81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  On a raw Sunday in December, they listened to the radio reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Within months, Crane was shipped off to Alabama to begin military flight training, and the wartime industries were making planes as fast as they could drive rivets.

  The future Iceberg Inez came off Consolidated’s San Diego assembly line years later, May 31, 1943. Its price tag for the Army was $297,627. The plane was flown June 2 to Tucson to install additional equipment such as radios, which were not part of the factory-line procedures out of concern such detail-oriented work would slow down production. From there, 42-40910 passed through Wright Field in Ohio, where Crane was first posted after being called up. The B-24 touched down at Ladd field on November 19, 1943, on an unusually mild day outside Fairbanks. It didn’t last. Soon it was well below zero.

  Back in Philadelphia, as the war in Europe dragged on, Crane’s parents struggled to get any scraps of news from Shpola. They knew the Nazis had control over nearly all of Ukraine. But only fragmented reports made their way to West Philadelphia. What they heard was hard to fathom: whole communities wiped out or herded off to camps by the Einsatzgruppen death squads. A photo taken in 1913—perhaps about the time Louis and Sonia left for America—showed a group of young Jewish militiamen organized to protect against the pogroms. Their rifles are pointing defiantly at the camera. Louis Crane now wondered what had happened to them and their children if the stories of the Nazi killings were as horrible as they sounded.

  They were. By the war’s end, only remnants remained of the once flourishing Jewish community in Ukraine. In Shpola there was almost no one left. One young boy, Iurii Pinchuk, managed to slip away from a concentration camp just before a mass killing in 1942. His mother couldn’t manage the escape.

  Before the extermination, a man had approached Pinchuk’s mother and asked if she had a spare piece of fabric.

  “I remember him well,” Pinchuk told filmmakers five decades later. “He was skinny and had a thin neck and big ears that stuck out. He said, ‘Give me a piece of this fabric.’ She asked why. He said, ‘I want to hang myself.’”

  Seven

  December 29, 1943

  Wilderness

  Harold Hoskin pulled up a chair. Dinner was served. The plates were heavy with juicy steaks and mashed potatoes swimming in butter.

  You look good, Crane told the pilot.

  I’m fine, Hoskin replied. But we need to eat fast, he continued. We’ve got to get out of here.

  Crane nodded. You’re right, Hos. I was thinking the same thing.

  Then they ate, digging into the meal and savoring the tastes—especially the warmth.

  It all seemed so real.

  Leon Crane was dreaming the dreams of a starving man.

  Night after night for more than a week, such scenes visited Crane. Each time was more vivid than the last. The food was always hot and plentiful, the settings cozy and inviting. One meal was imagined so fully that Crane thought he could feel the warm grease from a lamb chop running down his fingers. In that halfway space straddling sleep and waking, he thought how bizarre it all was. It was punishing and pleasant at the same time. His subconscious was playing tricks. That was clear. But he enjoyed the ruse nonetheless. He allowed the wonderful fantasies to play out. If nothing else, it was a nice escape from the strangling cold.

  The feast with Hoskin was a bit different, however. Crane hadn’t dreamed much of the crew since the crash. Now, Hoskin had appeared. He looked healthy and calm and was carrying a message: move and move quickly. Intellectually, Crane recognized that this, too, was nothing more than a reverb of his decision to leave the river and strike off overland. But hearing it repeated by the reliable pilot—even if just a dream—offered some uplift that he had made the right call.

  Crane had set his course. He would head west into the wilderness. That was the general direction of Big Delta. Crane, of course, had no way to judge the distance. He was only sure that somewhere out there was Big Delta base. It wasn’t a lot to go on, he knew. But the river, on the other hand, was a total cipher. If I’m going to walk, Crane told himself, it might as well be toward something certain. There was also something psychologically fortifying about that. At this point—with no food and just about no hope of rescue—Crane felt he needed to do something bold before he was too weak or broken.

  Certainly, the plan involved a gamble. Crane was comfortable with that. The alternative was far worse in his mind. Crane did not want to die meekly without attempting some bid to save himself.

