Frozen in Time

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  McDonough’s comment is a sideways reference to a congressional mandate. In 2010, under pressure from families of missing servicemen, Congress told the Defense Department to speed the pace of MIA recoveries. Specifically, federal lawmakers amended a law known as the Missing Persons Act, or Title 10. In the amendment, Congress ordered the creation of a “comprehensive, coordinated, integrated, and fully resourced program to account for designated persons who are unaccounted from World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Persian Gulf War.” Congress also required that by fiscal year 2015 the Defense Department spend enough money to bring home at least two hundred MIAs annually, a sharp increase from the current yearly average of eighty-five.

  Later, McDonough reiterates the point in an e-mail: “Don’t forget what I said about Title 10. Should you get onto the ice and make a discovery it would be a game changer.”

  But as the meeting draws to a close, McDonough focuses on delivering the bad news, knowing that Lou sees silver linings in the darkest clouds. He defines the current situation: “It’s January now. You’re looking at going there in May. If you don’t have an underwriter, you won’t get up there?”

  Lou acknowledges: “It’s looking that way.”

  Yet Lou still won’t surrender, offering one more shot that falls somewhere between a pitch and a plea: “Where do we go from here? Can anybody go back and look at this? Why stop now?” He tries to build momentum: “There’s a lot of congressional interest in this. Have you seen the letters they’ve sent?”

  This smacks of desperation. Everyone at the table knows that the real trick would be finding a member of Congress who’d publicly oppose retrieving World War II heroes. Joan Baker, a forensic anthropologist for DPMO, rolls her eyes when Lou mentions the letters. Wearing the expression of a person who thinks her time is being wasted, Baker answers coolly: “We see a lot of letters in our office. Perhaps some of the congressmen can contribute.”

  Lou says softly, “I can find these guys.” Speaking more to himself than to the dwindling crowd, he adds: “It’s just a question of money.”

  FEBRUARY–MARCH 2012

  The phone rings four times before a woman answers.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Nancy, it’s Mitch. Calling again about John.”

  I quickly get to the point: “Nancy, I have a question. If John’s body were found, where would you want him buried?”

  “Oh. Let me think a moment,” Nancy Pritchard Morgan Krause says in her lilting voice. “He was Coast Guard, so it would be nice if he were returned to the Coast Guard Academy. But they have to find him first.”

  I update her on the financial and other hurdles facing Lou, North South Polar, and the Duck Hunt. I thank her and say good-bye.

  I met Nancy seven months earlier, at her retirement home in Annapolis, Maryland. At eighty-eight, she’s a trim, lovely woman with snow-white hair that she keeps short and stylish. Nancy and her second husband, Bill Krause, who’s ninety, are competitive croquet players who enjoy travel, easy banter, a civilized cocktail hour, and each other’s company.

  Nancy married Bill after the death of “Tick” Morgan, her brother John’s best friend. Tick died in 2004, shortly before he and Nancy planned to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary with a big family reunion. She turned the reunion into a memorial. “That was closure for my husband,” Nancy says. “We’re still waiting for that with my brother John.”

  The day we met, as Bill served drinks, Nancy ran her long, elegant fingers over the cover of the Coast Guard Academy’s 1938 yearbook. Its spine is like a hinge to the page with “Johnny” Pritchard’s entry: two years of football, two years of boxing, yearbook staff, newspaper staff, basketball manager. Then a short profile of her eldest brother that Nancy has read too many times to count: “Before you is a product of the fair state of California—a person whose disposition bears out the reputation of that state for sunshine. His ready smile and overflowing chatter have not only become a tradition at the Academy, but have buffaloed many a member of the fair sex into believing all his promises.”

  Nancy smiles as she talks about her “confident, self-assured” big brother, nine years her elder, and about how gentle and caring he was toward her. Nearly seventy years after the fact, she cries when she describes the phone call she received from her mother while at college. “She said, ‘Nancy, John’s been lost.’ That was it.” Nancy left her dormitory, went out into the falling snow, and walked around the block, knowing that she’d never fully recover from the loss.

