Peering downward beyond the edge of the ice platform, Spencer saw that the crevasse continued far below into deep, blue-ice darkness. As he shifted his weight to turn around, the block slipped, threatening to take him crashing to the bottom with it. But the gaps in the walls of a crevasse tend to narrow the deeper they go, so the block wedged itself into the walls again, at a spot just below its original position. Spencer got to his feet to look around. As he gazed left and right, he noticed that his platform was the only one like it as far as he could see. If he’d fallen through the ice bridge a few feet in either direction, he’d almost certainly be dead at the bottom of the crevasse.
A CREVASSE NEAR THE PN9E CRASH SITE, DATED 1942. HARRY SPENCER IS BELIEVED TO BE ONE OF THE THREE MEN PICTURED. (COURTESY OF CAROL SUE SPENCER PODRAZA.)
Spencer felt strangely serene. He drank in the ethereal beauty of his surroundings, a cathedral of ice in shades of blue and white. His eyes followed the translucent light-blue crevasse walls upward to the white hole through which he fell. He looked up to a sky that was its own winking shade of blue. Sunlit clouds completed a scene fit for a ceiling fresco.
Halfway down the gullet of a crevasse was the last place the twenty-two-year-old newlywed airman expected to find himself. Climbing out on his own wasn’t possible; the crevasse walls were too vertical and too slick, and Spencer had no tools to make handholds. But at that moment, encased in natural splendor, standing on his little platform, Harry Spencer felt confident that it wouldn’t be his final resting place. He thought: “God must have a plan for me, or this block of ice wouldn’t be here.”
WHEN SPENCER FELL, Bill O’Hara called for help from the men in and around the carcass of the PN9E. When no one responded, O’Hara repeated the distress call three more times. When he got their attention, O’Hara ordered, “Get rope! Get rope!”
Roused from his prayer session with Spina inside the bomber’s tail, Monteverde ran toward the hole, ignoring the risk of crevasses and the frostbite gnawing at both his feet. Following close behind were several others who’d been searching the snow for rations and equipment lost in the crash.
The break in the ice bridge revealed the crevasse to be fifteen feet wide, more than capable of swallowing them all. Fearful of joining Spencer, they tiptoed toward the opening like soldiers approaching a minefield. The PN9E crew had no previous idea what a bridge-covered crevasse looked like, and until the crash none thought he’d ever need to know. Soon they would begin to recognize what Tucciarone described as a telltale sign of danger: “Small ridges, two or three inches in height, drifted over with snow.” But not all hidden crevasses had those markings, so every step on the glacier carried deadly risk.
Monteverde dropped to his belly and wriggled to the edge. He shouted down to Spencer, who called back that he was OK.
Other crew members hurried back to the bomber and gathered nylon lines from the parachutes they’d sliced into bedding. They braided six lines into a long, strong rope, followed their footsteps back to the crevasse, and lowered the rope to their copilot. Spencer tied the last few feet into a loop and slipped his head and arms through. The makeshift lasso settled securely under his armpits.
Seven of Spencer’s crewmates, all but the injured Spina, grabbed onto the other end of the rope and hauled him toward the surface. With each pull, the nylon threads sawed a narrow channel deeper and deeper into the edge of the crevasse. When Spencer neared the top, Monteverde and the others realized that they were pulling him toward the underside of an impassable shelf of overhanging ice. Already weak and tired, they lowered Spencer back down a hundred feet to the platform. They pulled up the rope and plotted a new strategy.
First, they attached a parachute harness to one end of the rope. On the initial rescue attempt, Spencer felt as though the nylon loop under his arms was cutting him in half. The harness had straps that went over his shoulders, across his chest, and between his legs, and was far more comfortable and secure. Along with the parachute harness they lowered a bolo knife from the survival kit. When everything was in place, the seven able-bodied crewmen returned to the rope line and pulled Spencer back up. This time when he reached the ice ledge near the top, Spencer used the bolo knife to hack from below while Monteverde used another knife to chop away from above. Together they carved a V-shaped notch at the lip of the crevasse, a passage large enough for the rope team to pull Spencer through.