  He waited for first light to set off. He figured he could fix his path west in relation to the rising sun in the east. He would have to sit tight for a while, though. Dawn was still two hours away. He tried to sleep, but couldn’t doze off. Crane lay deep within his parachute wrap and wondered how he would handle being on the move. Since his brief trip downriver days before, he hadn’t traveled much beyond the twenty feet between his camp and the ice. Thankfully, there were no further injuries. His fingers, however, were clearly worse. They were growing unresponsive. It took supreme effort to make a fist to try to squeeze some blood past his knuckles. Crane forced himself to keep at it.

  Frostbite works like a shoplifter. It comes quietly and pilfers bit by bit. The losses begin small, but continue to add up until it’s impossible to replace what’s been taken.

  At first, as the outer layers of skin cool, the body goes into self-preservation mode. It does not want chilled blood pumping around. So it constricts the capillaries and veins near the cold tissue. There’s still no major dilemma. Warming the areas can restore circulation without anything more than a pins-and-needles rush. But that grace period doesn’t last long. At some point, if the exposure persists, nerve synapses shut down and ice crystals begin to form between cells. Now, it’s far more serious. There is still a chance to counteract the damage with gradual thawing, but the recovery can be acutely painful as the nerves snap back to life and the warming skin erupts in blisters. The deeper levels of frostbite sharply narrow the chances for such recovery. Healthy cells dehydrate and freeze. Here, it’s moving beyond the point of no return. At some point, there is little left for doctors to do except reach for a scalpel. During Napoléon’s retreat from his disastrous Russian campaign in the winter of 1812, his chief surgeon, Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, reportedly amputated hundreds of frostbitten limbs from soldiers. It was a gruesome, but important, education. Larrey went on to become one of the first physicians to attempt to scientifically document frostbite’s causes and progression. Among his groundbreaking conclusions: it’s far better to keep skin covered and at a relatively stable temperature—even if still cold and unpleasant—rather than go through repeated cycles of fireside thawing and then freezing.

  Crane somehow understood this. He wisely kept his hands buried deep inside the parachute or drawn into his parka sleeves whenever he could and avoided placing them too close to the flames. There was something else starting to worry him, however. And, for this, he had no obvious remedy. In fact, he couldn’t really give it a name. It started with just a few passing moments of disjointed or meandering thoughts. He had to consciously snap himself back to reality. At first, he wrote them off as mental drift caused by hunger. But they were coming more frequently in the past days. Sometimes he would lose track of the fire and let it burn too low even as he sat just feet away. Other moments, he would find himself in a daze and wonder how long he had been staring into space. Crane felt himself slipping. His judgment was fraying.

  Experts in wilderness survival often cite the timeless “enemies” of survival. They include pain, cold, thirst, hunger, fatigue, boredom, and loneliness. With the exception of thirst, Crane ticked all the boxes. Starvation, of course, will ultimately claim its victims. In the wilds, however, tragedies are often hastened by decisions made as hunger takes hold or panic takes over. An expert in subarctic survival, Gino Ferri, advises clients at his northern Ontario camp to watch how the ext
reme cold “plays tricks on your psyche.”

  “Your reptilian brain takes over,” he said. “It is telling you, ‘I got to get the hell out of here at any cost.’ That is when disaster is looming.”

  Crane’s periods of cloudy thinking also suggested he was moving into the next stage of starvation. At this point, the body is shifting into crisis measures. Muscle tissue is being converted into fuel to maintain blood sugar levels and feed critical organs, especially the brain. The liver, too, is in overdrive. Fatty acids are being turned into something called ketone bodies, which is the biological equivalent of a reserve tank. But, like most end-of-the-line options, there are shortcomings. Among them is a chance for panic-induced decisions. The brain, getting a taste of the ketone bodies, tells itself that things are getting desperate.

