81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  An American P-39 fighter repainted with the Soviet red star as part of the Lend-Lease aerial armada. US Army

  Fighter planes at Ladd Field at the height of the Lend-Lease program, which turned over U.S. warplanes to Soviet pilots to join the fight in Europe and elsewhere. The program transferred thousands of planes in one of the most massive movements of military equipment of the war. US Army

  Soviet officers and airmen at Ladd Field, where they occupied half of Hangar 1. The Soviets’ presence was also felt in Fairbanks as they scooped up American goods as soon as merchants could put them on the shelves. Stockings and chocolates were big hits. US Army

  The wreckage of the Iceberg Inez above the Charley River. Crane landed about two miles away after parachuting from the crippled aircraft, but was unable to reach the site because of deep snow and loose rocks. Photo by David Myers

  Debris from the B-24 crash. An intense fireball burned away much of the paint from the plane and the equipment inside, but the lack of foraging animals and undergrowth helped preserve the wreckage largely intact for decades. National Park Service

  The remains of the Ames’ family cabin, located near where the Charley River empties into the Yukon River. Albert Ames and his wife Nina raised a family in the Alaskan bush, trapping and fishing for food and money. National Park Service

  Leon Crane stands outside the Ames cabin shortly after coming out of the wilderness. One of Crane’s first questions was whether the war was still going on. Courtesy of the Crane family

  A 1936 photo of Woodchopper, Alaska, a town that grew around a gold dredging operation that turned a modest profit before going under. Woodchopper is now abandoned. US Geological Survey

  Story of Crane’s return in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on March 16, 1944.

  Headline in the New York Times on March 17, 1944, as word spread about Crane’s ordeal. The 84 days includes the three-days’ time spent in the Ames cabin and the travel to Woodchopper.

  Leon Crane after his return to Ladd Field, still wearing his tattered flight suit. US Army

  Crane enjoys his first meal at Ladd Field following his return. One airman wrote in his diary that word of Crane’s survival spread like “wildfire” across the base. US Army

  Former Yukon-Charley historian Doug Beckstead on one of his visits to the crash site. Beckstead’s research was crucial in finding the remains of the pilot Harold Hoskin. Photo by David Myers

  The twisted wreckage of the Iceberg Inez. National Park Service

  The U.S. military’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. The military lists more than 83,000 personnel unaccounted for in conflicts going back to World War II. The majority of the cases remain in the Asia-Pacific region. Department of Defense

  The B-24 wreckage with the Charley River in the distance. National Park Service

  John Hoskin, the younger brother of Harold, at his home in Gorham, Maine, in late 2013. Photo by Toula Vlahou

  Harold Hoskin’s daughter, Joann Goldstein, being greeted at Arlington National Cemetery following the September 2007 burial ceremony for the remains of her father. Photo by Bruce Guthrie

  Doug Beckstead addresses mourners at Arlington National Cemetery at the funeral for Harold Hoskin. Photo by Bruce Guthrie

  Ethel Myers, the sister of Richard Pompeo, at the 2007 burial of Hoskin’s remains. Pompeo’s nephew, David Myers, traveled to Alaska to visit the crash site two years earlier. Photo by Bruce Guthrie

  The grave of Harold Hoskin at Arlington. The graves in the background include the burial site of another crew member from the flight, First Lieutenant James Sibert. Photo by Toula Vlahou

  Ten

  January 10, 1944

  Wing Rescue Section, Seattle

  With a winter warm front approaching, a military plane flew south from Ladd Field.

  A classified mailbag was in the cargo hold. The documents aboard included a dossier of seven typed pages that recounted, in exacting detail, the hunt for Crane, Hoskin, and the others. It also marked another official step in the process to move them from the list of the missing to that of the dead.

