81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  An arm reached across and pulled Crane into the staff car. Crane barreled through the Ladd gates and was led directly to Colonel Keillor’s office in Hangar 1. Keillor was waiting at the door.

  “Well done, Lieutenant. Well done,” said Keillor, who kept his hair parted down the middle in the style more fitting of the twenties. He gave Crane a long handshake, and—in a scene that would be fodder for gossip at Ladd—the colonel started to weep. “We have a lot to ask you. But, first, is there anyone you want to call?”

  “My parents, sir. I’d like to call my parents in Philadelphia.”

  Crane gave Keillor the West Philadelphia exchange, SH for Sherwood, and the rest of the five digits. Keillor contacted the operator. It was past midnight on the East Coast.

  Crane’s father answered.

  “This is Colonel Keillor from Ladd Field in Alaska. I have some good news for you,” he said. “Will you please hold the line?”

  The heavy black receiver was passed to Crane. “Dad . . . ,” he began. “It’s Leon.”

  Crane sidestepped the breathless questions from his parents. It was too soon to tell the whole story. Crane could barely grasp it all. He told his father that he had “a little trouble” and had to walk out of the woods. He was fine, though. Don’t worry. I’m back.

  Crane had an appointment at the hospital for a full checkup. First, though, he wanted to eat and get a hot shower. He walked the underground passageways. The people he passed slapped his back. Some newcomers at Ladd were told, that’s the guy.

  “The news was traveling like wildfire,” Arthur Jordan continued in his diary. “No one believes he is back until they see him.”

  At the hospital, word came down that an airman lost in the wilderness for nearly three months was coming in for a full physical. The incredible thing, the story went, is that he looks in remarkably good shape.

  On duty that night was a nurse from Iowa, Wilma Koehrsen. She received orders to help with the Crane examinations when he made his way to the hospital.

  First, Crane had other business. He passed the base exchange, where he grabbed the matches that morning for Hoskin. He stopped at the mess hall.

  What can I get you? the guy behind the counter asked.

  Crane ordered a milkshake.

  Outside, it was thirteen degrees. The coldest days of winter were behind.

  Three days later, on March 17, a Seattle newspaper ran a story under the headlines: “Luck Saved Crane in Arctic Wilds; City Flier, Foodless Nine Days, Found Cabin with Stock of Provisions.” Margaret Sibert, a sister of the Iceberg Inez’s prop specialist, noticed the article. She dashed off a quick letter to Anna Pompeo, mother of the crew chief. For one last moment, hope was rekindled.

  “Dear Mrs. Pompeo,” she wrote. “It seems unbelievable that one of the boys got back. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the others.”

  Nineteen

  March 7, 2007

  Gorham, Maine

  Only waiting remained.

  It was six months since the JPAC field team left the crash site above the Charley River. So far, few details of the investigation had been shared with the Hoskin family: John and his wife, Mary, in Maine, and Harold’s daughter, Joann, in Florida. But clearly there was something of interest in the evidence bags. John had been asked to give a DNA sample. He went to his doctor for a cheek swab, which was sent by overnight courier to the military lab in Hawaii.

  March was a busy time for John, who even into his eighties moved with the energy of a much younger man. He took up tax preparation after retiring as a minister at the Free Baptist Church near their home in Gorham, a suburb of Portland, with mills, clapboard storefronts, and stone fences going back nearly 350 years. Mary was eager to get back into the garden after Maine’s messy “mud season” bridging winter and spring.

  More than five thousand miles away in Hawaii, the scientific director of the Central Identification Laboratory was putting the final touches on his report. At stake was whether the bone fragments found at the B-24 crash site could be linked conclusively to Second Lieutenant Harold Elton Hoskin, serial number 0 736 523.

  A match would wrap up another loose end from the crash, leaving only the crew chief, Pompeo, among the missing. Still, other mysteries in the crash may never be fully answered.