  Alaska is a clearinghouse for such stories. In 1942, a year before the Iceberg Inez went down, the U.S. military embarked on a comprehensive study of Far North survival techniques. Dozens of Alaskan old-timers were interviewed. Nearly all recounted some bad-news tale about people striking off blindly into the wilderness. One veteran bush pilot from Nome told the Army envoys about a group of fliers who tried to hike back from their downed plane. They wandered in circles for eight days and were found, near death, just a few miles from the crash site. In another interview, a dogsled mail carrier described how hunger and cold can bring on fatal miscalculations in the wild. There’s a “strong tendency to fight his environment by roaming” until the point of exhaustion, he told the Army team.

  At sunrise, Crane tossed his last twigs on the fire. He gathered up his chute, turned his back on the river, and began blazing a trail through shin-deep snow.

  Crane had no concept yet of the magnitude of his blunder. Big Delta was at least 70 miles to the southwest in a direct line—and probably close to 150 miles of hiking even by an experienced Alaska hand with a compass and knowledge of the terrain. In between is a mountain ridge capped by the more than 6,500-foot Mount Harper, which has an indirect but tragic connection to Crane’s distant Philadelphia. The peak is named for an Irish-born Yukon explorer and trader, Arthur Harper, whose marriage to an Athabascan girl produced eight children. The youngest, Walter, gained mountaineering immortality in 1913 as the first person confirmed to reach the summit of North America’s highest point, then known in the Western world as Mount McKinley and now widely called Denali, after one of the Athabascan names, meaning the Great or High One. In 1918 Walter and his new bride set off for Philadelphia—ten months before Crane’s birth—where Walter planned to attend medical school. Their Seattle-bound steamer struck a reef near Juneau. The couple were among more than 340 passengers and crew members lost at sea.

  There were no villages in the Harper mountain chain and perhaps only a few scattered cabins. This, too, Crane could not have known.

  It took just a few minutes, however, for him to discover that overland travel would be nothing like following the river, whose banks were at least a level grade. The land rose gently from the riverbank, but even this modest incline was torturous. Each step meant he had to plow aside snow. With surprising speed, numbness began to spread downward from Crane’s knees. He could still move his toes inside the mukluks. But that wouldn’t last indefinitely.

  “Ack,” he cursed, stumbling again on the rocks hidden everywhere under the snow.

  Not a single stride landed easily. Crane had to adopt a stutter-step cadence to avoid toppling over and exposing his hands. He let his boot sink halfway into the snow, pause a second, and then push deeper, slowly feeling for the rocks. Progress was ridiculously slow. He had to stop every ten paces just to catch his breath. His heart pounded, and he could feel drops of sweat trickling down his back. It’s minus twenty and I’m sweating, he almost laughed. But he knew the perils.

  Any kind of moisture could freeze into a potentially life-sapping armor. The cold material siphons off the body warmth and clears the way for frostbite and other complications, such as gangrene. Natives of the Far North understand this well. Typically, undergarments are avoided or worn in the lightest possible materials. In the era before mass-produced clothing, Natives of the frigid Bering Strait hunted in the winter wearing an inner parka of skin from a month-old fawn and an outer layer of skin from a reindeer killed at the height of summer when the hair is at its most fine. In interior Alaska, the most prized skins for clothing came from the hides of pregnant moose killed in late March. Only in extreme cold would they add undergarments made from squirrel hide or woven rabbit fur.

  The rock dodging also sent Crane zigzagging off course. Every few minutes, he needed to check his bearing against the sun. Sometimes, he’d be so turned around that he faced south instead of west. At midday, with the winter sun hanging about thirteen degrees over the horizon, Crane stopped. He looked back at his tracks and could still see the river below. In more than two hours, he made perhaps three hundred feet. I’m simply marching to my death, he thought. At this rate, he’d be lucky to make a half mile a day. Even if Big Delta was close—which, in his heart, he knew it wasn’t—it could be months of hiking. He had fewer than thirty matches left.

  And no one would ever find his body.

