Frozen in Time

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Jim marvels at how two ladders that Lou bought last-minute in Keflavík turned out to be among our most critical equipment. “Where there’s a will,” he says, “there’s a way.”

  THE BREAK IS brief, as moving the Hotsy is only part of the job. We need to haul more fuel, hoses, ropes, and other equipment to BW-1 for WeeGee to start melting. Several of us hike back to base camp with the ladder skis and cram the necessary supplies into a large Pelican case. When we’re done, it weighs more than four hundred pounds, so we attach ropes to drag it up the glacier. We’re tired from the Hotsy move, there are fewer of us working, and the surface has grown slushy since dawn. Even with the ladder skis it feels like pulling a reluctant donkey up a hill, and we anoint ourselves “the Mule Team.” What follows is a two-hour torment, complete with loud and imaginative curses cast on everyone who isn’t helping us.

  Doc plays a leading role on the Mule Team, pulling with the strength of a much younger man and entertaining us with stories from his youth and his Coast Guard travels. Only later does he reveal that he nearly didn’t make the team.

  For days, safety leaders have cautioned that we’ve become too casual on the glacier, ignoring risks and tempting fate by failing to rope ourselves together. Doc tells us that when he left BW-1 after the Hotsy move, alone and unroped—a double mistake in the safety team’s view—the glacier opened beneath his feet. Luckily, he threw out his arms and halted his fall at his armpits. His first thought, he says, was to get out fast. But he admits that his immediate motive wasn’t to save himself; he didn’t want to hear Nick say, “I told you so.”

  Doc’s drop turns out to be the closest the glacier comes to claiming any of us.

  A happier adventure befalls Jetta on her way to base camp after the Hotsy move. Walking with her head down, Jetta glimpses something dark on the glacier surface about a hundred yards from BW-1. She kneels and carves it from the ice with help from Jim and Rob. It’s a piece of frozen fabric, striped blue and gray, about the size of her palm. It looks and feels unlike the clothing that expedition members wear, and no one has reported torn or lost gear. It’s a long shot, but Jetta preserves the cloth for testing, in the hope that it might be from the Duck’s fabric-covered wings. Months might pass before an answer, but her discovery raises hope of good news to come.

  WEEGEE STARTS MELTING the first hole at 1:00 p.m. He chooses a spot where John and Frank drilled yesterday with the auger. He straddles the trench, keeping the black steel pipe vertical and aiming the boiling water from the Hotsy downward into the ice. WeeGee plans to burrow nearly twice the radar-reported depth of the anomaly, to be sure not to miss anything. The rest of us stand around watching, wishing the hole would open faster.

  When the pipe is several feet into the ice, WeeGee looks up and notices that Jaana’s hands are bare.

  “You have gloves?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says, quizzically.

  “Put ’em on.”

  When she does, WeeGee steps aside and hands her the hot pipe. It’s an act of appreciation, a tribute to her discovery. The work is slower than expected, the glacier resists the intrusion, and after a while WeeGee reclaims his place above the hole. At 2:15, he reaches a depth of sixty feet. Hand over hand, he pulls up fifty feet of black hose attached to the ten-foot pipe and sets it aside.

  Alberto goes to work with his camera, a 4-mm lens surrounded by tiny high-intensity lights encased in a silver shell the size of a ripe pear. The camera hangs from a thick black wire, and Alberto unspools enough to reach the bottom of the hole. He drops it in, turns on the video screen, crouches on the ice, and drapes a coat over his head to block the glare. He pulls up the camera a foot at a time, searching the screen for any hint of the Duck. After several minutes, Alberto stands and runs his hands through his curly black hair. He stares at the hole and says nothing. We tamp down our disappointment, knowing that if a hole is even a foot from the Duck the camera might see nothing. And because the Duck might be nose-down or nearly vertical in the ice, it would make a narrow target.

  ROBERT “WEEGEE” SMITH MELTS THE FIRST HOLE AT BW-1. WATCHING ARE (FROM LEFT) JIM BLOW, ALBERTO BEHAR, KEN HARMAN, AND MITCHELL ZUCKOFF. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH BY JETTA DISCO.)

