by Brian Murphy
Crane again ran through the odds of rescue. They certainly were no better than the day before. Without a last-minute radio call, Ladd’s rescue planners would have no idea where to send the planes. They would, of course, circle over Big Delta, the location of the plane’s last contact with Ladd. But they might as well be looking in Siberia. Crane was well off to the northeast—even if he didn’t know exactly how far. And what if search planes never came? What were the chances of survival then? It looked bleak from any angle.
Start, Crane told himself, with the positives. It wasn’t all grim. On the plus side, he had matches and the parachute. And don’t forget: silk is an excellent insulating material and handles the deep cold well. His parka was in good condition, and the mukluks, so far, kept his feet warm.
There, too, was no problem with water. Even at the subzero temperatures, it gurgled up from fissures in the river ice. This was enough to keep him alive for a while. He also was in reasonably good shape except for his hands. Crane wiggled his toes. They were still nimble and warm enough. But how long, he asked himself, would that last?
For whatever reason, the radio operator, Wenz, hadn’t indicated their heading from Big Delta in his last transmission to Ladd. And, in another baffling oversight, he had failed to make another call. Protocol was for radio contact at least every thirty minutes. If Wenz had kept to the schedule, there would have been a call to Ladd just before the B-24 went into its spin. Even if the plane was out of range, the message might have been heard at Big Delta.
But clearly, something must have happened to keep Wenz from making the radio call. Crane knew enough of Wenz to consider him deeply reliable. At thirty-one years old, Wenz was by far the oldest member of the crew. He had a nine-year-old daughter back in his native Nebraska. Even though the marriage didn’t take, Wenz made arrangements to have some of his military pay put aside for his child. Wenz also was well aware of what it meant to be out of reach for help in the wilderness. Before coming to Alaska, Wenz spent time in Pinedale, Wyoming, not far from Jackson Hole. He opened a barbershop with his brother. In his time off, he was drawn to the solitude of the Rockies. Wenz hiked alone into the mountains and camped for a week or more. Relatives remember him playing with chipmunks and his curious choice of adopting a pet badger.
Crane figured that if Wenz could have made one last radio call, he would have. Something happened to him, Crane guessed. It couldn’t be good.
Without the radio contact, Crane knew search teams had no road map. For all Ladd Field knew now, the Iceberg Inez could have pushed due east and gone down near the Canadian border. Or it could have looped back toward base. Or it could be any other direction. The normal search map began, obviously, with the last known position and expanded into widening circles if the plane’s flight path was uncertain. That would give, at best, perhaps one or two passes that could come even close to Crane’s location. So many variables would have to fall into place just to have a prayer of being spotted. There’s the overall visibility, which is rarely good in winter. Then a host of other factors kick in: the angle of the sunlight, whether the plane was banking away or pulling up, whether a tree blocked the line of sight, whether the spotters were tired, hungry, bored, daydreaming, or just figuring the whole thing was a lost cause.
Think of trying to spot a button tossed at random on a football field. This is what search teams were sometimes told by their commanders trying to emphasize the need to stay sharp during a search. Then multiply it many times over with fields in every compass direction and no clue as to which one holds the prize. Crane was the button. This was no longer science. It was pure needle-in-haystack stuff. Technology offered no real help. It was too soon. At the time, over the border in Canada, a fellow aviation engineer and tireless tinkerer named Harry Stevinson was experimenting with a crash-resistance radio beacon whose beeps would be like a trail of virtual cookie crumbs for rescuers. Yet it would be well after the war until prototypes were tested.
Of course, the smoldering crash site also might hold some advantages as a search target, Crane thought. He looked up to the slopes. There were no more inky plumes. The wreckage must have burned itself out overnight. That would definitely lessen the chances of being spotted. Crane also wasn’t sure whether the debris was plastered on a spot easily seen from the air. He racked his memory. He thought it was a relatively open patch. That was good. But he also recognized that he pulled the rip cord far lower than the altitude of search planes, which would have to stay thousands of feet up to avoid the highest peaks. Crane was also looking frantically for his plane as he floated under his chute. Searchers, however, would have no idea they were even near the wreckage and to keep their eyes peeled.