  Such as, what went wrong? The Iceberg Inez appeared to have no more than the normal hiccups coming off the assembly line.

  The plane had been grounded at least once because of “bad flying characteristics” on takeoff and landings. Military reports also noted concerns with “general instability of the controls” on the plane. This might seem scary to commercial air travelers. But experts in World War II aviation, including Jeremy Kinney at the Smithsonian Institution, see no significant red flags from such observations. Wartime aircraft were in near-constant repair and retooling from normal wear and tear. The rule of thumb for military aviation at the time was to build it fast, get it flying, and make adjustments along the way. It became even more complicated by the rigors of the Far North winter. One B-24 out of Ladd Field was once christened the “Queen of Whitehorse” because it was stuck for months in the Canadian city with a list of ailments, including malfunctioning hydraulics, clogged gas lines, and out-of-whack tachometers.

  The Inez had some special challenges as well. It was loaded up with cold-weather testing equipment. “Very heavily instrumented” was how it was described in a military report. This had previously overtaxed the plane’s electrical system, leading to at least “one complete electrical failure due to instrumental overload.”

  But military engineers said they had fixed any electrical circuit problems. The B-24D was in “perfect flying condition” when it took off for the prop-feathering mission, according to a postcrash report filed in February 1944—written before Crane’s return to Ladd and his account of the last moments of the Iceberg Inez.

  Crane told investigators that the instrument panel was “acting strangely” as they climbed through the opening in the clouds, trying to reach twenty-five thousand feet. The first signs of trouble were failures of the gyro and flight indicator. They show, among other things, the plane’s horizontal orientation to the ground. To some experts who have studied the crash, losing both instruments suggests some kind of blockage or breakdown in the vacuum selector valve, which sucks in air from the engines on the pilot’s side. The system powers the gyro and deicing systems on the leading edges of the wings. Others wonder if electrical overloads started to skew the instruments.

  Regardless of the cause, engine number one cut out and could not be restarted, Crane said. By this time, the electrical system was going haywire.

  It’s possible—but can never be proven—that electrical shorts brought down the radio, leaving the operator, Wenz, unable to contact Ladd Tower as the plane went into a spin.

  Moments after Hoskin and Crane managed to stop the first spin, they heard a “cracking noise” in the tail, Crane said. “From then on we had no control of the elevators,” he continued. This deprives the pilots their main ability to hold the plane’s pitch, basically keeping it from seesawing. The plane was soon in a second spin. All that was left for Crane and Hoskin were the three other engines—which may or may not have been working—as well as the rudders and ailerons, the hinged panels on the wings that control the plane’s side-to-side swaying. Even with those few tools, they again managed to halt the spin.

  At the time, the B-24’s nose was dangerously high, slowing the plane and bringing it close to another stall, Crane told investigators. He said he tried to bring the nose down using the trim tabs, which are small rudder-like panels on the wings and tail. “Not effective,” he said.

  “The ship came into a stall again and whipped off into another spin,” Crane said, according to the military report. “Lieutenant Hoskin gave the order to jump and we both left our seats.”

  At some point before, another
key system failed. Bolts in the vertical stabilizer had been sliced away by the competing forces of the spin and the efforts to regain control, investigators believe. There was no way to right the plane, which was now bucking and swaying by the forces of the fall.

  “Violently mishandled” is how an April 13, 1944, report described the stresses on the aircraft. That is not a reflection on the crew’s action. Instead, it means the plane and its systems were simply pushed to the limit of what steel and cable can handle.

  “The crash,” the report said, “was attributed to structural failure, specifically to the fact that vertical stabilizer attachment bolts in both upper and lower holes of the front fitting failed without distortion of the fitting.” A search radius of several hundred yards from the crash did not locate the plane’s rudder or vertical stabilizer assemblies, suggesting they broke off as the aircraft was in its doomed plummet.