  The last search flights had gone out in late December, making their passes about ten miles south of Big Delta. It was a fitting and frustrating end to more than a week of searches that never came close. The planes were dispatched in the opposite direction from the wreckage and Crane’s northward push along the Charley River. None of the planes, in fact, ever came within the general vicinity of the B-24’s resting place. It’s unlikely that crews even glimpsed the mountains around the headwaters of the Charley.

  The search leader, R. C. Ragle, waited more than a week before writing up the cover letter for the report on the loss of B-24D no. 42–40910. Perhaps he was waiting for some miracle with the new year. Ragle was like that. He tended to hold out hope until the very end. He knew Alaska well. A big land sometimes produced big surprises.

  But the file couldn’t wait forever. Ragle wrapped it up during the first week of 1944 and got it into the mail sack tossed into a C-47 carrying airmen for some R&R in the States. The flight left for Seattle just as a ridge of relatively warm air ballooned up from the south, pushing the thermometer in Fairbanks over the freezing mark for the first time in months. The report on the Iceberg Inez was bound for the Army Air Forces command in Washington via review stops in Seattle and Minneapolis. Ragle made sure to document the scope of the search and—in a possible attempt to anticipate questions from the higher-ups—noted that the B-24 gave no indication of its heading after the last radio call.

  “Intensive detailed search was continued with from 9 to 17 aircraft through the days 21 December 1943 through 29 December 1943, with particular attention being paid to the area of the submitted flight plan,” wrote Ragle in his personal style that kept punctuation to a minimum. “This area receiving coverage by each of not less than five separately assigned missions both day and night, until no reasonable chance existed that further search would locate the missing aircraft.”

  The search, in other words, was now formally abandoned.

  Ragle was not only wrong about the proper search zone. He also misjudged the chances that anyone had bailed out. “The possibility of parachute escape,” he added in a backup document, “appears to have been remote.”

  With nothing to go on, the theories about the crash leaned toward sudden and catastrophic structural breakup. What else could explain a plane that vanished without the slightest hint to Ladd Tower? Aircraft went down all the time in Alaska, especially in the winter. Some Ladd disasters unfolded in full view. Planes crashed moments after takeoff or returned with cold-fouled landing gear and skidded in a bloom of sparks and shredded metal. For the others, there was almost always some trail—a distress call or sudden storm—to offer clues on what went wrong. This time, the plane was just gone.

  “The aircraft while conducting propeller tests in an area of known intense turbulence suffered structural failure which prevented use of radio and prevented escape of personnel,” Ragle speculated in a December 27 report that was included among the paperwork sent to Washington.

  “This conclusion is reached after consideration of the known characteristics of the members of the aircraft’s crew and in consideration of the fact that no signs, signals, or other traces of personnel have been found during search of this operating area and between that area and Ladd Field,” Ragle continued.

  Ragle’s report concluded with a bit of self-generated optimism, perhaps inspired by the stunning return of Pompeo and his crewmate from the wilderness in 1942. He noted that the prevailing high-altitude winds on December 21 peaked at about ninety miles per hour from the southeast. They could have pushed the B-24 off course, and Hoskin could have made an emergency landing in the Yukon River valley for some reason such as low fuel, and they could all be safe somewhere.

  “Under th
e premise, the probability is that all personnel are safe and comfortably supplied and encamped,” Ragle wrote.

  He urged all crews to remain vigilant for signs of the plane during regular missions.

  Such appeals were passed to the west side of Hangar 1. This was known by some as Red Square: the hub for hundreds of Soviet airmen, officers, and handlers sent to Ladd Field in one of the most far-reaching displays of Moscow-Washington cooperation during the war.

  Neither side, though, wanted to talk about it much at the time.

  To most outside Alaska, Ladd Field was little more than a distant point on the military map of World War II. It came up occasionally in newspapers as a dateline for USO tours or, as with Pompeo, the backdrop for inspirational stories about survival in the tundra. What was rarely mentioned, however, was the extent that Ladd Field was a linchpin site for the complicated relations between the Soviets and Americans during the war and, as it would turn out, a bit of a dress rehearsal for the Cold War to come.

