Frozen in Time (9 page)

The PN9E crew was discovering by hard experience what they otherwise might have learned less painfully had they been issued the Army Air Forces’
Arctic Survival Manual
. “Don’t wear tight shoes,” the manual ordered men who crashed on icy terrain. “If the shoes you have are not loose enough to allow you to wear at least two pairs of heavy socks, don’t use them. Instead, improvise a pair by wrapping your feet in strips of canvas cut from your wing covers, motor covers, or any other heavy material that may be aboard your plane.” The survival manual’s section on shoes added ominously: “If rescue fails, your feet will be your only means of travel, so take care of them.”

Unfortunately for O’Hara, without the manual the crew didn’t know that rubbing his feet might worsen his condition by damaging the frozen tissue. “Don’t rub the spot,” it warned. “Even the gentlest massage can do a great deal of harm.” The manual recommended that frostbitten feet and hands be wrapped to allow for gradual warming. The PN9E crew made matters worse by rubbing snow on each other’s frostbitten skin, a useless home remedy that did nothing but make the area colder and raise blisters. Paul Spina had so much snow rubbed on him that blisters the size of tennis balls erupted on his skin.

Still, even with his broken wrist and frostbite, Spina was better off than O’Hara. The danger facing O’Hara, and to some extent all of them, was the frightful progression from frostbite to dry gangrene, a hideous condition descriptively known as mummification.

Dry gangrene is slower-acting than wet gangrene, in which bacteria infect a wound and kill surrounding flesh. If left unchecked, wet gangrene spreads through the blood with deadly results, usually within days. Dry gangrene is marginally less cruel. It results when oxygen-bearing blood can’t reach part of the body. When dry gangrene takes hold, body parts shrink and turn colors. They display the reddish black of mummified skin, and then they die. The process might take years for a heavy smoker with ruined circulation. A young navigator with frozen feet might suffer the same torment within weeks.

Although unaware of the survival manual’s frostbite protocols, Monteverde and Spencer did follow some of its recommendations. Many seemed to have been borrowed from a Boy Scout manual, a document familiar to both men. Without being told, the two officers kept the plane clear of snow, to improve its visibility from the air; they also worked to keep their crew well rested and well hydrated.

But other parts of the manual might have been useful had they known them. It urged downed fliers to drain the plane’s oil for a smoky signal fire to be kept burning day and night. It also recommended that they remove shiny pieces of metal called cowl panels from the engines, and then place them on the wings as sun-catching reflectors to attract search planes. The PN9E crew did neither.

The crew couldn’t have followed another piece of the manual’s advice even if they’d known it: “DON’T GROW A BEARD if you can help it—moisture from your breath will freeze on your beard and form an ice-mask that may freeze your face.” With no way to shave, all soon sported moisture-catching whiskers.

Other parts of the manual wouldn’t have been useful at all. Warnings about Arctic mosquitoes applied to crashes in the summer months. Blazing a trail in thick woods wouldn’t be an issue, either, as there wasn’t a tree for a thousand miles. Avoiding the stomach-turning qualities of parsnip root wasn’t a concern; nothing grew on their glacier. No native Inuit people were around, so they didn’t need the simple phonetic dictionary of “Eastern Eskimo” phrases such as “Where is there a white man? = Kah-bloon-ah nowk.” Above all, the manual’s cheerful promise that “you can beat the Arctic” by staying dry, warm, and well rested, and by eating plenty of fat, would have seemed a pitiless taunt to the half-frozen men living in a ripped-open fuselage and stretching their meager rations.

Hemmed in by crevasses, the men of the PN9E instinctively followed the survival manual’s most urgent command: “If you were on your flight course when you were forced down, stay with your plane. Rescue planes will be out looking for you and will find you. But remember—any search takes time. Don’t give up hope of rescue too quickly. The men who are out looking for you are trained in their jobs, and if it is humanly possible to find you and get you out, they will do it.”