  With her parents and other brothers gone, Nancy is John Pritchard’s closest surviving relative, what the U.S. military calls his PNOK (pronounced “pee-knock”) or primary next of kin. That gives her final say over where his remains would rest, should they be recovered. In 1975, when the Coast Guard first tried to find the Duck, Nancy was skeptical. “I said at the time, ‘Leave him there. Let him rest in peace. That’s where he went down, and I would hate to see anybody else put in danger.’ ”

  Now Nancy feels differently. “Congress has said they want all the MIAs, the missing in action, to be brought back to this country, and I agree. If they bring everybody back, then by God, you bring my brother back.”

  AT AGE SEVENTY-SEVEN, Edward “Bud” Richardson still sees his stepfather Benjamin Bottoms through the eyes of a small boy.

  “The biggest thing I remember about him is that he taught me not to be prejudiced,” Bud says. “Sometimes he’d show up at home with two or three soldiers or sailors, whoever was at the bus stop that night, looking to go into town to have a few drinks or whatever. He’d bring them home for dinner instead.

  “I recall him bringing home a black man, and I had never seen anybody other than people who were white. I must’ve looked surprised, and he told me, ‘There are different people in this world, different colors, different eye shapes, but they’re all people. That’s just how God made them.’ That’s the biggest lesson I learned from him, and I remembered it always.”

  The rest of what Bud knows about Ben Bottoms is from snippets and snapshots, some drawn from his own memory, some from stories told by his mother. Bud remembers Ben teaching him to swim in the ocean off Gloucester, Massachusetts; riding on his shoulders to buy an ice cream cone; losing his sailor’s cap when they ran home to avoid a storm; unwrapping skis from Santa Claus. Bud always knew that the skis came from the other man in his life with a bushy beard.

  Though unrelated by blood, these days he bears a distinct resemblance to his stepfather, with a rounded face and a receding hairline. He remembers his mother, Olga, a pretty woman with coal black hair, refusing to accept that her husband was dead. “She had a belief that maybe he was alive up there, maybe Eskimos rescued him.” Bud says she only relented after a Coast Guard officer assured her that a pilot had seen the wrecked Duck and the bodies of its crew. The part about the bodies was doubtful, but it had the desired effect, putting to rest Olga Bottoms’s dream that Ben had survived.

  “As a young boy, I had illusions about going up there to Greenland and bringing his body back,” says Bud, a retired construction manager and stable owner. As he got older, he considered going to the Coast Guard Academy, but that plan washed away when his mother married a navy officer. Bud thinks the marriage was mostly designed to give him a secure home and a father figure.

  If his stepfather were found, Bud says, he’d probably be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But Bud wonders if instead Ben Bottoms should rest in his native Georgia. Either way, Bud wants him home. “I feel very good they’re going back to get him,” he says. “It’s just a shame it couldn’t have happened when my mother was alive. He was the love of her life.”

  One more memory: when Bud was a boy he learned to play the trumpet, but the one song he could never play was “Taps.”

  “I played it once and she totally broke up. I never did play it again. I knew why.”

  JERRY HOWARTH WAS born in the same four-room log cabin in Wausaukee, Wisconsin, as his
uncle Loren “Lolly” Howarth. Jerry was not yet two years old when the Duck crashed, so all he knew of his uncle were stories from his father, Loren’s younger brother.

  “Loren was basically a country boy,” Jerry says. “Everybody worked together on the family farm. Lived off the land. There wasn’t much money to make. They’d hunt and fish. Deer, mostly. Duck, too.

  “Everybody said he was awful quiet.”

  There’s pride in his voice when Jerry says Loren was the first member of the family to go to college. “He washed dishes and worked in restaurants to make his way.”

  As Loren Howarth’s PNOK, Jerry provided the Coast Guard’s John Long with a wristwatch that belonged to one of Loren Howarth’s brothers, from which a DNA sample was taken. “I wish my dad and his brothers and all of them were still here, but it’s a good idea to bring him home where he belongs.”

  Marc Storch, a cousin by marriage, is the family historian and the keeper of Loren Howarth’s Legion of Merit, which he inherited from Loren’s widow, Irene.