  This might take many holes and lots of time, everyone agrees, so nine team members return to base camp to eat lunch and begin packing. Eight of us remain at BW-1: WeeGee, Lou, Jim, Jaana, Doc, Frank, John, and me. WeeGee starts a second hole, this one at the exact spot where Jaana placed the flag over the anomaly. But after forty minutes, with the hole about forty-five feet deep, the hose starts to spray water from where it’s attached to the Hotsy. WeeGee turns off the Hotsy to repair what he diagnoses as a blown rubber O-ring. Doc shuts off a portable Honda generator that powers a pump that draws water into the Hotsy. The glacier reclaims its quiet majesty.

  I notice that Jim has wandered some fifty yards away. He stands with his back to us, facing Koge Bay, talking on a satellite phone. After several minutes, he turns and walks toward us, his shoulders slumped. We gather around as he says, “Everyone’s got to get off the ice.” Confused, we look at each other and back at Jim. He explains that rough weather is approaching faster than expected, so Air Greenland is sending its two biggest helicopters to airlift all of us and as much gear as possible before nightfall. The first helicopter will be here in an hour.

  We thought we’d have a full day or more at BW-1, and we’ve brought lights to work through the night. We anticipated driving fifteen, twenty, or more holes to probe the anomaly that every one of us can picture in our minds from Jaana’s radar screen. Now we have an empty first hole, an unfinished second hole, and an order to leave.

  It feels like a cruel joke. Everything for naught: Lou’s relentlessness and sacrifices; Jim’s labors and dedication; Jaana’s persistence; WeeGee’s inventiveness; our hard work and shared joy from the unexpected results at BW-1; the time and money spent; the triumph of the Hotsy move. This was the Duck Hunt’s best shot, and now it’s apparently over.

  As Jim’s words sink in, Lou’s face goes slack. Normally he doesn’t hesitate to question the Coast Guard commander’s orders, but Jim looks as dejected as anyone. Lou and the rest of us say nothing.

  Before we disperse to gather our personal gear, WeeGee breaks the silence: “I’m staying. Grab my stuff and have the last helicopter pick me up here.”

  To my surprise, Jim doesn’t object. I see an opening, so I look to WeeGee. He gives me a slight nod.

  “I’ll stay to help,” I say.

  Jim hesitates, then approves. Lou raises his eyebrows and shoots me a look with one possible meaning: Are you sure you know what you’re doing?

  Not really, but I’m staying anyway.

  Five minutes later, WeeGee and I are alone on the ice at BW-1, the final two searchers atop the Koge Bay glacier for the final hours of Duck Hunt 2012.

  WASTING NO TIME, WeeGee replaces the O-ring in the hose and tries to restart the generator. It refuses to turn over, so he takes it apart, checking the oil, the connections, the spark plug, the filters, the carburetor, the fuel cap, everything he can think of. Few people know as much about engines, and the generator is a pretty basic machine. Yet no matter what he tries, WeeGee can’t restart it. Without a way to draw water into the Hotsy, we can’t melt holes. Our effort feels cursed.

  WeeGee calls base camp on the walkie-talkie, asking that a backup generator be dropped off to us when the first helicopter arrives. Frustrated, I start breaking down equipment to shove into the Pelican case. WeeGee carries Alberto’s camera and the case containing the video screen to the unfinished second hole. It’s about fifteen feet short of the desired depth, but with nothing better to do, WeeGee wants a look. It’s 4:00 p.m.

  He covers his head with a black puffy coat to view the screen and feeds the camera to the hole’s bottom. I watch him as I work, hoping. WeeGee pulls up the camera as patiently as a fisherman testing his line. After a few feet he stops. I hold my breath.

  “Hey, Mitch,”
he calls, “come here. Take a look at this.”

  I race to his side, drop to my knees, and duck under the puffy coat. Our heads almost touching, his right shoulder against my left, WeeGee points to the bottom right corner of the screen. It’s unmistakable, a sight so beautiful, so satisfying, so perfect, yet seemingly so impossible that I blink several times to be sure: a black plug with a wire extending from it, with a white band wrapped around the wire.

  My eyes dart around the screen. I spot a cable on the opposite side of the hole. Nearby are objects that look like fuses. Rivets. More wires. We see dark shadows just beyond the camera’s view that promise more vintage World War II aircraft parts where they don’t belong: under thirty-eight feet of ice, on a glacier several miles from Koge Bay, in almost the precise spot where a 1943 military report says a rescue plane called a Grumman Duck, serial number V1640, crashed on November 29, 1942, with three heroes aboard.