By coincidence, on November 10, one day after the PN9E crashed, another Allied military plane went down on Greenland’s east coast, a crash unrelated to the searches for McDowell’s C-53 or Monteverde’s B-17. Added to Greenland’s scorecard for November was a Douglas A-20 attack bomber being flown by a three-man Canadian crew.

That crew would violate almost every instruction in the Arctic survival manual, with surprising results.

7

A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

NOVEMBER 1942

L
IKE THE MEN
of the PN9E, David Goodlet, Al Nash, and Arthur Weaver were a ferrying crew. Members of the Royal Canadian Air Force, the trio was supposed to deliver a forty-eight-foot, twin-engine A-20 attack bomber from Newfoundland to England, with a fuel stop in Greenland.

Flying over water two hours after they left Newfoundland, the Canadians ran into thick fog and misfortune. First, the radio went dead. That prevented radioman Arthur Weaver, dark, compact, and handsome, from checking their course or sending a distress signal. Next, navigator Al Nash, tall and lean, with a Tintin-like pompadour, found it impossible to see through the fog to plot their position by sextant. Completing their woes, pilot Dave Goodlet, aristocratic-looking, with a high forehead and a cleft chin, struggled with ice-coated wings that made it impossible to gain enough altitude to fly above the weather. Flying lower wasn’t an option, either. Goodlet knew that Greenland lay ahead, and he didn’t want to slam into a fog-covered mountain. They flew onward at fifteen thousand feet, fear rising as they barreled off course for hours through the soupy haze.

With a half hour of fuel remaining, the twenty-two-year-old pilot concluded that he’d run out of options. Braving whatever might be hiding in the fog, Goodlet brought the plane lower to find a place to set down. Nash provided gallows humor by narrating the descent as though they were in a department-store elevator: “Fifth floor, ladies’ wear, lingerie, and fancy hosiery.” They broke through the fog at thirty-eight hundred feet and saw the east coast of Greenland below—they’d crossed nearly the entire island. By then, Nash’s narration had reached the bargain basement.

Goodlet estimated that they were about fifteen miles inland. He brought the plane down to five hundred feet and saw crevasses slicing across snow-covered glaciers that sloped toward the sea. Though fearful of landing nose-first in a crevasse, Goodlet knew the exhausted fuel gauge left him no choice. He slowed the plane to 110 miles per hour and kept the wheels retracted for a belly-down landing. Somehow, he threaded the needle between crevasses and landed the bomber in one piece in deep snow. When the plane shuddered to a stop, all three men were unhurt. Nash and Weaver pounded Goodlet on the back, shouting, “Good show, old cock!”

Eager to look around, Goodlet stepped outside and sank into snow up to his crotch. His crewmates pulled him inside and slammed the door. Goodlet was from Ontario, Nash from Winnipeg, and Weaver from Toronto, so they knew their way around winter. But this was something else entirely.

After sunset, the cockpit thermometer registered 34 degrees below zero and falling. The plane shook from the wind; the bomber’s airspeed indicator told them the storm was blowing sixty-two miles per hour. The chopped meat sandwiches they’d brought and the coffee in their thermos bottles had frozen solid. The trio sucked at the corners of the sandwiches until they were soft enough to nibble. Their only other food was a box of hard iron biscuits, packed with nutrition but with a taste like sawdust. They had enough for eight days, if they rationed the half-inch-square biscuits one per man every twenty-four hours. Prisoners of war ate better. For warmth, they wound their parachutes around their bodies like mummy wraps. At regular intervals, they slammed their hands and feet against each other and the floor, to promote blood flow. They spent that first night in the navigator’s compartment in the plane’s tail, piled atop one another to share body heat. They alternated positions so each man could take a turn in the middle of the human sandwich.

Unable to sleep, Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver talked to pass the time. They discussed Gandhi, noting that the slight revolutionary had gone long periods without eating. If he could do it, they decided, so could they. Goodlet passed around a photo of his five-month-old daughter. The other two studied it so long that Weaver declared that he could pick her out from all the babies in the world. Nash confided in his partners about a girl from Michigan he’d been dating, and about his worries for his newly widowed mother. Weaver gave a blow-by-blow account of his recent wedding, lingering on the shape and cut of his bride’s dress. He described his plans to build her a house, down to the last nail.

