by Brian Murphy
81 Days Below Zero
The Incredible Survival Story
of a World War II Pilot in
Alaska’s Frozen Wilderness
with Toula Vlahou
Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 2015 by Brian Murphy
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First Da Capo Press edition 2015
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my daughter Zoe,
who will always be my Princess Zozo
Contents
Preface
Introduction–Mount Athos, Greece
Chapter One–December 21, 1943
Chapter Two–December 22, 1943
Chapter Three–December 23, 1943
Chapter Four–June 23, 1994
Chapter Five–December 25, 1943
Chapter Six–December 29, 1943
Chapter Seven–December 29, 1943
Chapter Eight–December 30, 1943
Chapter Nine–August 31, 2006
Photographs
Chapter Ten–January 10, 1944
Chapter Eleven–January 19, 1944
Chapter Twelve–February 10, 1944
Chapter Thirteen–September 15, 2006
Chapter Fourteen–March 3, 1944
Chapter Fifteen–March 9, 1944
Chapter Sixteen–March 10, 1944
Chapter Seventeen–March 13, 1944
Chapter Eighteen–March 14, 1944
Chapter Nineteen–March 7, 2007
Chapter Twenty–September 7, 2007
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography and Sources
Index
Preface
These are true stories. This book chronicles, to the best of my abilities and available resources, the solo trek of First Lieutenant Leon Crane through the Alaskan wilderness in the winter of 1943–1944. It also recounts the efforts, decades later, to recover the remains of the pilot who sat beside Crane in the cockpit of their B-24D bomber, Second Lieutenant Harold E. Hoskin.
Obviously, there are gaps in retelling a solitary ordeal when the central figure is no longer with us. Crane died before I began this project. Among the challenges: seeking to convey Crane’s emotions and inner dialogue. Such passages are based, as much as possible, on extrapolations from his own words as well as insights into his personality from his family and acquaintances. I have endeavored to remain as true to Crane’s character as within my powers.
All names and places in the book are real. Some of the military facilities mentioned have been renamed since the period covered by the book. Ladd Field is now Fort Wainwright, and Hickam Air Force Base became part of Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam. Also, for consistency, I referred to the Army’s military aviation command during World War II as the U.S. Army Air Forces, its official designation after 1942. It was previously known as the U.S. Army Air Corps. The Air Corps remained active as a part of the Air Forces throughout the war, and many airmen used the two names interchangeably. The Army Air Forces was the forerunner for the U.S. Air Force.
In a few instances, I made decisions on the spellings of names from Native Alaskan languages and the Cyrillic script. I used the form I believe best represents the name. In references to the indigenous tribes, I use the term Athabascan. This reflects the general culture that binds various Native clans and dialects across interior Alaska.
On very rare occasions, the sequence of events was slightly reordered for narrative flow. In no case does it alter the scope of the story.
It’s also important to call attention to some place-names to avoid confusion. There are sites that share similar or identical names to places in the book, notably the Charley River, Coal Creek, and Woodchopper. Alaska’s Kandik River was once called Charley (or Charlie) Creek. It flows into the Yukon River, but not in the area walked by Crane. There is a Coal Creek in the Canadian Yukon. It, too, has no connection to this story. An abandoned mining camp called Woodchopper is located northwest of Fairbanks, far from the crash site.
All temperatures are expressed in Fahrenheit.
I close with a personal note. I am neither a military historian nor an expert on the Alaskan wilderness. In fact, I had never stepped foot in Alaska before beginning this project. Many caretakers of military history and Alaskan lore often consider laymen or generalists, such as me, clumsy intruders. In reply, I can only say that I did my best to tell this one story. I leave it to others to further analyze the fascinating role of Alaska during World War II or bring deeper personal insights into survival in the Far North.
See how my feet are moving—awfully funny they look—
Moving as if they belonged to a someone that wasn’t me.
The wind down the night’s long alley bowls me down like a pin;
I stagger and fall and stagger, crawl arm-deep in the snow.
Beaten back to my corner, how can I hope to win?
And there is the blizzard waiting to give me the knockout blow.
—“Lost,” by Robert W. Service (1874–1958)
Introduction
Mount Athos, Greece
I chose a path that twisted toward the sea.
Early spring wildflowers—delicate crimson poppies and sturdy yellow crocuses—flapped like small flags in the squalls off the northern Aegean. The air carried a salty sharpness from cold rains that washed over the land in waves. I pressed on. Alone, downhill, around one hairpin turn after another. I walked until the path was overtaken by green brambles. The thorns soon gave way to rocks. Then they dropped off into a wind-sculpted sea.
Here, on this outcrop in Greece, I thought about solitude.