  The idea of wolverines or birds picking at his corpse seemed to Crane the ultimate insult, the parting shot of the wild. He did not want to end up like that. It was, however, increasingly hard to imagine another outcome. More and more, Crane was envisioning his own end. Everyone does in some abstract way. In wartime the images take on sharper relief. This was particularly true among the Cold Nose Boys. In battle there was any number of ways to get it. Here in the Alaska skies, everyone pretty much knew what trouble looked like. Either the plane would seize up in the weather, or a storm would clobber it. No one at Ladd had climbed aboard a plane for a winter mission without thinking whether this could be their last one.

  “This is a bad place to be out in the wild, lost,” Maine airman Arthur Jordan wrote in his Ladd Field diary.

  “I wonder if the mystery of what happened to it will ever be explained,” Jordan penned in reference to the fruitless hunt for the Iceberg Inez. “The only hope, I guess, is that some trapper may come upon some bits of twisted steel some time and report his find.”

  Crane was shuffling into the past tense.

  His family knew this. But they refused to describe him as gone. Hope was kept within reach, although a bit more of a stretch as each day passed. To anyone who would listen, Sonia Crane insisted she could sense her Leon was still alive. Call it a mother’s intuition or simple stubbornness. No one dared to contradict her.

  But the facts couldn’t be ignored. The Army telegram said he was missing for more than a week. Anyone surviving the crash would stand little chance in the winter. Being homeless during a rough patch of Philadelphia winter could be harsh enough. What were the odds in Alaska? At Ladd Field, the bunks and lockers for Crane, Hoskin, and the rest of the Iceberg Inez crew were still untouched. That would change soon. The personal items would be packed up and eventually shipped south to the next of kin in the Army files.

  Crane guessed the telegram was already sent to Baltimore Avenue. He pretty much knew the words, too, written in the military template: Missing since Dec. 21. . . . Searches have failed to find crash site or survivors. . . . We will keep you informed of any developments. It won’t say what really matters: it’s minus fifty some nights in the backcountry or that the military is no longer going to devote much energy to the hunt.

  In hearts and minds, Crane was being reassigned to the rolls of the dead. He was turning into a living ghost, an invisible pilgrim.

  Crane found a special cruelness in this in-between world.

  There were no walls or barbwires cutting him off as with prisoners of war (POWs). He wasn’t pinned under wreckage. Only space and the winter stood in his way. That was more than enough, of course. But, at times, he seemed so connected, so heartbreakingly close, to what was on the other side. This waxing cr
escent moon over the Alaskan Yukon in late December was the same one that rose over Ladd Field and Philadelphia and Boston and Berlin. The constellations decorating the sky were the same ones seen from outside some warm and well-stocked cabin maybe just over the horizon. The wind stinging his cheeks was pulled around the globe by weather cells that mingle and collide—all seamlessly connected—from continent to continent.

  These were curious thoughts for Crane. He was not a man of poetry. Crane was shaped by machines and their power. What he most admired was how these creations could shove aside nature and natural limits. As a boy, he studied the steamships that crossed oceans without relying on the winds. He dissected the workings of automobile engines that shrank distances and made the horseman a quaint obsolescence by the time he was born. In his eyes, though, air travel was the ultimate expression of man’s mastery. It fulfilled dreams as fundamental as dreams themselves. Leonardo da Vinci sketched his ideas of taking flight. Further back, the Greeks wrapped stories and morality tales around the wings of Daedalus. Even earlier, the awed Ezekiel of the Old Testament watched the spinning wheels that carried aloft heavenly creatures. At MIT Crane’s science-for-the-people avionics mentor, Manfred Rauscher, was hailed for figuring out how to get earthbound hardware off the ground. “He makes them fly,” said the caption under Rauscher on Crane’s senior yearbook.

  Crane’s interests leaned toward speed. He concentrated on pushing the limits of the relatively new science of jet engines. Now, his world had contracted to the pace when the skies were out of reach. His pace below was one step at a time.

  He paused on the hillside. There was perhaps ninety minutes of light left. He could probably make it over the next ridge. He wouldn’t have the stamina to turn back to the river after that.