  “When she first showed it to me, she said it was Lolly’s and she smiled,” he says. “She said, ‘He was such a sweet boy.’ Remember, Irene was talking about someone who stopped growing old in 1942. There she is at one hundred and one years old. Lolly never got any further than his twenties. So Irene, eighty years later, is still seeing that boy, that young man.

  “It means so much that Lolly could come home and be close to where his family is,” Marc says. “Even though it’s only a physical reuniting, having his remains back here would be important to those who remember him. It would also be important to those who know what he did to help save his crew.

  “People should know about that, and what it cost him.”

  14

  GLACIER WORMS

  DECEMBER 1942

  AS NOVEMBER TURNED to December 1942, the days grew shorter, the nights colder, the survivors’ hopes dimmer. The six icebound members of the PN9E crew, now joined by Don Tetley, faced the awful truth that their two best chances for rescue had gone down with Max Demorest’s motorsled and John Pritchard’s Duck.

  Their spirits fell even lower during the first week of the new month. Heavy storms with windblown snow made it almost impossible to leave the bomber’s tail. Rations ran low as no supply planes could reach them.

  In addition to Tetley, the remaining men trapped on the ice were pilot Armand Monteverde; copilot Harry Spencer; navigator William “Bill” O’Hara; engineer Paul Spina; passenger Clarence Wedel; and volunteer searcher Alfred “Clint” Best.

  Time and hardship had revealed Monteverde to be confident enough to take advice freely and to give orders only when necessary. Spina considered “Lieutenant Monty” to be a hero for the way he held them together.

  Although Spencer was the youngest crew member, he had the traits and the touch of a natural leader. Even after falling into the crevasse, he was the strongest and most capable among them, a likable fellow with sensitive radar for when one of his crewmates needed an extra ration or a supportive shoulder.

  To a man, they admired O’Hara for his tough-guy stoicism, even as his numb, discolored feet worsened and the blackness spread up his legs.

  They valued Spina for his relentless good cheer despite his injuries and agonizing frostbite. Even when Spina moaned about pain in his hands and feet, he did so with the timing of a vaudeville comic. Spina’s comfort in tight quarters might be traced to the fact that he was the third of seven children of a homemaker and an Italian immigrant factory worker.

  Wedel, a stranger to the others just weeks earlier, had earned respect for his mechanical ingenuity, somehow fixing their temperamental generator despite frozen parts. Powerfully built, with dark, wavy hair, a cleft chin, and bright blue eyes, the thirty-five-year-old Wedel was one of the more unusual privates in the U.S. Army.

  PRIVATE CLARENCE WEDEL. (COURTESY OF REBA GREATHEAD.)

  Born on a Kansas farm, the eldest of ten children, he was raised a Dunkard, a tiny Christian denomination of pacifists whose members, like Mennonites and Quakers, could claim exemption from military service. But Wedel believed that it was wrong to use his religion to avoid the war. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Wedel left the welding business he owned with his father and enlisted. He left behind his pregnant wife, Helen, a violinist ten years his junior whom he’d married on Christmas Day 1941. The two shared a love of dancing, and they’d spent their honeymoon in the “big city” of Wichita, at a nightclub named after their favorite song, “Blue Moon.”

  Clint Best was easygoing and introverted. He had no bluster or bravado, and he won praise for mixing the crew’s monotonous rations into creative meals. But Best was no outdoorsman, and he was perhaps the least suited among them for the deprivations of Arctic survival. The son of a traveling shoe salesman turned grocer, Best was happiest working inside with numbers. Equipped with a layer of padding from years at a desk, the brown-haired, blue-eyed Best had worked as a bookkeeper for a wholesale distribution company in Memphis before the war. During the five months he’d been in Greenland, cracking codes in a heated office at Bluie West One had been a perfect fit. Being cold, hungry, and trapped in an oversize icebox, watching men disappear into crevasses and going down in airplanes, was torment for the cryptographer turned volunteer searcher. As days passed, Best retreated into his own thoughts.

  TECH SERGEANT ALFRED “CLINT” BEST. (COURTESY OF ROBERT BEST.)