  Fairbanks was the handover spot in a long-distance feeder network to ferry American warplanes over the Bering Strait. From there, the aircraft headed across the vastness of Siberia to join the battles on the Eastern Front. The logistics were complex, but the premise was simple. America had the industrial clout to churn out planes and fighting equipment at staggering rates, while the arsenals of the Soviet Union and other Allied countries were drained dangerously low. A match was made. The United States supplied the hardware. The other countries strapped in their pilots or sent the made-in-America firepower to their ground forces.

  It was known as the Lend-Lease program. Washington set the plans in motion months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, it marked a major shift from official American policies to keep some distance from the widening war. Not all were happy with the change. It brought a fierce backlash from proisolationist factions in Congress. One vehemently antiwar senator, Burton Wheeler of Montana, complained that Lend-Lease would drag America into the conflict, and “our boys will be returned—returned in caskets, maybe; returned with bodies maimed; returned with minds warped and twisted by sights of horrors and the scream and shriek of high-powered shells.” He appealed to other lawmakers: “Was the last world war worthwhile?”

  The views of Wheeler and others who favored neutrality took a dramatic U-turn after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Many of the former isolationists, however, later paid a political price. In 1946 Montana voters sent Wheeler packing to end his long Senate career.

  In the early stages of Lend-Lease, some U.S. matériel was shipped off to Britain and its European allies. But the mainstay of the program became the supply routes for billions of dollars in equipment—from Spam to submachine guns to the latest fighter planes—bound for the embattled Red Army. The reasoning in Washington and London was that it was money well spent. Think of it as a down payment to keep the Soviet Union in the war. “The most unsordid act” in history, said a welcoming Churchill. Some shipments crossed over from Iran and through sea-lanes to Soviet ports. The fastest, and most storied, transit was the Arctic air corridor.

  The U.S. planes began the journey in Great Falls, Montana, where a small Soviet advance team logged the departures and sent word back to Moscow about what was on the way. Sometimes, the Soviet red star insignia would be painted over the stars and stripes before the trip got under way. American pilots razzed each other, saying they didn’t know whether they were flying on behalf of the Soviets or the air force of the filling-station giant Texaco, whose well-known logo also was a red star.

  The aircraft then puddle-jumped across western Canada, bound for Alaska, which was bought from Russia for about two cents an acre fewer than eighty years before. In the winter, just getting to Ladd Field could be a harrowing feat. The last leg between Canada’s Watson Lake and Ladd was dubbed the “Million Dollar Valley” because of so many costly wrecks below. On one run in February 1943, the heater froze on Major George Racey Jordan’s C-47 transport. The plane was fourteen thousand feet over the tundra after leaving Watson Lake. Jordan estimated it was minus seventy outside.

  “I never knew a person could be so cold,” Jordan wrote in his 1952 memoirs. “I nearly lost a couple of toes, and my heels are still sore. My nostrils cracked when I breathed and the corners of my mouth hurt like a toothache. I shut my eyes because the eyeballs pained so. . . . The pilot couldn’t see out of the window because of his breath freezing on the pane. So we flew by instruments until the end, when we used lighter fluid to wash a hole to land by.”

  Jordan’s book became something of a Cold War screed. His contention was that the Soviets manipulated the Lend-Lease program to help build up their military and gain important insights into U.S. military technology.

  But Jordan’s chronicles are more important as one of the most vivid descriptions of Ladd Field’s Soviet guests. About eight thousand planes headed to the Soviet Union along this route, including craft such as the P-39 Airacobra fighter that was Crane’s specialty. The P-39 had its drawbacks, including small fuel tanks that limited its range. The Soviets loved the P-39s all the same. It was deemed so good at low-altitude combat that it was given the name Cobrastochkas, or Dear Little Cobras. Some planes, however, never finished the trip from Alaska. An estimated 140 Soviet airmen died in Siberia-bound crashes after taking over various aircraft. Still, many Soviet pilots—so confident in their war-honed abilities—barreled off the Ladd runway sometimes with no more training than received when picking up a rental car. In one preflight briefing, a Soviet pilot climbed onto the wing of a P-40 fighter to quiz the American airman before flying to Siberia. His translator was on the other wing. Just four questions were asked: How do you start it? How many RPMs for takeoff? How do you keep the oil and coolant pressures in the right range? How does the radio work?