  In one posthumous legacy of the crash, the report recommended that the attachment bolts for the vertical stabilizers be made bigger and undergo heat treatment to strengthen against brittleness. Loss of the vertical stabilizers had been considered a factor in a number of other B-24 crashes, including one uncontrolled spin on a B-24E that went down August 12, 1943, near the California desert town of Indio.

  A B-24 combat veteran, Bill Gros believes a stall is the only credible explanation for the first spin. “We flew a number of times with one engine out with no big trouble,” said Gros, a former radio operator and the last surviving member from his World War II bomber crew. “One engine out is not going to put you in a spin unless there is something else happening.”

  That factor could have been trying to keep the plane in a tight circle while it climbed through the pipe of clear air, Gros said. The short-radius climb could have slowed it enough for a stall. Normally, the instruments would have indicated the approach of stall speed. But Gros speculated that the electrical system disruptions reported by Crane could have compromised more than just the flight indicator and gyro. It may have given off-the-mark readings on flight speed as well, he suggested.

  “This plane was rigged up with extra electronics for the cold-weather testing,” he said. “They said they addressed the problems of overload, but who knows?”

  Once the plane fell away in the spin, the force of trying to level the craft was enough to wrench apart the elevator controls and stabilizers. “That’s what doomed the aircraft,” Gros said. “The stress just tore the systems apart. From then on, you knew it was going down.”

  After mulling over the Alaska crash site for years, historian Doug Beckstead added his own theory on the cause for the B-24’s initial spin. He believes the mechanism that controlled the angle of the propeller blades malfunctioned during the feathering tests. “The blades started changing angles as if they had a mind of their own,” he wrote in 2007. “That, in itself, could cause the engine to tear apart. Then the blades locked up perpendicular to the airflow, which is akin to having an anchor dropped at the end of the wing.”

  Randy Acord, who served with Crane at Ladd Field and became an expert on American aviation history, had still another idea. He placed the blame on the vacuum selector valves. He told interviewers in 1991 that pilots were “uneasy” about feathering because it required shutting down one or both of the engine’s vacuum pumps. Acord believed that moisture got into the lines and froze, blocking the airflow into the valves. “When the vacuum ceased, they lost all their flight instruments.”

  Figuring out whether Hoskin went down with the plane rested with a handful of remains: four tooth fragments and shards of bone—none bigger than three centimeters.

  The teeth were compared against Hoskin’s military file from November 1942. There was just not enough physical evidence to make a definite connection. The analysis then turned to the pieces of shattered skeleton: bits of skull, vertebrae, femur, and other splinters.

  First, it was determined that the remains were from one individual. “No duplication of skeletal remains,” wrote the lead anthropologist. This was an important first hurdle.

  The lab technicians then went through their checklist:

  Gender: Probable male. The right distal humerus—the section of arm bone just above the elbow—was shaped in ways characteristic of men in more than 90 percent of cases in some studies. It was the same for the estimated size of the cranial cavity and the size of the third metacarpal, the middle finger.

  Age of deceased: Twenty to thirty years old, most likely under twenty-four. The conclusion was based on the degree of fusion within the bones. One portion of rib recovered carried the size and appearance common in men in their early twenties. Hoskin was twenty-two years and eight months on that last flight.

  Stature: Indeterminate. Not enough skeleton was found to make a judgment.

  Race: Indeterminate.

  Trauma: Fire and blunt-force impact. Portions of bone displayed apparent fractures and charring consistent with “high-temperature burning.”

  Length of time remains were at location: Unclear. Small plant roots, sediment, and a “green moss-like material” on the bones suggest “some undefined period.”

  Anthropologist Elias J. Kontanis finished the report with a nod toward Hoskin, but still not enough for a confirmed match. “There is a general biological agreement” between the remains and Hoskin’s physical characteristics, he wrote.

  All that was left was the magic bullet for modern investigators: DNA matching. Three pieces of bone were chosen in December 2006 for the analysis: the right humerus and two leg fragments, the left fibula and tibia.