Crane’s mind was clicking in the same way as when the poker-night pots got deliciously big: who knew what and how that knowledge—or lack of it—could influence the next move.
The short daylight also allowed precious little time for search planes from Ladd. The planes would be in the air by now, Crane guessed. He knew the drill. He hadn’t taken part in any extensive search missions out of Ladd since arriving ten weeks before, but he had heard enough from the Cold Nose Boys. The hunt in winter was measured in days, not weeks, before it was called off as pointless.
Crane tried to take his mind off the worrisome logic of the search. He turned instead toward the embrace of simple dumb luck. Nothing could be more contrary to his scientific nature. But there were few cognates to his old life anymore. Crane’s world was rewritten the moment he left the bomb bay. It seemed to him almost surreal. “It’s all a dream,” Crane told himself as he scanned the wilds. “It doesn’t make sense.” There was, however, still luck. That remains, no matter what. He already had amazingly good fortune to have his father’s letter and the spur-of-the-moment matches. Stay upbeat, he told himself. It’s rather amazing you are sitting here at all.
There was always that possibility of just the right path by a search mission and just the right gaze on just the right spot. It happens. Newspapers and magazines, pumped up with wartime propaganda, were full of miracle rescue and survival stories. Back in the summer, while Crane was wrapping up flight training, the papers carried the story of a Chinese-born steward named Poon Lim, who leaped from the torpedoed British merchant ship SS Ben Lomond and floated for 133 days on a wooden lifeboat in the Atlantic before being picked up by Brazilian fishermen. The lifeboat had basic supplies and water, but not nearly enough for more than four months. He resorted to fishing and catching rainwater. “The amazing Mister Poon Lim,” said the clipped tones of a British newsreel showing his arrival in England to receive the British Empire Medal from King George VI. “To all intents and purposes, Mister Poon Lim is a dapper little Chinese one might meet anywhere. But now let’s tell you something. He’s a twenty-five-year-old merchant seaman who, after his ship had been torpedoed, lived for 133 days on a raft in the South Atlantic. Over four months adrift in midocean!”
And don’t forget Pompeo. Crane even had his own rabbit’s-foot guy on the Iceberg Inez. The crew chief, Pompeo, had been pretty much written off as dead two winters before. Crane heard it right from the source. Pompeo took an immediate liking to Crane because of their shared Pennsylvania roots. Pompeo grew up near the Appalachian Trail in Mount Holly Springs, southwest of Harrisburg. He gave Crane special renditions of his life on the Alaskan tundra and meals of caribou meat and dried fish. In January 1942, Pompeo and another airman were forced to make an emergency landing on a frozen river after getting lost en route to Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon. The plane’s radio was knocked out in the hard landing. They waited by the aircraft for two days and then set off on foot. In a phenomenal stroke of luck, they ran across some native trappers who arranged for them to be handed off, trapper to trapper, on a fifty-mile dogsled relay to Fort Yukon, an outpost on the Arctic Circle. The Army lauded them for “resourcefulness, fortitude and soldierly qualities.” The pair arrived back at base, it said, “apparently in excellent condition
.”
“Pompeo!” Crane yelled again, half expecting him to come swooping up on a dogsled.
“Hos! Hoskin!”
Crane didn’t even bother calling out for the others anymore. There were those odds again. If they didn’t get out, the chances of surviving a nose-first slam into a mountainside and then escaping the fire were, well, it just doesn’t happen. Crane had a hard time believing Hoskin made it out. But that parachute he saw could have been Hoskin’s. What harm is there in allowing a little hope?
Crane gave his overall condition another check. He was stiff, and his hands were developing a pasty, white look—the first signs of frostbite taking hold. He tried to keep them wedged in his parka pockets as much as possible. But when the fire needed tending, there was no choice. He had to gather more wood. Frostbite would mean a quick death if he lost the use of his fingers. He already thought about the ways to accept the end on his own terms if left with no other way. Well, his Boy Scout knife was certainly sharp enough to slit his wrists.
