivering the eulogy, Coast Guard commandant Admiral Thomas Collins declared, “All hands are now accounted for.”

  That was true for Vietnam. But it troubled King that the same couldn’t be said for Coast Guardsmen from World War II, notably the pilot and radioman of the Northland’s Duck, John Pritchard and Ben Bottoms.

  King’s focus on the Duck intensified in 2007, when he learned that a Coast Guard Academy ring was being auctioned on eBay. The ring had belonged to the late Captain Frank Erickson, a Coast Guard giant who pioneered the use of helicopters on rescue missions. King shuddered at the thought of Erickson’s ring being melted down or worn as a golden bauble on some rich guy’s knuckle. King and his friend Captain Mont Smith, president of the Pterodactyls, won the eBay auction for $2,025. They carried the ring to Coast Guard events and reunions, treating it like Cinderella’s shoe by allowing fellow aviators to try it on for size.

  Coast Guard relics became King’s passion, and he was named the Pterodactyls’ vice president for museums, aircraft, artifacts, and restorations. By the time he and Smith won Erickson’s class ring, King had sent an e-mail to fellow Pterodactyls asking what they considered to be the Holy Grail of Coast Guard aviation artifacts. King knew the answer before the survey was done: John Pritchard’s Grumman J2F-4 Duck, serial number V1640, lost in Greenland.

  Certain that the Duck should be displayed in the Smithsonian or a Coast Guard museum, King felt sickened by the possibility that a wreck hunter might recover the plane from the ice and sell it to a private collector of warbirds, as vintage military aircraft are known. King knew that the lucrative market for warbirds had led salvagers to seek them out in jungles, on mountaintops, beneath the seas, and on glaciers. Only thirty-two Grumman J2F-4s had been built, and only one of those Ducks remained in flying condition, making it one of the rarest warbirds. Because Pritchard’s Duck carried a heroic backstory, it could be worth several million dollars on the private market. Even more horrifying to King was the possibility that a wreck hunter might disturb the human remains and grave-rob personal items.

  “I don’t want to see John Pritchard’s wallet being sold on eBay,” King says, shaking both his head and his fist. “We can’t allow that.”

  The Coast Guard did try to reach the Duck in 1975, using two helicopters and a shore party. Conditions for the search were ideal, but they were looking in the wrong place. As King talked up the idea of a new search, he got word that a private collector had already obtained permits from Greenland to launch an expedition to retrieve Pritchard’s plane. King’s eBay nightmare seemed to be coming true.

  Back-channel messages were sent to Greenland government officials that the remains of American World War II casualties were believed to be inside the plane. That made the Duck an overseas American military gravesite. Wreck hunting was one thing; disturbing the resting place of heroes was something else entirely. The wreck hunter’s permits were squashed. Still, it was a close call. Considering the Duck’s potential value, other wreck hunters might start circling, perhaps without going through the formal permitting process. Fears about the Duck’s fate rose further amid reports of rapid melting of the Greenland ice cap. The plane and its occupants might be exposed to the e
lements and treasure seekers both. A sense of urgency took hold.

  King enlisted his friend Mont Smith, the Pterodactyl president, and Smith buttonholed Vice Admiral Vivien Crea, at the time the Coast Guard’s second-ranking officer. Crea held an exalted position as the Pterodactyls’ “Ancient Albatross,” an honorary title bestowed on the service’s longest-serving aviator. Crea passed the mission of saving the Duck to Captain Mike Emerson, then the Coast Guard’s chief of aviation.

  In February 2008, Emerson walked into the aviation office on the third floor of Coast Guard Headquarters. Pausing at a cluster of cubicles, he dropped a pile of papers on the desk of one of his project managers, Master Chief Petty Officer John Long.

  “Hey,” Emerson said, “see if you can find something out about this.” The papers contained the outlines of the Duck story.

