Frozen in Time (14 page)

JOHN PRITCHARD’S COAST GUARD ACADEMY PORTRAIT.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTO.)

After Alaska, Pritchard was accepted for flight training and became Coast Guard Aviator No. 82. Promoted to lieutenant, he served at the Miami Air Station until February 1942. Nancy spent six weeks of her summer vacation from college visiting him in Florida. During that time, Tick Morgan’s ship came in, and so did Nancy’s. They wed two years later and stayed married for the next sixty years.

After Miami, Pritchard was assigned to the
Northland
, as pilot of the ship’s Duck. Except for a brief period back in Florida, he spent most of 1942 flying the little biplane countless miles over and around Greenland.

T
HE MAN WHO
sat behind Pritchard in the Duck was the
Northland
’s ruddy-cheeked radioman first class, Benjamin A. Bottoms. A year older than Pritchard, the bearded, blue-eyed Bottoms could have shared a wardrobe with his pilot. He, too, stood just over five-feet-ten and weighed 145 pounds. By coincidence, Bottoms also had a sister named Nancy, who was his twin.

A farm boy from Cumming, Georgia, Bottoms enlisted in the Coast Guard after graduating from high school. He spent a decade moving from station to station, ship to ship, reenlisting three times and picking up a nickname fitting his Deep South accent: “Georgia Cracker.” In 1937 he married Olga Rogers, a fisherman’s daughter from Gloucester, Massachusetts. They settled with her son Edward, whom Bottoms called “Bud,” near the Coast Guard Air Station in Salem, Massachusetts.

In December 1939, Bottoms found himself in an unusual predicament for a Coast Guardsman: adrift at sea. He and three other servicemen were aboard an amphibious plane called a Douglas Dolphin when it was forced down in fog twelve miles off the Massachusetts coast. Damaged in the landing, in danger of capsizing, the plane drifted for twenty-five miles and was battered by waves for more than a day before being towed to safety by a Coast Guard cutter. No one was injured, but Bottoms would never forget how it felt to need rescuing.

He served for five months on the
Northland
in 1941, then returned to Massachusetts with measles. When he recovered, Bottoms could have escaped the demanding Greenland duty. Instead he volunteered to return as the Duck’s radioman. He rejoined the ship in February 1942, around the same time as Pritchard, and the two became a team. Bottoms impressed his crewmates and superiors with his skills and work ethic. Weeks before the PN9E rescue mission he was recommended for promotion to chief petty officer.

RADIOMAN BENJAMIN BOTTOMS BEFORE HE GREW A BEARD.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

O
N THE COLD
morning of Saturday, November 28, 1942, the
Northland
pushed through the ice into Comanche Bay. The ship’s communication officers picked up Howarth’s faint distress calls, which gave Pritchard and Bottoms a bearing they could follow to the PN9E crash site. The ship’s crew lined the rail as the little plane taxied away. Less than twenty minutes after the
Northland
’s anchor splashed into the bay, the Duck was in flight.

As Pritchard and Bottoms flew toward the downed B-17, Colonel Bernt Balchen and his crew were simultaneously flying over the crash site in their borrowed C-54 Skymaster. Balchen dropped more medical supplies for O’Hara’s gangrenous feet, along with extra sleeping bags, canned chicken, sausages, soups, and candy. By radio, Balchen told Lolly Howarth that he’d spotted two motorsleds carrying Lieutenant Max Demorest and Sergeant Don Tetley some twenty miles away. They were making good time across the ice, each one towing a cargo sled loaded with equipment and supplies. Balchen expected the sledders to arrive at the wreck late that night. He told Howarth to shoot flares after eight o’clock to guide them in.

THE GRUMMAN DUCK, PILOTED BY JOHN PRITCHARD, WITH BENJAMIN BOTTOMS SERVING AS RADIOMAN, TAXIS AWAY FROM THE
NORTHLAND
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1942.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES DORIAN.)

As Balchen circled overhead, he received a radio call from Pritchard in the Duck. The two pilots knew one another from Pritchard’s occasional landings at Balchen’s base. Balchen told him about a level area relatively free of crevasses not far from the PN9E. There, he said, Pritchard could make a wheels-up landing on the Duck’s belly, using the central pontoon like a sled on the ice. Balchen flew over the potential landing site and dropped one hundred feet of rope, snowshoes, and bamboo poles to help Pritchard and Bottoms trek to the wreck after they landed.

Running low on fuel, Balchen turned the C-54 back across the island toward Bluie West Eight, confident that Pritchard and Bottoms in the Duck, and Demorest and Tetley on motorsleds, had the rescue of the PN9E well in hand.

P
RITCHARD CIRCLED THE
Duck above the bomber, then leaned forward on the control stick and brought his plane low over the PN9E. Pritchard buzzed so close to the ground that several of the icebound men took cover inside the tail section. Pritchard tossed out a small can with a red flag tied to it. Inside, Monteverde’s crew found a note that Pritchard had written while aboard the
Northland
. It inquired about ground conditions and asked Monteverde’s crew to stand on the B-17’s right wingtip if they thought it was safe for the Duck to land with its wheels down. If they thought that he should land wheels-up, on the Duck’s belly, they should stand on the left wing. If landing was too dangerous to consider altogether, they should gather on the PN9E’s tail. As a signoff, the note read, “If there’s a 60-40 chance, I’ll take it.”

When Monteverde read that line aloud, several men wiped away tears.

The desperate bomber crewmen looked at one another. They feared that the crevasses would swallow the Duck like an alligator opening its jaws under a mallard. Without a word, they climbed atop the tail to tell Pritchard and Bottoms that it was too dangerous to land. In doing so, they knew that they were waving off what might be their best chance for survival.