  The newest member of their band was Tetley, a wiry Texan who fit the stereotype of the quiet cowboy. After Demorest’s death, Tetley drove his motorsled over the crevasse-free ski tracks and parked alongside the wrecked PN9E. He’d been trained by Demorest in Arctic life, and even a short time in the cramped tail section made him seek alternative lodgings. It wasn’t the crowding—he was used to that from living at Beach Head Station and Ice Cap Station—it was the precarious position of the fuselage. Although secured with ropes to the front half of the plane, the tail perched over an expanding crevasse similar to the one that killed Demorest. On Tetley’s first night in the fuselage, he was startled when the tail section shifted. Fearful of sliding into the abyss, he climbed out of his sleeping bag and declared: “I’m going out and dig myself a hole [to] crawl in.”

  SERGEANT DON TETLEY. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

  WITH MORE STRENGTH and energy than the others, Tetley dedicated himself to the tasks of improving their lodgings and plotting a way out. He converted the metal cover of the PN9E’s Norden Bombsight into a crude saw and carved out blocks of snow under the bomber’s unbroken right wing. Spencer and Wedel pitched in, using a jungle knife, a shovel from Tetley’s supplies, and tools from their mess kits.

  Within several days they’d dug a “room” with walls of ice about fifteen feet long, eight feet wide, and more than four feet high. The roof was the metal underside of the wing. They couldn’t stand straight, but at least they could stop living like sardines and crevasse-bait. Upon moving from the tail section to the underwing snow cave, the seven men spread out sleeping bags to their full length. One drawback was that the ice underneath them melted from their body heat, soaking the sleeping bags with no way to dry them.

  When they’d all moved in, Tetley set up his stove in the cave. The men held their breath when he lit it, fearing the fuel-filled wing above them. The metal pinged and moaned when it first heated, but it posed no danger. Wedel made the cave homier by stringing a lightbulb on a wire from his generator. The well-lit, white-walled room brightened their spirits.

  With Howarth gone, Tetley became the new radioman, with Best as his assistant. They lacked Howarth’s communications knowledge, so they couldn’t get the transmitter to achieve its full range. They could send messages only by Morse code, but they could receive incoming voice transmissions. Despite Wedel’s unceasing efforts, the generator was unreliable, so the radio and the light were on-and-off pleasures.

  The men blamed mechanical woes, missing items, and other unexplained troubles on “Glacier Worms.” There were, in fact, c
reatures called ice worms that lived in glaciers, though not in Greenland. But in the stranded men’s imaginations, Glacier Worms became the ice cap equivalent of gremlins: mischievous, mythical beasts that bedeviled airplanes in flight and, now, on the ice.

  With their new quarters complete, the PN9E survivors cut the lines securing the bomber’s tail section. Their home for the previous four weeks slid into the crevasse with a thunderous roar and disappeared from sight.

  AFTER SEVERAL DAYS of hoping the Duck might return, the men of the PN9E cast aside lingering dreams of being airlifted to safety. Winter was closing in and the cavalry wasn’t on the way. They reported a temperature of 16 degrees Fahrenheit and sent requests via the Northland for supply drops: “We need food. . . . Everyone OK, but weak.” They made other requests, as well: “If [supply] plane comes . . . we need flashlight batteries, laxatives, bandages, candles, and reading material.”

  The supplies arrived in an airdrop from the B-17 flown by Captain Kenneth Turner. A Salt Lake City native approaching his fortieth birthday, Turner was mature, balding, and composed. He seemed ancient to the young flight crews he worked with, so everyone called him “Pappy.” Like the PN9E, Turner’s B-17 was in the temporary possession of the Air Transport Command on its way to England. Also like the PN9E, it had been diverted from its destiny as a weapon into the role of a search-and-supply lifesaver.

  Supply drops by Turner and his crew satisfied the immediate needs of the men on the ice, but they couldn’t stop O’Hara from getting worse by the day. As Monteverde changed the dressings on the navigator’s feet, he grew convinced that little chance remained of saving them. O’Hara also was losing more weight than the rest of them. He could stomach only a few drops of thin soup. Spina needed expert medical care, as well, and the others worried that neither man might last long.