  Long and Commander Joe Deer, later replaced by Commander Jim Blow, spent the next two years working as historical sleuths, haunting archives to dredge up declassified reports, details, maps, photographs, obscure references, and even rumors about the plane, its men, and their final flight. They pored over radar data and studied the movement of glaciers. They tracked down family members of the lost Duck crew. One goal of those contacts was to discover how family members felt about a mission to bring the men home. Another was to collect DNA samples from relatives of the lost men, to prove their identities if bodies or bones were found.

  In 2008 and 2009, radar and sonar scouting missions identified what seemed like a promising place to dig, and an expedition took shape for 2010. When Coast Guard officials began looking for help from outside experts to carry out the mission, they teamed up with a guy named Lou.

  THE ELDEST OF four boys, Luciano “Lou” Sapienza spent his childhood in suburban New Jersey, thirty miles from Manhattan. His father, a World War II navy veteran, worked as an import-export manager for a brewery supplier. His mother founded the Somerset County Association for Retarded Citizens and served as its executive director, a role that fit her work helping one of Lou’s brothers, who was developmentally disabled.

  As a child, Lou was quiet and withdrawn, “a little bit of a mama’s boy.” Beyond his driveway were woods where he’d have imaginary adventures until he heard his mother’s booming voice, “scaring the hell out of me” and calling him home. He went to parochial school, where he won a camera as a prize in a third-grade magazine drive. “I was tied with this girl, and Sister Mary Lawrence told me, ‘Be a gentleman and let her have the camera.’ I said ‘No.’ I really wanted that camera.” The nun thought of a number between one and ten; Lou picked three and won. He walked away with a box-shaped Imperial Satellite 127 camera and his first calling.

  “I’m one of those people who always feel as though I was born in the wrong generation,” Lou says. “Photography for me, in retrospect, has always been about preserving the past. I have this thing about the past.”

  Before embracing photography, though, he had been on a crooked path toward the priesthood. He attended a seminary during freshman and sophomore years of high school, but the priests gave him the option of leaving on his own or being thrown out. “It had something to do with girls. Nothing major,” he says. Lou ended up at an all-boys parochial high school where he had few friends and felt most comfortable behind a camera. “Photography helped me. It helped me to relate.”

  After floundering through two years as a communications and theater arts major at a small college in Indiana, Lou returned home. He took photography courses at Cornell Capa’s International Center for Photography in Manhattan, at New York University, and at the Maine Photographic Workshops. A career as a commercial photographer followed, along with marriage and three sons.

  “In 1989, I was married and we’d just bought a house in Plainfield, New Jersey. I always had CNN on in the background. I was walking from one room to another, and I heard that a group of American explorers were going to Greenland to search for the Lost Squadron. I was stuck and bogged down doing commercial stuff. This was the type of story I always wanted to tell. Also, I always wanted to do something adventurous. Not just adventure for adventure’s sake. I was fascinated with World War II. This was about rediscovering the past, adventure with a purpose. I called CNN and tried to find out who these people were.”

  He tracked down Norman Vaughan, a renowned explorer who’d been a dogsled leader during Admiral Richard Byrd’s 1928 expedition to Antarctica. During World War II Vaughan served as a lieutenant colonel, and in July 1942 he took part in the rescue of the twenty-five men of the Lost Squadron. When Lou began searching for Vaughan, the explorer was past his eightieth birthday yet still competed in Alaska’s Iditarod dogsled race. In his spare time, Vaughan had joined a team that intended to retrieve one of the Lost Squadron’s six P-38 Lightning fighter planes, buried under more than two hundred feet of snow and ice.

  LOU SAPIENZA IN GREENLAND IN 1992 WITH A .50-CALIBER MACHINE GUN FROM GLACIER GIRL. (COURTESY OF LOU SAPIENZA.)