He blinked away the thought. He wasn’t even close to that point. The chance of rescue from the air was depressing, yet there were other elements in his favor. He could walk. And maybe a settlement was just down the river.
Crane gathered his parachute, dotted with burn holes from sparks exploding off wet patches in the driftwood. He checked the matches. Just thirty-five left. He had to be careful. The chemical reaction atop those small sticks—a mix of red phosphorus, potassium chlorate, and sulfur—was now the centerpiece of everything. No fire equaled no chance. Crane then looked at the river. It was frozen bank to bank. But, in sections of fast-flowing water, the ice was much thinner. Here, Crane could see the current running on the other side of the glass-clear sheets. He carefully tested a section with his boot, adding a bit more weight second by second. Hairline cracks started to spread. It was far wiser to walk in the snow along the banks.
His decision was made. Crane would head downstream. If nothing else, the reasoning was solid. It would eventually have to drain into something—the Yukon River, he guessed—and somewhere along its banks there was a chance of finding trappers or others riding out the winter. He knew it was wrong to stray too far from the crash site. The military procedure was to stay with the wreck to boost the chances of rescue. But he felt he had to explore a bit. Sitting around brought nothing except anxiety.
He set off. It took hours just to cover a mile. The snow would suddenly swell into waist-deep drifts and then fall away into a slippery crust of ice-coated rocks. Crane kept the river to his right shoulder. The low winter sun—in the rare moments it broke through the clouds—brought ashen shadows over the hills. Crane had no idea of the landmarks around him. On the other bank, the hills folded toward a smaller waterway called Copper Creek. If Crane had even these scant bearings, he could have worked out his spot: near the headwaters of the Charley River and a twisting, nearly ninety-five-mile course north until its clear waters merged with the muddy Yukon. The nearest road was at least seventy-five miles away.
He knew none of this. There was just what he could see: a frozen river snaking north.
When hunger came, it surprised Crane with its intensity. There were no small pangs as warnings. Now, suddenly and desperately, he was hungry.
He hadn’t thought much of food since the crash. He had been living off adrenaline and the counterintuitive nature of sudden and extreme exertion. Crane’s body was churning through calories, but not immediately sending signals to replace them. Instead, it was cashing in stored energy accounts—glucose and fat—and putting aside the demand for food until later. For Crane, this was the later. He scooped up a postage stamp–size dash of snow, trying to keep his hands buried in the sleeves of his flight suit. He knew eating too much raw snow was a losing proposition. The potential damage to the sensitive tissue inside the mouth was often more than its benefit as a water source. But Crane’s hunger demanded something, and this was his only answer.
He let the small bit of snow melt against the roof of his mouth. It helped a little. He also remembered stories about people sucking on stones to help drive away thirst and hunger. It just wasn’t worth digging through the snow to test the idea. Every moment with his hands exposed, even a little, was inviting disaster.
The medical files back at Ladd were full of sobering lessons on how quickly cold can claim its victims. Crane received the standard briefings and was issued the cold-weather protection manuals given everyone shipped north. If he was more curious—and some pilots were—he may have thumbed through real-life accounts in the medical records on base. They were written with the precision and attention to detail of any military report.
The case file of JLB (names were kept confidential from other service members) would undoubtedly have held Crane’s interest. JLB was a twenty-five-year-old crew member on the first of Ladd’s back-to-back B-24 calamities in February 1943. His plane went down after sundown about thirty miles south of Ladd Field. The crew survived, but JLB was pinned under a dislodged bomb-bay door. He took off one wool glove and began digging in the snow with his left hand in an attempt to get free. It was minus forty-five. His hand was fully exposed for about twenty minutes. Frostbite, however, had set in. It took a week of treatment at Ladd to save his fingertips.