  On many levels, Ladd Field became an ad hoc laboratory in East-West understanding. Soviet engineers used pantomime in the supply room to fill orders. A seat was made available for a Russian speaker in Ladd Tower. A civilian woman who worked at Ladd once invited two Soviets to a home-cooked dinner by her mom in Fairbanks. The woman prided herself on being a good chess player and wanted to show her skill to the guests. Well, it turned out she was good by Fairbanks standards. She recounted how the Soviets demolished her with just a handful of moves before checkmate.

  The Ladd Field newspaper, the Midnight Sun, ran phrases in Russian such as transliterations of “Comrade Captain” and “I am your friend.” Yet the airmen from both countries quickly found the common languages of drinking and bartering. A popular swap was American pinup beauties for Russian memorabilia such as coats, pins, and the classic Cossack-style trousers with their billowing thigh panels. Many of the deals were brokered by an American private, Frank Nigro, who moonlighted as a bartender at the Russian Officers’ Club, where beer was a dime and a Hershey bar a nickel.

  When Major Jordan arrived on the frozen tarmac from his bone-chilling flight, he was greeted by a buxom Russian woman mechanic. “Without inhibitions, the generous girl seized my head with her brawny arms and hugged me to her warm bosom,” Jordan wrote. “She held it there until I could feel ‘pins and needles,’ which showed that the tissues were warming back to life.”

  Jordan was then led to the Soviet section, where he was plunged in a tub of cool water that “seemed hot” to his iced skin. Paper cups brimming with vodka soon arrived. “Russian medicine,” one of the Soviets grinned. Jordan then got a rough rubdown with towels and received a dinner invitation from a slim, elegant man who spoke refined English. He looked to Jordan to have the ascetic features of a monk. It was, according to Jordan’s account, the KGB’s man at Ladd Field.

  Later, when Jordan showed up at the officers’ mess for dinner, it was the usual divide. The Americans kept to one side in a men’s-only section. Only a few women nurses stayed on base at the time, and the Women’s Army Corps, or WACs, didn’t arrived until April 1945. The Sovi
ets were on the other side, sitting with young women who served as translators and, according to many winks and nods from the Americans, possibly more. One of the Cold Nose Boys, Lieutenant Arthur Jordan of Maine (no relation to Major Jordan), waxed on in his diary about his flirtations with some of the girls in the Soviet entourage and how he got chummy with a Russian soldier who had a passion for singing American folk songs. His favorite was Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.” Jordan also got a “great kick” out of watching the Soviet crews guzzle bottle after bottle of Coca-Cola while trying their luck at slot machines. “They slam in hundreds of nickels, dimes and quarters,” Lieutenant Jordan observed in his diary.

  “They are getting a taste of the best democracy has to offer and they love it,” he added in a bit of personal flag waving. “I guess they are not too eager to leave. . . . Can’t blame them.”

  It all must have seemed a bit disconcerting for someone like Leon Crane, who was raised on stories of pogroms in Ukraine and the suffering of his parents and other Ukrainian Jews. Crane knew a bit of Russian picked up from his parents. If he decided to try it out on the Soviets at Ladd, he never mentioned the results.

  As it stood, there was no official media blackout on the Soviet presence at Ladd. But American reporters in those days generally toed the line on information considered instrumental to the war effort. So the War Department had a firm grip over how much was said about the Soviet role at Ladd. That control extended to censoring letters from the public to remove references to the Soviets.