81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  Crane and the wreckage were at least sixty miles to the northeast from the nearest reconnaissance plane. It’s doubtful the searchers even caught a glimpse of the Charley River valley on the other side of the Tanana uplands.

  Results still negative.

  The head of Ladd’s search-and-rescue unit, Major R. C. Ragle, looked over the weather forecasts and maps. They were hand drawn, with wavy isobars, arched fronts, and wind-speed arrows flowing like schools of fish. Winds were still kicking up around the search zone, lifting the light snow into near-whiteout conditions in places.

  The Ladd forecasters predicted an overall drop in winds the next day, Christmas Eve. The skies should be about as clear as they ever get in the eastern Alaskan winter.

  Ragle walked down the wide stairwell from the second-floor weather office at Hangar 1.

  Let’s cover as much ground as we can while the weather holds, he told the flight scheduling officer. Sixteen planes were assigned for the Christmas Eve search.

  The officer looked up sheepishly.

  What is it? asked Ragle.

  Well, we’re not finding anything so far around Big Delta, sir. You think we should expand the search?

  To where? Ragle snapped. We can’t be flying blind around Alaska looking for a plane. We have to stick with what we know. And we know they were just east of Big Delta on the last radio call. Schedule the flights the way it was planned. We don’t have a lot of time.

  Ragle didn’t have to state the obvious. If these missions came back empty-handed, hopes of finding survivors would quickly erode. It then becomes more about the duty of finding bodies. No commander—especially outside a war zone—wants to report that a plane was lost without a trace. But the searches cannot go on indefinitely. That’s just how it went. At some point—usually less than a week in the winter—the chances that anyone would be alive were too slim to justify keeping planes on full-time search patrol. Aircraft and crew were valuable. They would eventually be diverted to other tasks.

  Every bush pilot, Ragle included, knew that. The struggle between the ambitions of aviators and the rigors of the interior Alaska winters had been going on since a barnstorming couple, Lily Martin and her husband, James, shipped a biplane from Seattle for the first flight in Fairbanks in 1913. The grandstands were packed for the debut, a July 4 extravaganza arranged by local merchants. Everything went well and the crowds were wowed. The Martins then shifted into the real reason for the exhibition. They tried to sell the plane to the highest bidder. But there were no takers, despite the appreciative applause as the plane swooped by at forty-five miles per hour. This was all impressive in midsummer. No one, however, believed it was possible to fly once the long winter set in. And besides, who was crazy enough to wing off into the bush on one of those flying machines?

  It wasn’t until about a decade later that some pioneer pilots gave it a try.

  Ragle’s parents bestowed him with the regal name Richard Charles, but he was known to nearly everyone in Fairbanks as R. C. or Dick. That suited him fine. He liked the casual, frontier ways of Alaska. He also took well to the demands of backcountry flying, where confidence and caution had to be applied in just the right balance. Too much of either could bring nasty results. This was Ragle’s niche at Ladd Field. He was the resident expert on the risks of Alaskan aviation.

  Ragle came north with his wife and young son in 1938 after landing a professorship in geology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. The campus was then a handful of buildings with one notable work-in-progress landmark: the art deco aeronautics building dedicated to a local flying legend, Carl Ben Eielson, who was anointed the “Arctic Lindbergh” for his 1928 flight over the polar cap. The following year, Eielson and his mechanic were killed while trying to rescue passengers—and a load of valuable furs—from a three-mast schooner, the Nanuk, trapped in ice off Siberia. The Nanuk survived the winter and was later sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and used in swashbuckling films such as Treasure Island.

  Ragle’s academic expertise may have been very much earthbound, but he seemed possessed with the soul of a flier. He was born in Colorado Springs—the future home of the Air Force Academy—and finished his master’s degree in the early 1930s while serving with the Army’s Flying Cadet Program in Texas. It was an exciting time. Military aviation had left behind the days of fragile biplanes and was racing toward the era of high-performance prop fighters and giant bombers.

  Once Ragle climbed into an Army plane for the first time and skimmed over the Texas sagebrush, he never looked back.