Food was a frequent subject. They told stories of Christmas dinners, and they raised their right hands and vowed never to leave anything untouched if they ever saw a full plate again. The bomber carried a cargo of cigarettes, so they smoked like fiends. Nash had been a nonsmoker, but he picked up the habit fast.

During the first two days, Weaver fiddled with the radio, with no luck. Late on the third night, the wind died down enough for Nash to take his sextant outside and calculate their position. He placed them fifteen miles inland from the Atlantic and 110 miles from any airbase or known location on their maps.

Driven by courage, self-preservation, optimistic youth, hypothermia, fear of dying without trying, or some combination, the three Canadians hatched a plan. Using Goodlet’s pocketknife, they cut plywood cargo boxes and the pilot’s seat into crude snowshoes. Then they inflated the plane’s rubber dinghy, intending to drag it fifteen miles over snow and around crevasses to reach the water. Once there, they intended to climb in and paddle one hundred–plus miles to the nearest settlement. As implausible as the plan sounded, they concluded that it was their best chance. They gathered a flare gun with a box of cartridges, three pyrotechnic marine distress signals, their iron biscuits, and all the cigarettes they could carry.

Before setting off, Weaver tried the radio one last time. Unexpectedly, a weak signal reached a Canadian airport. Weaver sent three SOS calls and gave the position Nash had calculated by sextant. His fingers froze, so he pounded his coded message on the transmitter key with his fist. On the third SOS try, before the batteries gave out, the airport responded that the message had gone through.

Expecting that help was on the way, they postponed their journey. But after two days, with no sign of rescuers and their biscuit rations reduced to one-quarter a day, they stopped waiting. They inflated the dinghy, destroyed their plane’s bombsight, and burned all papers that might be useful if an enemy happened upon the abandoned bomber.

Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver leaped into the wind and snow but didn’t get far. After two hours of pulling the dinghy, they’d traveled a quarter mile. Dejected, they turned back and spent the night in the plane, smoking cigarettes and smacking each other’s arms and legs to keep blood circulating. Their mouths grew bloody and sore from sucking shards of ice and snow.

The next day, Greenland’s weather took a strange turn: the temperature soared by about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, heated by a warm breeze called a
foehn
or “rain shadow” wind. The warmth made for mushy trekking, but it encouraged Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver to try again, this time with no turning back. They made good progress, but when night fell, Greenland’s punishing cold winds returned, freezing their flying suits to their bodies like icy armor. For the next seventeen hours of darkness, they huddled under the inflated dinghy, praying. Weaver promised to become a regular Sunday churchgoer if he ever again found himself in a place with churches. They’d slept just a few hours since the crash, yet none of them could nod off.

The following morning the weather broke and the skies were clear. They resumed their journey at daylight, heading east toward the coast. While veering a mile off course to avoid a crevasse, they heard the unmistakable sound of an airplane engine. The Canadians dove into the dinghy for their supplies. The flare gun proved useless—the firing mechanism had broken in the cold. The first marine signal was a dud. So was the second. But the third and last one worked, lighting the sky. The search plane wagged its wings in salute. The date was November 18, 1942, eight days after the crash. They’d been found.

The search pilot reported that the men had traveled a remarkable seventeen miles northeast on foot from their downed plane. He circled low over them. Soon the trio saw small parachutes open, drifting to earth like milkweed seeds. The crates beneath the chutes carried food, clothing, sleeping bags, snowshoes, one hundred feet of rope, and a bottle of Scotch.

Nash had never touched liquor, but just as he’d become a smoker, now he grabbed the Scotch. Half mad with thirst, he plucked out the cork and drank eight ounces—on an empty stomach and no sleep for days. Within minutes, Nash had sprawled onto his bottom. His eyes rolled around his head—Weaver thought they looked like marbles in a milk bottle. Down for the count, Nash slumped onto his side and passed out. His companions couldn’t wake him, so they dressed him in dry clothes and a parka, then stuffed him in a sleeping bag. Goodlet and Weaver put on dry clothes, too, then gorged on K rations from breakfast to dinner. After an hour of sleep, they woke up retching, having overwhelmed their shrunken stomachs. Nash woke and followed them down the binge-purge path.