No, let’s be more precise. I wasn’t imagining the pleasant isolation of a solo hike or some other private sojourn, such as my visit to the centuries-old monasteries of Greece’s Mount Athos peninsula and this walk on a raw March afternoon to the edge of nowhere. Instead, I wondered about detachment in a crueler, more primitive form. A kind that’s vanishing—and increasingly difficult to even imagine—in a world crowded and connected.
In these rare castaway places, the separation is absolute. There is no way to reach out and declare four powerful words.
I am still here.
The only way is to somehow claw back to a world that now refers to you in the past tense. Call it an earthly purgatory. Only a few have experienced it. Fewer still have faced it alone.
This, perhaps above all things, is what pulled me so s
trongly to the story of a lost World War II pilot and his improbable passage through the Alaskan wilderness after bailing from a crippled plane.
First Lieutenant Leon Crane, in a palpable sense, returned from the dead.
Search parties had given up. A military letter addressed to Crane’s father, written seven weeks after his son’s plane went down, promised “additional information” if it became available. But the letter really amounted to an advisory to abandon hope. It included an attempt to connect Crane’s family to a wider grief by listing the next of kin of the other four airmen on their missing B-24D bomber. The Arctic survival manual they were issued had already provided obituary material for those lost without supplies or weapons for any length of time. “Freezing to death may come after prolonged exposure,” it read, “coupled with lack of food, extreme fatigue or exhaustion.”
I often imagined myself in such a shadow walkabout: alive, but dead to everyone else. I think of my wife and daughter accepting condolences. Word spreading among friends. My family arranging a headstone for an unoccupied grave. And I am powerless to call it off.
Tens of thousands of servicemen on all sides were declared missing in action (MIA) in World War II, and their families, too, undoubtedly felt this same unclosed sorrow. The Pentagon says more than seventy-three thousand U.S. military personnel are still listed as unaccounted for from World War II and about ten thousand more from later conflicts. Just a tiny fraction—a number so small there isn’t even a subcategory in the military’s granular record keeping—turned up safely on their own like Crane.
As a journalist for more than three decades, my tally of assignments, big and small, has covered six continents. There is, of course, the fair share of sitting through tiresome conferences or scribbling down predictable political grandstanding. Yet there are those other moments—wonderful moments—of chasing a story. It could be anything, really. All it needs is some of the elements we all recognize: maybe valor, or betrayal, or suffering, or, perhaps best of all, resilience and endurance. I’m proud, in this way, to call myself a storyteller. Stories have always been, at their heart, affirmations of humanity in all its forms. In the case of a lost man who had no business surviving in a frozen land, there is much to say.
I am not, however, the first to recount Crane’s remarkable return. Crane’s story received attention in magazines and newspapers at the time. One nice headline called him “The Man Who Came Back.” Crane was later mentioned, from time to time, in books on Alaska. A hero of this book, historian Douglas Beckstead, published some articles on his research into the crash.
But the full arc of Crane’s deliverance has never been told. This book is overdue. For a storyteller, there is no greater reward.
In later years, Crane very rarely spoke of his time in the Alaskan wilds and, when pressed, gave only the vaguest replies. He viewed his struggle as nothing more than an uninteresting footnote in the greater context of the war. It’s likely he would have disapproved of this retelling or, at best, dismissed it as pointless. I disagree. It is, to me, a measure of the human spirit. Such things should not be forgotten or locked away.
Mount Athos is known in Greek as Agion Oros, or the Holy Mountain. From where I sat that March day, I could see the outlines of two other peninsulas that jut out to the west before the sea opens again. On the far shore, after the two rocky fingers, the land begins to swell toward another sacred peak, Mount Olympus, the home of the gods of antiquity. The allegories and fables built around their reign, and passed on to us, are as expansive as the human imagination. All great and enduring stories are so. Some of the sharpest lessons from Olympus spoke directly to overwhelmed travelers struggling to reach home. The gods, we are told, smile on resourcefulness and humility. They punish hubris.
A young pilot from Philadelphia, who fell from the sky in December 1943, would come to learn that well.
One
December 21, 1943
Ladd Field
On a morning just above zero, a pilot with bed-rumpled hair hurried through tunnels under the Alaskan snow. The rubber soles of his shin-high Arctic boots slapped on the red concrete floor. With his sleeve, he wiped away crumbs from toast eaten on the run. He made sure to stay to the smooth outside wall of the passageways, careful not to snag his flight suit on the networks of pipes, heating ducts, and bolted braces that shared the warrens beneath Ladd Field.
He also paid attention not to rush too fast. He knew that any beads of sweat would turn into icy lesions the moment he stepped outside.
But he had bigger worries. He was late. Embarrassingly late. Damn, grumbled First Lieutenant Leon Crane as he hit a bottleneck of airmen near the busy stairs leading up to Hangar 1. He pushed his way through with a few muttered apologies.