  For a few summers in Alaska before the war, he ran a civilian pilot training class for university graduates and students. The rules in those days were anything but rigid. Just about anyone who had the white-knuckle nerve could find something to fly—and then confront the sometimes greater challenge of figuring out where to land in a territory with few formal runways. The normal onboard bush-pilot kit included a rake and shovel to help maintain the landing strips, which often were little more than packed snow in a field in the winter or a spit of gravel along a low-running river during the brief summers. But the fliers took the hazards and hassles in stride. They were the costs of doing what they loved. When a member of the first family in early Alaska aviation, Ralph Wien, died in an October 1930 crash near the Bering Sea, the tributes poured in from the seen-it-all fellowship of bush pilots. “He died a man’s death,” said a letter of condolence from another famous backcountry figure, Sam O. White. “God help me to die as nobly as he did.”

  Ragle was quick to seek a slice of the growing air-ferry business that was opening up Alaska’s interior. He called his company the Trans Alaska Corporation. It was a mighty name for an outfit with just a few secondhand planes and a flight school run out of small buildings on skids known as wanigans. But the timing was impeccable. Pilots were in great demand to service the ever-expanding network of rustic airstrips. Planes were slicing out of the sky in places that often had more sled dogs than people. One route advertised in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner linked Fairbanks and Koyukuk, a Yukon River town about 275 miles to the west. The hardscrabble stops along the way included Stevens Village (population about seventy), the fading gold rush town of Myrtle Creek, and a flyspeck called Wiseman, whose few rugged hangers-on were profiled in a 1930s best seller, Arctic Village. A classified notice on the same newspaper page gave more hints of Alaska’s diverse needs at the time: Morrison’s has guns, typewriters and vacuum cleaners for rent. 50 cents a day.

  Aviation opened up interior Alaska to the modern world at a breakneck pace. An airstrip, no matter how rocky and gritty, meant access to a previously unimaginable cornucopia. There were mail-order goods, books, clothes, booze, and even just the wonders of sending an ordinary letter. Sometimes people scribbled messages on the outside of the plane for a recipient at the next stop. “No post office fees,” said Pete Haggland, curator of the delightfully eclectic Pioneer Air Museum in Fairbanks.

  The planes, too, brought links to Alaskan seaports or bigger airfields. And, from there, the rest of the globe. The role of Alaska’s bush pilot cannot be overstated. They were—and remain—couriers, counselors, emissaries, guides, and anything else that fits the moment. Once a pilot hauled back a crated polar bear cub and became its temporary nursemaid, feeding the animal hamburger and raw eggs in his backyard before it was shipped south to a zoo. In many ways—big, small, comical, tragic—bush pilots helped create modern Alaska.

  Yet the early decades of Alaskan aviation certainly were not for the timid. It was a stage for pilots with nicknames like “Mudhole” Smith and “Big Money” Monsen and planes running the Jacobs Radial L-4 engine, a loud but reliable machine known affectionately as the Shakey Jake. The wooden planes in the 1920s could be blown into mountains or disintegrate in an emergency landing. The sturdier aircraft that followed fared a bit better, but Alaska’s weather claimed them at a steady clip.

  Ragle became a familiar sight
in Fairbanks, dressed in a jumpsuit with his goggles propped atop old leather aviators’ headgear. Ragle always kept a comb handy. He paid close attention to his thick straw-colored hair, which topped him like a plush carpet. It would have been easier to crop it off, as did many pilots. He wouldn’t hear of it.

  He lived close enough to walk to Weeks Field, the crushed-stone strip that served as Fairbanks’s main airport. Weeks was a modest affair, but had one grand moment. It was part of the Fairbanks tour by President Warren G. Harding in July 1923 after driving a ceremonial fourteen-carat spike to finish the last stretch of the Alaska Railroad. Harding later fell ill. Two weeks later, he dropped dead—reportedly in the middle of a conversation with his wife in the presidential suite of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

  On the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, Ragle and his wife heard the news on the radio at home. About the same time, a local radio engineer named Augie Hiebert—who would go on to become a paragon of Alaskan broadcasting—caught the same bulletin from a San Francisco shortwave station. Augie beat the Pentagon’s own internal network. He called the commander at Ladd Field, Colonel Dale Gaffney, to give him the world-changing news. “He was sort of a party guy. He had been up the night before,” Hiebert recalled. “I got him out of bed, and I asked him, `Did you know there was a war on, Dale?’”