  As WeeGee and I stare at the screen, we see the final pieces of the puzzle that reveals what happened that fateful morning seventy years ago. Under the original plan, John Pritchard and Ben Bottoms would have landed the Duck, then hiked to the PN9E to get Bill O’Hara and Paul Spina. By the time they returned with the injured men, visibility likely would have been too poor to take off safely, and they would have waited for the weather to clear. But Max Demorest’s fall into the crevasse changed everything. When Lolly Howarth ran to the Duck with the terrible news, Pritchard and Bottoms knew that waiting wasn’t an option. They hustled Howarth aboard the Duck and took off immediately for the Northland, to collect ropes and tools and able-bodied men for an emergency rescue attempt. Pritchard bravely flew into the teeth of the storm, lost his bearings, called for guidance, then slammed into the glacier at the exact spot where WeeGee and I kneel.

  We came within a hairbreadth of failure. With the Hotsy idle and time running out, if we had bored the hole a few feet in a different direction, we might have been standing atop the Duck without ever knowing it.

  WeeGee and I throw our arms around each other, both of us grinning like new fathers.

  “We’ve got it,” WeeGee says.

  TWO HOURS LATER, darkness is falling and the storm is bearing down. There’s no time for the helicopter pilot to shut down the engines, so WeeGee and I rush aboard under the spinning blades. We’re met by cheers, hugs, and backslaps. Our walkie-talkie call informing base camp—WeeGee made sure that Lou was the first to hear—had the predictable effect on the team: disbelief, followed by jubilation.

  Now, everyone on this last flight to Kulusuk crowds around to see the camera images I made from the video screen. Smiles spread from one to the next as they witness what we came for: hard evidence of the Duck’s crash site. The more we analyze the images and the circumstances, the more certain we are. Everything adds up: the depth of the discovery, which matches the predicted ice accumulation of seventy years; the precise coordinates of the 1943 crash report; the absence of any other known plane crash on this area of the glacier; metal and electrical parts found in a Grumman Duck. Add that to a radar hit showing a large under-ice anomaly and signals from the magnetometer. Proof positive.

  We’ll have to return to Koge Bay, ideally next summer, with heavy equipment to excavate perhaps fifty tons of ice atop the plane to reach the bodies of John Pritchard, Benjamin Bottoms, and Loren Howarth. But we’ve solved the mystery of where they’ve been all these years. They had to go out, and now they can come back.

  Aboard the helicopter, Lou fights tears: “I’m just so happy for Nancy.”

  Jim can’t stop smiling. “Everything that went wrong,” he says, “it’s like it was supposed to happen. It’s like divine intervention.” Our handshake expands into a bear hug.

  Watching from his seat, WeeGee shoots me a grin.

  “Hey, Mitch, how does it end?”

  “Like this, WeeGee. Like this.”

  EPILOGUE

  AFTER GREENLAND

  1943–PRESENT

  THE FIRST HALF of 1943 was a busy time for war news, from the German surrender at the Battle of Stalingrad, to U.S. troops’ capture of Guadalcanal, to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Yet when the press blackout lifted, the crashes and rescues in Greenland became a momentary sensation.

  The biggest splash occurred in May 1943, after the U.S. Army issued a lengthy press release describing the extraordinary events of the previous six months. Newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, ran page-one stories based on the military’s account. The Los Angeles Times enhanced its coverage with an exclusive interview with native son Armand Monteverde. Uncomfortable talking about the experience, Monteverde said his goal was to resume ferrying bombers, “preferably in the South Pacific.”

  Coinciding with the press release, Monteverde, Harry Spencer, and Don Tetley went to the White House on May 3, 1943, where they met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They emerged from the meeting spit-shined and smiling for an official photograph with General H. H. “Hap” Arnold.

  Several days later, newspaper readers nationwide awoke to a twelve-part syndicated series written by Oliver La Farge, an Army Air Forces captain who’d won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1930. The series focused on the PN9E crash and aftermath, mentioning the crashes of John Pritchard’s Duck and Homer McDowell’s C-53 almost in passing. Later, La Farge’s series became part of a book called War below Zero, written with none other than Bernt Balchen and the writer Corey Ford.