  Lou wrote a passionate letter making his pitch: he would serve as the expedition’s official photographer and do whatever else was needed, including cooking and hauling equipment, to take part in the mission. It worked. “They told me, ‘We’ve got a lot of good photographers who want to go. You wrote a better letter.’ ”

  “My first trip to Greenland,” Lou says, “we were out there about fourteen days. I was told, ‘Wear what you normally wear when you go skiing.’ I had never been skiing. I wore jeans and imitation Sorel boots, and I started going hypothermic. The boots soaked through. I had to wrap my feet in plastic bags. I learned that if your feet ain’t happy, you ain’t happy. When I was invited to go back to Greenland the next time, I got sponsors, and we had two pairs of real boots for everybody.”

  When Lou joined the team, Vaughan and other expedition members had already made four unsuccessful trips to Greenland in pursuit of their prize. Lou participated in the last three expeditions, including a climactic 1992 effort in which they drilled and melted through almost a football field of ice, to a depth of some 268 feet. They created an otherworldly ice cavern around a P-38 Lightning, disassembled it, and hauled it piece by piece to the surface. That plane became Glacier Girl, and Lou’s photos became the visual record of the expedition.

  Lou returned to his life, got divorced, had a long relationship, broke up, met someone else, got married and divorced again. Through it all, he never shook the idea that he had found his true calling. He read a magazine article about three navy fliers buried in 1946 under the ice in Antarctica, inside a flying boat called the George 1. Lou located the men’s families and offered his services. “I told them, ‘We’ve done this before. I know how to get them.’ ” The navy still hasn’t signed on, saying the search would be too dangerous. But Lou won’t give up, which is why the George 1 mission is embroidered on one of his patches.

  “If you tell me it can’t be done and I know it can be done, I don’t take that kind of answer very lightly,” Lou says. “I feel like I can’t turn my back on the families. As long as I’m alive, these men are coming home.”

  While promoting his plan for a George 1 expedition, Lou presented his case to the government’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, which works with DPMO to recover unaccounted-for American service members. JPAC wasn’t ready to pay for the George 1 project, but through a roundabout series of contacts, the agency put him in touch with the Coast Guard’s Duck Hunt team. A public-private partnership was born.

  “We went from there,” Lou says. “They wanted me to provide positive, verifiable proof that we knew where the Duck was.” They went to Greenland in September 2010, where Lou and his team investigated a site that a previous Coast Guard contractor had identified as the likely resting place for the Duck. That location proved to be a dud, so Lou regrouped.

  GLACIER GIRL SOME 268 FEET UNDER THE ICE CAP. (COURTESY OF LOU SAPIENZA.)

  He returned home to a town on eastern Long Island, New York, where he lives with his twenty-two-year-old son, Ryan, and his d
achshund, Sarge. Convinced that he could succeed, Lou deepened his research and focused on winning support to finish the job. As months passed with no sign he’d get a green light, Lou forced himself to remain upbeat. In private moments, though, he’d acknowledge that several years had passed since he’d earned a steady paycheck. The little money he had left was going into planning the Duck Hunt. He was surviving on savings, an inheritance, a supportive girlfriend, and faith.

  “The biggest thing is faith,” Lou says. “Faith in the national commitment to leave no man behind.

  “One of the things I’ve realized is that this screwy life that I’ve had was all leading up to being able to put an expedition together to Greenland,” he says. “I bring certain skill sets to this that a lot of people don’t have, and I’m able to get it done. If they’re there, we will find them. If the families and the Coast Guard want these men home, that’s good enough for me. It’s the ultimate way to honor these men and what they did to bring them home to their families.”

  9

  SHORT SNORTERS

  NOVEMBER 1942

  STORMY WEATHER RETURNED to Koge Bay from November 13 to 16, the four days following Harry Spencer’s rescue from the crevasse. Driving sleet and snow kept the nine men of the PN9E trapped inside the remains of their bomber. Wedged together in their cocoon of silk parachute cloth, they had all day and night to think, and to worry.

  They salvaged what they could from the front end of the bomber, ripping up the floor in the radio compartment and moving it to the tail to create more room for sleep. They tore out cabin insulation for bedding. They dug through the snow near the wreck and found crew members’ personal belongings, including several garment bags containing clothes, cigarettes, candy, and gum to share.