  Ragle’s wife, Jane, was too shaken to remember to thaw out the milk delivered to the front porch. The kids were served something like latte Popsicles with dinner that night.

  Ragle was soon called back to active duty. His combination of bush-pilot experience and hard-charging optimism won him honored status at Ladd, which was bulldozed out of the taiga and opened in 1940. The base was named for a military flier killed in a South Carolina crash. The choice angered some locals, who wanted it named in honor of a late Army major born on the “outside,” but considered a friend to Alaska. Ragle was a newcomer, too, but never seemed to have any problem winning over the locals. Everyone knew if someone at Ladd was lost, it was Ragle, the wing rescue officer, who would oversee the search, set its boundaries, and decide when to call it quits. His reputation was further bolstered by a number of military combat awards and a curious bit of wilderness diplomacy that won him additional accolades.

  The summer before the Iceberg Inez went down, a strange call came from Nome in early July 1943. The Soviet crew flying a loaned A-20 Havoc fighter-bomber reported that one of the crew members was missing. The plane was okay. The airman was, um, simply gone. It appeared that Lieutenant Constanta P. Demianenko got bounced out of an open hatch somewhere between the central way station of Galena and Nome, the last U.S. jumping-off point for planes heading to Siberia. Less than a week earlier, two A-20s collided in flight along the same route, killing four Soviet airmen.

  Ragle joined the search team in a pontoon plane capable of landing on lakes. Right along the flight path, they spotted Demianenko’s yellow parachute, which was likely hooked to a static line and deployed when he toppled out. Ragle’s plane made a water landing, and Demianenko started to pick his way through the soggy moors. One of the American airmen who got out to help—a grocery store owner from Iowa—sank to his armpits in a bog and later told reporters he expected to be swallowed alive in the muck. “I thought I was a goner,” he said, “and, believe me, I was really scared.” They eventually pulled aboard the wayward Soviet, who looked like a pincushion from mosquito bites.

  Ragle had also seen action in Alaska. This deeply impressed airmen such as Crane, who arrived after the Japanese had been driven from the Aleutians.

  The Japanese assault began in Dutch Harbor, the sea gateway to a relatively small but strategic U.S. base far out on the Aleutian archipelago. The inhospitable site was protected by antiaircraft batteries and made livable for soldiers with diversions like Blackie’s bar. Whiskey was fifty cents a shot. Blackie’s was always so crowded that one veteran noted that “regardless of how drunk we got, there was never enough room in the place to fall down.” Tables and chairs were removed because, as many Alaskan saloon owners of the day could attest, the splintered wood could become choice weapons in bar fights. One enterprising sergeant always had a big wad of bills handy to make loans—with interest, of course—for the endless poker games.

  U.S. code breakers had intercepted Japanese chatter indicating a probable Dutch Harbor attack. While the intel appeared good, it was widely regarded as a diversionary tactic by Japan to draw away U.S. forces from the main battle looming in the Pacific at the Midway atoll. There was even a good idea about the size of the force Japan could deploy in the Aleutians: possibly two carrier groups. But American combat reinforcements sent north were left at a relative trickle. There simply were other, more pressing, demands in the Pacific theater. And the military infrastructure in the Aleutians was alarmingly basic in many places. Some of the U.S. planes arrived in the Aleutians skidding on a secret airstrip made of interlocking iron sheets. Grass and wildflowers poked through the seams.

  Japanese naval forces had already shown they could take aim on U.S. shores. In February 1942, a Japanese sub shelled the Ellwood oil field near Santa Barbara, causing only minimal damage but succeeding in stoking the West Coast paranoia level. It eventually contributed to disgraceful measures such as ordering Japanese Americans into internment camps.

  The Dutch Harbor Naval Operating Base was under attack before dawn on June 3, 1942. Japanese air raids took a quick toll. The radio tower and oil storage tanks were destroyed. Among the dead were about twenty-five soldiers killed when bombs blasted their barracks at nearby Fort Mears. The Japanese bombing and strafing runs were so low that American forces later said they could make eye contact with the attacking pilots.