  The popular radio program The Cavalcade of America turned the PN9E saga into a twenty-five-minute radio play called Nine Men against the Arctic. The fictionalized account featured cheesy studio sound effects; the crunch of feet on snow sounded suspiciously like a man squeezing corn starch in a leather pouch. Worse yet was the stilted dialogue, which put the turgid in dramaturgy. Consider this imagined exchange between Monteverde and Spencer in the cockpit shortly before the crash:

  Monteverde (From California)

  You know, Spence, I don’t like this place.

  Spencer (Texas Drawl. Aged 22)

  It sure is a long way from Texas.

  Monteverde

  You can’t see anything. All this whiteness everywhere. No horizon. How high are we, anyhow?

  Spencer

  Reckon we’re plenty high, but you can’t be sure. It’s like flying through milk.

  Not long after the radio play, the story of the Greenland crashes faded from view. Like most of the men and women who served during World War II, the survivors and rescuers rejoiced at the war’s end and returned to ordinary lives. In doing so, they joined a generation that endured terrible threats and remarkable events, only to tuck away their memories with their old uniforms.

  ALTHOUGH HE BORE the brunt of blame for the PN9E crash in official reports, Armand Monteverde received the Legion of Merit for his actions during the months that followed. His citation credited him with “high devotion to duty and complete disregard for his own safety” in caring for his crew after the wreck. Legion of Merit medals also were given to the six other PN9E survivors and Don Tetley.

  ARMAND MONTEVERDE IS WELCOMED HOME BY HIS SISTER ADA LEHR (LEFT) AND HIS MOTHER, VIRGINIA MONTEVERDE, WITH NIECE DEANNE LEHR ON HIS SHOULDERS. (U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH.)

  While on leave in California after being rescued, Monteverde enjoyed a brief moment of celebrity. Newspaper photos showed him being greeted by his beaming mother and sister, with his seven-year-old niece on his shoulders, wearing his new captain’s hat.

  After recuperating, Monteverde returned, as he had hoped, to ferrying planes for the Air Transport Command. He continued his service during the Korean War, and spent twenty-two years in the air force before retiring as a lieutenant colonel. Along the way he married and had a son. Armand Monteverde died in California in 1988. He was seventy-two.

  Like Monteverde, Harry Spencer also was promoted to captain during his time on the ice. Afterward, he too continued to ferry bombers for the Air Transport Command. In August 1943, Spencer wrote a letter to leaders of the Boy Sco
uts of Dallas explaining all that he’d been through in Greenland. In it, he credited God and his Eagle Scout training for his survival. The letter made one request: “I have not been where I could pay my dues,” Spencer wrote. “If you can tell me what that amount is, it would be a favor to me, as I would like to be connected with Scouting always.”

  After the war, Spencer opened a hardware store in Texas with his brother-in-law, then launched a successful air-conditioning business. Everything he might have imagined about his life when he fell into the crevasse came true. He and his wife, Patsy, had two daughters, Peggy and Carol Sue; a son, Tommy, who died in childhood of leukemia; and three grandchildren. When Patsy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Spencer dedicated himself to caring for her.

  He served as a city councilman in Irving, Texas, as director of a local hospital, and as district commissioner of the Boy Scouts of America. He was a board member of the local branch of the Girl Scouts and served on the boards of the Irving Chamber of Commerce, the Texas Commerce Bank, and the Irving YMCA. Spencer taught Sunday school at his Methodist church for thirty-five years. He won the Distinguished Irving Civic Award and the High-Spirited Citizen Award for Extraordinary Contributions to the City of Irving, and was named Rotarian of the Year, among other honors.

  Spencer’s family knew him as warm and funny, and they’d remember him as a man who bought toilet paper in bulk long before warehouse stores. When his younger daughter Carol Sue asked why, Spencer explained: “I have been without toilet paper,” he told her, “and I am never going to be without toilet paper again!”

  At Carol Sue’s urging, in 1989 Spencer returned to Greenland to visit the site of the PN9E crash. He wrote afterward that he was motivated by a desire to revisit “the pristine whiteness of the Ice Cap snow, which seems to have no dimension, the crystal blue of the bay water, and the lurking shadows of the crevasses [which] hold me in deep awe of God’s wonderful creation.”