Minutes later, Howarth and Monteverde reached Ben Bottoms by radio, and Monteverde reinforced the message. He told the Duck’s crew, “Don’t try it.”

Pritchard buzzed them again, wagging his wings and waving from the cockpit. The dejected PN9E crew thought that was the last they’d see of the plane. But as they watched, Pritchard circled lower and lower over an area several miles away. On Pritchard’s orders, Bottoms radioed: “Coming in anyway.”

A member of the PN9E crew muttered, “He won’t make it, poor fellow.” Several couldn’t bear to watch. They climbed back inside their shelter.

Adding to the danger, Pritchard disregarded Balchen’s advice about the best way to touch down. He hand-cranked the Duck’s landing gear into place, intending to treat the ice cap the same as he would a paved tarmac. It was a calculated risk. A belly-down landing might damage the Duck’s fuselage or curl its propeller, rendering it yet another squished bug on the ice cap. On the other hand, a wheels-down landing could lead to the same result. Five months earlier, when the pilot of the first plane from the Lost Squadron tried a wheels-down landing, he’d flipped his fighter onto its back. But Pritchard went with his gut: wheels down.

Pritchard clicked through his eight-point landing checklist: propeller set at low pitch, cabin hood locked open, tail wheel locked, and so on. He pushed forward on the control stick, and the Duck met the ice cap. The wheels touched, then sank into deep snow. The plane’s bulbous nose seemed intent on burrowing downward into a catastrophic somersault. Pritchard fought back, relying on the big central pontoon and the wing floats to keep the plane level. Several times the tail lifted, threatening to cartwheel over the nose and destroy the plane and both men aboard. Pritchard kept fighting.

He brought the Duck to a stop, completing the first planned, successful, wheels-down landing on a Greenland glacier.

T
O AVOID THE
web of crevasses, Pritchard had landed about two miles from the wreck, far from where Balchen dropped the rope, snowshoes, and bamboo poles. Pritchard and Bottoms climbed out of the Duck equipped with little more than a broomstick to test for hidden ice bridges.

For more than an hour, the two Coast Guardsmen shuffled, poked, trudged, plowed, and slid across the glacier. At one point Pritchard slipped into the mouth of a crevasse, but he managed to catch an edge and pull himself out. When they reached the wreck, Pritchard approached each crewman of the PN9E with an outstretched hand.

Monteverde told Pritchard, pilot to pilot, “You shouldn’t have landed. Now you may not be able to get off.”

“I came prepared to stay,” Pritchard answered.

It was a good line, but in fact Pritchard intended to take off as soon as possible. He told Monteverde that the Duck would take two men immediately and would return the next day for the rest. O’Hara and Spina were the worst off, and Monteverde wanted them to go first. But the navigator’s frozen feet and the engineer’s broken arm and other injuries made it impossible for either to reach the Duck without being carried on sleds. They’d have to wait until the Duck returned with hand sleds or they could be carried on Demorest and Tetley’s motorsleds. Pritchard suggested that Monteverde’s frostbite made him a good candidate. But Monteverde was captain of the PN9E. He’d be the last to leave.

Monteverde chose two of the best-liked men aboard the bomber, Al Tucciarone and Lloyd “Woody” Puryear. Both needed medical care, Puryear for feet that had frozen in his leather boots, and Tucciarone for the broken ribs he’d suffered in the crash. Both were weak with hunger and chilled to the bone, yet Monteverde considered them strong enough to reach the Duck on foot.

The timing was providential for Tucciarone, who’d begun having visions. He felt certain that he’d seen a giant image of Jesus Christ in the Greenland sky. Puryear felt fragile and stiff from the cold, and his mind had become so foggy from hypothermia that he barely registered that he was leaving his new friends. When it dawned on them that they’d been chosen, Puryear and Tucciarone both declined. They argued that copilot Harry Spencer and volunteer spotter Clint Best should take their places. Spencer and Best refused, Monteverde pulled rank, and that was that.

Despite his fall into the crevasse, the resilient Spencer felt the strongest of the PN9E crewmen. He volunteered to make the trek to the Duck, in case Tucciarone or Puryear needed help along the way. Pritchard roped them all together, separated at thirty-foot intervals, and led them onto the trail that he and Bottoms had made on the way in.

Nineteen days of vicious cold and little food had sapped the young airmen’s strength more than they’d realized. Puryear could hardly lift his feet, and Pritchard and Bottoms dragged both him and Tucciarone almost as much as they walked. Spencer helped, but he couldn’t do much. Soon both Puryear and Tucciarone fell face-first into the snow from exhaustion. Puryear felt himself surrendering to sleep, a precursor to death on the ice cap. Bottoms propped up Puryear, put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it for him. He encouraged the young man from Kentucky onward, half carrying him much of the way. Pritchard tried to raise Tucciarone’s spirits by joking that Tucciarone’s mother would have homemade spaghetti waiting for him.

Fearing the approach of dusk, Pritchard and Spencer hurried ahead to prepare the Duck for takeoff. Pritchard decided to crank up the wheels, so they wouldn’t drag through the snow. But in the four hours since landing, the Duck’s floats had frozen to the glacier. Pritchard and Spencer dug out the wheels and rocked the little plane to break it free of the ice. They turned it in the opposite direction, using the ice as a pivot, so Pritchard could fly out the way he’d come in. By the time Bottoms and the two zombielike PN9E crewmen reached the Duck, it was ready to go.

Puryear and Tucciarone half climbed and were half carried into the empty compartment below the Duck’s cockpit. Pritchard and Bottoms strapped themselves in and prepared to leave. Pilots seek to take off into a headwind because it’s easier to generate lift, but Pritchard didn’t have that option. Spencer gave the plane a push to help it on its way, then watched as the Duck gained speed for a difficult and dangerous downwind takeoff.