  U.S. counterattack options in Alaska were limited. Personnel were scarce. But on hand were the Cold Nose Boys at Ladd Field. They were rapidly mobilized. Ragle found himself as copilot in an old B-17B bomber, an early model of the Flying Fortress. They headed east through broken clouds over the treeless island chain. His family and other military households in Alaska, meanwhile, were ordered to pack up. There were fears the battle could widen to the mainland. Ragle’s son and young daughter—the first of his children born in Alaska—headed to Colorado.

  At one airstrip along the way, Ragle watched two B-26 Marauders limp back from a close encounter with a Japanese ship. The planes were peppered with holes from Japanese gunners, who had easy target practice in the Aleutian weather. American pilots were forced to make their bombing runs under the cloud ceiling, which pushed as low as 200 feet. It was not only perilous, but pointless. Some U.S. bombs needed a 600-foot fall to trigger. Any lower, and they just bounced off the Japanese destroyers and carriers. A black-humor punch line about flying below the Alaskan cloud cover went like this: “Stick your hand out. If it touches a ship’s mast, you’re flying too low.” The erratic Aleutian weather, meanwhile, also played into Japan’s hands for the moment. For several hours, the skies over Dutch Harbor cleared slightly, allowing higher-altitude bombing runs and long strafing passes.

  Ragle’s plane was fitted with four 1,110-pound armor-piercing bombs as big as refrigerators. Turning toward Dutch Harbor, Ragle and the pilot, First Lieutenant Jack Marks, brought the plane to the edge of the cloud ceiling at about 150 feet—close enough to make out fish in the seabed shallows. Soon, other aircraft began to drop through the clouds. Amazingly, Ragle’s plane had meshed into a formation of seven Japanese warplanes heading back to the carrier.

  Ragle set the plane’s directional gyro to fix the course to the carrier. Then he called for the gunners to open fire.

  “But, Lieutenant, I can see their faces,” came the reply from one.

  “That’s a problem?” Ragle barked. “Just fire!”

  Suddenly, a group of American P-40 Warhawk fighters poured into the middle of the Japanese formation. The single-seat fighters, just under 32 feet long, dipped and buzzed. The pilot Marks shouted into the radio. There’s another American plan
e here, he yelled. Don’t shoot us! The P-40s either got the message or recognized the fellow Yanks. The P-40s let loose with their .50-caliber Browning machine guns, picking off a Japanese plane.

  The waist gunner on Ragle’s plane lined up his own .50-cal. They were running alongside the long cigar-shaped body of a Nakajima reconnaissance aircraft.

  “Got ’em,” he roared over the radio. The Nakajima rolled to its side and then dropped into the sea.

  A moment later, the pounding bursts of a .50-caliber echoed through the plane.

  “We hit?” yelled Marks, already looking down at the sea for a possible place to ditch.

  Then came more firing from inside the plane. “What the hell?” cried Ragle. The plane, though, seemed to be fine.

  Word then reached the cockpit about what had happened. The waist gunner had noticed a Japanese plane closing from behind. The B-17B had no tail-gun turret. So the sergeant swiveled his .50-caliber back into the plane and stuck his head outside to aim. He opened fire and prayed. The spray blasted more than fifty holes in the tail, but remarkably missed any critical cables or flight systems. Even more astonishing—probably, too, for the Japanese crew on the receiving end of the barrage—was that the shots nailed them. Days later, the sergeant asked sheepishly if his pay would be docked for shooting up his own ship. Instead, he was recommended for officer candidate school for quick thinking in combat.

  The Japanese planes peeled away from around Ragle’s plane and the P-40s.

  Marks and Ragle, however, still had a bead on the Japanese carrier group through the gyro settings. And there they were: the carrier and four other vessels about fifty miles off Dutch Harbor. But the cloud ceiling was far too low for the bombs and their six-hundred-foot minimum trigger. Marks pulled the plane into the clouds to hide while they worked out a plan. It came down to simple geometry, but it could work. They would fix the location of the carrier and then fly for three minutes in the clouds while climbing two hundred feet, take a ninety-degree turn and climb another two hundred feet, and then finish with a third leg. The maneuver should put them in line with the carrier with enough altitude to drop the bombs at two-second intervals.