He blamed it on the cards.
Their poker game had run longer than usual. That’s what happens when six hard-nosed players get together. Hefty bets were laid down, and the pots swelled to tempting sums. Crane was up as much as seventy-five dollars—a nice chunk of his monthly Army pay—before shedding about half his winnings with some long-shot betting. This most definitely wasn’t his style. He considered bluffing for fools and trying to cheat the odds as even more clueless. This night, though, he was having some laughs and didn’t want to be on the sidelines, even if it cost him some cash.
Finally, a little after two in the morning, they called last hand. Remember, one of the players said, some of us have to fly in the morning. Right, answered Crane. And I’m one of them. Let’s wrap this up.
Crane was scheduled at the hangar about seven thirty. But it wasn’t until eight that he squinted over at the alarm clock, which he had forgotten to set when he flopped into his bunk after the card game broke up. He pulled away his blankets and swung onto the carpeted floor in one motion. He rarely overslept. The Alaskan winter, however, still had him off balance. It was that way for many other guys experiencing their first Far North winter. Late afternoon was already so dark that it felt like deep into the evening. What passed as morning was really just an appendage of night.
Crane’s roommate was already up, but didn’t know Crane’s flight schedule and hadn’t thought to wake him.
The lights from the airfield made starbursts on the frost-glazed windows, which were Coke-bottle thick to keep out the cold. Crane checked the clock again. Sunrise was still nearly three hours away on the first day of winter.
First day. That was a well-worn joke at Ladd. Only calendars and almanacs called it the beginning of the season. In Fairbanks the subzero bite had set in months earlier. Yet there was still some reason to mark December 21. It was finally the turning point of the darkness. From now on, the sun would linger a bit longer each day. If nothing else, the winter solstice was a chance for a collective sigh of relief. They were passing through the dark season’s tightest corridor. On this day, on the stingiest break from the night, there are fewer than four hours of milky daylight in Fairbanks, about 110 miles below the Arctic Circle.
Crane still felt tired. But he figured he’d catch a nap later when he was back at base. After all, there wasn’t much else to do in the deep-freeze months when you weren’t airborne. There were reports, meals, shut-eye, maybe a prowl around Fairbanks, a couple miles down a dirt and gravel road with ruts and ice heaves. Poker remained the time waster of choice for many. That often included Crane. The shifting odds, the step-by-step betting—it all appealed to Crane’s engineering sensibilities and love of problem solving. He became a student of the fifty-two-card deck as a fraternity newbie at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with its rarefied IQs and one future Nobel laureate as a Phi Beta Delta brother. Crane was now developing a reputation at Ladd Field as a player of considerable finesse, knowing when to push his luck and knowing when to pull back. He did nothing to dispel the image of cool and cunning. Crane hated boasting, but he also liked people to recognize he was clever.
He was popular on base since arrivi
ng October 10 on one of the transport flights that hopscotched north from Montana. Crane brought none of the silly swagger carried by some of the more insecure guys. He grew up in West Philadelphia watching how braggarts and bullies were eventually cut down to size. It paid to be quick-witted and resourceful on those row-house streets, especially during the scruffy Depression years. And, above all, it was essential to learn to go with the flow. By the time Crane was starting grade school, the Jewish families such as his were well aware that their West Philly enclaves were under pressure. Like thousands of others, Crane’s immigrant parents were drawn initially to the neighborhood by the tidy, affordable homes built astride the electric trolley lines running down Baltimore Avenue and other streets. These, too, became attractive spots for African Americans, who began to pour north during World War I. European immigration was at a near standstill, and help-wanted signs were cropping up in factories from the Midwest to New England. The northward migration kept churning during the boom years in the 1920s and the lean times of the Depression that followed. Some of the West Philly old-timers grumbled in Yiddish or Russian or Polish about the “strange element” coming over the Mason-Dixon line, as one amateur Philadelphia historian termed the Deep South exodus. There were also unkind cuts about the newcomers’ music and food and unfathomable revival-style churches. Such naysayers, though, got an earful in return from the neighborhood’s more accommodating souls. Don’t forget your own wandering roots, the critics were told. Remember the intolerance and violence directed at the places you left behind, like the ghettos in Warsaw and Odessa.
Crane and his school buddies didn’t dwell much on the broad social forces at play around them. Like all young ones, they just instinctively grasped the basics of getting by. That usually meant keeping eyes open and mouth shut. That last part was maybe the easiest of all for Crane. He had always liked the company of his own thoughts. He could lose himself for hours in articles on aeronautics or the latest experiments with jet propulsion or marvel over designs in Popular Mechanics, which he dutifully bought each month and read until the pages were dog-eared and thumb smudged.