The Canadians found a note among the supplies instructing them to tie themselves together and continue toward the water. The men’s northeasterly path was taking them toward a notch in Greenland’s coast known as the Anoretok Fjord.

Based on the search pilot’s report, a plan emerged for the U.S. Coast Guard cutter
Northland
to fight through the ice and meet the Canadians at the fjord. Before joining the rescue effort, the
Northland
had been transporting freight and bringing about eighty U.S. soldiers to the new airbase at Bluie East Two.

Why the
Northland
hadn’t been involved in the rescue effort sooner—not only for the Canadians, but also for McDowell’s and Monteverde’s lost American crews—was never explained. One possible reason was the ossified competition among military branches. Officials of the U.S. Army Air Forces were overseeing the C-53 and B-17 searches, and the service had recently established rescue stations along Greenland’s east coast. A successful rescue would prove the value of the stations and the skills of army men, with bragging rights as a bonus. The army had no incentive to hand the Coast Guard the mission, and the potential rewards, unless absolutely necessary.

As the
Northland
headed toward a rendezvous point with the Canadians, the pilot of the ship’s amphibious Grumman Duck took flight. Hoping to make sure the three frozen travelers were headed toward the correct fjord, Lieutenant John Pritchard scoured the ice cap. Pritchard spotted the men’s trail of snowshoe tracks, which he thought looked less than two days old. But despite one pass after another, he couldn’t find Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver.

Bound together, the Canadians used the airdropped snowshoes to quicken their pace. They stopped when it got dark, afraid of yawning crevasses, only to be drenched by sleet and rain. Rather than wallow in slush, they stood through the long night like napping horses, holding sleeping bags over their heads for protection. Heavy fog the next morning held the same risk of crevasses, so they spent much of the day massaging their feet, using the Scotch as rubbing alcohol. When the sky cleared, they continued eastward toward the sea. Too exhausted to stand, that night they lay down on the ice with their arms wrapped around each other. Soon they were frozen together, and it took all their fading strength to pry themselves apart. Once separated, Weaver pulled off his right boot and found his foot had frozen solid, leaving the skin white, waxy, and numb.

The closer the trio got to the water, the more crevasses they encountered. They felt the glacier heaving beneath their feet and heard the thunder of icebergs calving nearby. Doubts rose in their minds whether they’d survive. Nash suggested that they sing a hymn but they didn’t know one. Instead they crooned “God Save the King” and a hit song, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” about a chaplain who took up arms during the Pearl Harbor attack. Their lips bled as they sang, but it raised their spirits through the night.

The next morning, a hard crust on the glacier made their snowshoes feel like skates as they glided toward the water. Looking out to the sea, they spotted what looked like a rowboat. It was the
Northland
, perhaps ten miles from shore, too far for the Canadians to attract the crew’s attention.

Setting aside their pain and hunger, their thirst and exhaustion, they raced the last two miles to a sheer ice cliff at the water’s edge. Using a lighter he’d filled with alcohol from the plane’s radiator, Goodlet tried to set fire to their parkas to signal the ship. But the coats were too wet to burn. The three men were literally and figuratively at the edge of a cliff. Their flare gun was broken, their marine signals spent. They had nowhere to go. Their one hope was that the crew of the
Northland
would see them. The sky was clear and moonlit, filled with stars beyond number.

The
Northland
fired flares and illuminating shells, a light show that reminded Weaver of fireworks for the queen’s birthday. The ship came closer to shore and swept its powerful spotlights back and forth along the coast. The trio danced and waved their parkas each time the spotlights hit them, but the lights never stopped. The men were too small and the ship was too far. The Canadians saw the Duck take flight from the water near the
Northland
, but still the trio saw no indication that their would-be rescuers had spotted them. Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver watched as the Duck returned to the ship.