Then there was WP, a twenty-seven-year-old pilot whose P-36 fighter developed engine trouble about fifty miles east of Northway, Alaska, on November 5, 1942. He brought the plane down in a clearing. He had only rudimentary winter gear and wore leather shoes inside his fleece-lined flight boots. He attempted to walk through foot-deep snow to the top of the nearby hill in an effort, in his words, “to get a better look at things.” After four hours of walking, and failing to reach the crest, he returned to the plane and started a fire. The temperature that night bottomed out at about minus fifteen. His feet ached from the cold, and the insides of his boots were caked in ice. When the rescue ski plane arrived the next morning, WP’s frozen shoes had to be cut away. “The skin of both feet was reddened, swollen and shiny and all of the toes were bluish-gray,” wrote Ladd Field doctors. They treated his feet with tepid compresses and a spray of something called Pickrell’s Solution, a diluted mixture of an antibacterial compound and an organic emulsifier used in products such as cosmetics and sunscreens. It wasn’t enough. WP lost four full toes and portions of others. On January 18, 1943, he hobbled out of the Ladd hospital with the help of a cane.
The follow-up report reprimanded WP. “He should have remained near the shelter of his plane and immediately built a fire and kept himself warm,” it read. Crane did not have the first of those options.
The sky was darkening. God, the daylight just races by, Crane thought. He remembered the winter solstice the day before. There was a bit of nature’s malice in this yearly pivot. The sun nudged a bit higher off the horizon each day, but the worst part of winter was still to come. Crane wanted to find a place to build a fire before nightfall. That would at least give him time to collect driftwood and arrange some boughs over the snow as a sleeping mat. There was no chance of moonlight. The lunar cycle was ending, and the new moon wasn’t for five days. It started to snow for the first time since the crash. Small, delicate flakes sprinkled from the low clouds.
Crane saw a promising spot. It was level ground in a clump of tall white spruce. Plenty of driftwood was scattered about. There were also some bigger logs with gnawed sections that could have been from beavers. A bit of fast-moving water bubbled through a blemish in the ice. Crane’s thirst took over. He stretched out flat, trying as hard as he could to distribute his weight over the ice. He used the toes of his mukluks to slide forward, inch by inch. His lips met the water. He drank until he almost felt full. A sheen of ice formed around his mouth.
There was still the urgent business of the fire. He wished that he hadn’t burned his father’s entire letter the night before. It took a few more matches to get some tiny flames going in the spruce needles and shavings. At th
is rate, he would have just a little over a two-week supply of matches. That is, if he could keep them dry. By the fire’s warmth, he finally took time to give his hands a thorough inspection. It was frightening. They were crisscrossed with cuts from the spruce. Color had drained from the fingertips. They were numb, and every movement felt sluggish.
It was insanity to try to walk farther, he realized. His hopes of a nearby cabin seemed dashed. It was better to listen to the military’s guidance and at least wait close enough to the crash site to hear a rescue plane.
He told himself he would make camp here for at least the best portion of a week. That’s about the time Ladd would call off the search. If he still had the energy, he’d start walking again.
At least he would know it would be the only choice left.
Three
December 23, 1943
Ladd Field
Results negative.
For two days running, the words were typed at the end of each search report. More than twenty search missions had been made from Ladd Field since late December 21, beginning about eight hours after the last radio contact with the Iceberg Inez. The first night covered the normal flight path between Big Delta and Ladd. All knew there was little chance of spotting an intact plane in the dark. And visibility that night was reduced to near zero at times—what some bush pilots called blotto-botto conditions—with areas of snow squalls and heavy ground fog. The crews on the search planes scanned mostly for signs of a possible burning crash site, a telltale glow in the murk that might mobilize a ground patrol.
Results negative.
It was the same conditions and same outcome the following day as the search area widened around the frozen Tanana River. The weather outlook improved slightly on December 23. A blast of dry and superchilled polar air cleared out the fog. The cloud ceiling moved higher. In Fairbanks the temperature clicked below zero at sunset and kept falling. It was soon minus twenty-three. The search planes made wide passes over Big Delta in a gradually expanding radius from the B-24’s last reported position. They had no way of knowing, however, that the missions were not even close.