  With the Hoskin case, experts also had at their disposal one of the powerful tools in DNA forensics: mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrial sequence is passed by the mother. Generally, offspring from the same maternal line have a common mitochondrial DNA map with some unique, and naturally occurring, mutations with each generation. It’s this mix of shared DNA sequence and the various anomalies that allow geneticists to trace family lines from children to mother to grandmother to great-grandmother and so on. It’s theoretically possible that nonrelatives could have the same mitochondrial, or mtDNA, sequence, which means it cannot stand alone as irrefutable evidence. But the chances of an outside-the-family match are extremely remote, and it’s a generally accepted marker of a person’s ancestral line.

  The mtDNA is a sort of battery pack. Among its central roles is either to produce or to synthesize proteins. The military analysts looked at more than 680 strands, or bases, from the mtDNA in the bone fragments. This was compared against 1,124 bases from John Hoskin’s sample.

  The connection came back consistent and compelling. The bases were the same. So were the mutations.

  The findings moved up the chain to the scientific director of the Central Identification Laboratory, Thomas D. Holland, who has been involved in military forensics across Asia and the Middle East. In his spare time, he created a fictional alter ego in a novel, One Drop of Blood, whose plot includes seeking to identify forty-year-old remains.

  On March 7, 2007, Holland wrote his conclusions. “In my opinion, the results of laboratory analysis and the totality of the circumstantial evidence made available to me establish the remains . . . as those of 2nd Lt. Harold E. Hoskin.”

  A few days later, a call was placed to Gorham, Maine, from the Army’s Service Casualty Office in Kentucky. Mary Hoskin picked up the phone in their kitchen.

  “John,” she called out, “there’s someone here who wants to speak to you about Harold.”

  Twenty

  September 7, 2007

  Arlington National Cemetery, Section 60, Grave 310

  The burial ceremony for Second Lieutenant Harold E. Hoskin took place on a sunny morning in northern Virginia. “Please remember,” advise the signs at Arlington National Cemetery, “these are hallowed grounds.”

  Eight military pallbearers carried the coffin into the Fort Myer Old Post Chapel. The blues
and reds of the chapel’s towering stained-glass windows were etched sharp and vivid in the late-summer light. Rows of chandeliers cast a softer glow that was reflected on the varnished pews.

  The chapel began to fill. Each mourner carried a different piece of the story that began long ago over the Charley River.

  Harold’s younger brother John, in a charcoal suit with a red tie, held hands with his wife, Mary, wearing a navy blue dress. Hoskin’s daughter, Joann, sat nearby in an aquamarine outfit. When she learned of the Arlington ceremony, she took out a plastic box that had remained closed for years. This was her late mother’s private treasure, holding some of Hoskin’s belongings and fifty-six letters sent by him. For the first time, Joann looked inside the box and opened each letter, carefully preserved and with just a hint of that pleasant musty library smell.

  Page by page, she discovered her father, the details of a love affair cut short, and—to her bemusement—their playful exchanges about their predictions of the baby boy “Dick” due in the spring. Some of Harold’s first letters from Alaska were written on tourist-style stationery decorated with drawings of Alaskan scenes, including one with a raised storage platform similar to Berail’s cache that saved Crane’s life. The letters then were dashed off on plain white paper in Hoskin’s slanting script. One of the last he wrote to Mary, dated December 7 at 8:00 p.m. Alaska war time, was different from the others. This one was full of remembrance—as if looking back on a life lived—rather than the normal hopeful banter about their plans once he was home. For whatever reason, Harold retold stories that Mary knew by heart, including a reference to the car they nicknamed Elizabeth.

  Joann read. It almost seemed like a letter to her.

  Ladd Field

  12-7-43. 2000 AWT

  Mary Darling,

  It’s just two years ago today that the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. A lot has happened, hasn’t it? I can’t help but reminisce a bit, presumably because I’ve been a lot of places and done a lot.