More than three hours after he fell, Spencer was out of the crevasse and back on solid ice. He was in relatively good shape—cold to the bone and suffering from a lost glove and frostbite on his exposed hand, but otherwise unhurt. He might yet enjoy a long and fruitful life, capped by lavish tributes in a distant obituary.
SPENCER’S FALL FORCED the PN9E crew to accept that they’d crash-landed on a glacier shot through with hidden crevasses. Even a cursory inspection revealed that they were hemmed in on all sides. The most worrisome crevasse was the one that crossed underneath the PN9E’s tail. Small at first, it grew at an alarming rate. Within days, it would threaten the crew and their living quarters.
If the PN9E had crash-landed in late summer, the ice bridges might have already melted, revealing the crevasses like highways on a road map. But in November they were no more visible at the surface than subway tunnels.
The crevasses forced the PN9E survivors to abandon hope that they could hike to Koge Bay. No longer could they dream of hunting seals on the coast until being spotted by a Coast Guard ship. Any thought of paddling a life raft to Beach Head Station was abandoned, too. They were trapped on the ice cap, their survival dependent on someone spotting them from the air. Yet even if they were found, a new question arose: How would anyone reach them? A plane couldn’t land among the crevasses, and motorsled or dog teams would face the same hidden dangers that nearly killed Harry Spencer.
The exhausted, bone-chilled crew of the PN9E trudged back to the broken bomber. They collected scraps of felt from the ruined radio compartment, drained fuel from the plane’s tanks, and made a fire on the icy ground. To celebrate Spencer’s survival and to replenish their energy, Monteverde issued the men full meal rations. They thawed snow for water to drink and heated canned meat over the open flame. They warmed themselves before the fire and pulled off their boots to rub blood back into their feet.
Then, all nine men prayed together, offering thanks for the survival of their friend, crewmate, and companion. Afterward, they prayed as a congregation every day. There were no atheists in their ice hole.
EVEN BEFORE SPENCER’S rescue, several men were hobbling on frostbitten feet; now they were in worse shape. Men whose shoes or flying boots were leather, as opposed to rubber, suffered the most. Woody Puryear discovered that his unlined leather boots were warm and soft during the day, but every night they froze, encasing his feet in blocks of ice. O’Hara’s leather dress shoes hadn’t dried since he’d jumped into the snow to help Paul Spina after the crash. Hours of trying to rescue Spencer from the crevasse left O’Hara with no feeling below the ankles.
Inside the bomber’s tail, O’Hara confided to Monteverde that he thought his feet were frozen solid. Spina heard the navigator say, “I don’t even know if I have any feet or not.” When Monteverde helped to remove O’Hara’s shoes, the men saw an awful sight: the skin on his feet had deep, ugly cracks, and they’d turned sickening shades of blue, yellow, and green.
Monteverde was stunned to find that O’Hara’s feet felt nothing like flesh and bone. An awful comparison rushed to his mind: they felt like the cold, hard metal on the butt ends of the plane’s machine guns. Monteverde knew that the cause wasn’t just O’Hara’s leather shoes. The navigator had been among the toughest and most selfless of them all. His feet had frozen after the crash when helping Spina, and he’d made matters worse by trying to hike with Spencer to the sea. Working to rescue Spencer from the crevasse had been the final straw.
Hoping to reverse or at least limit the damage, Monteverde rubbed O’Hara’s feet for hours, holding them against his body f
or warmth until they began to soften. He sprinkled sulfa powder into the cracked skin to fight infection. Within a day, O’Hara’s feet turned a mottled, multicolor mess, as blood and feeling returned. To relieve Monteverde, fellow crew members took hours-long shifts rubbing the navigator’s feet. The process could be excruciating. O’Hara’s feet didn’t hurt when they were frozen; frostbite by itself isn’t especially painful, because the flesh becomes numb. Burning pain accompanies the return of blood.
O’Hara’s plight put a scare into every man among them. Crewmen who’d been wearing leather dress shoes traded them for rubber or leather flight boots they found in the wreckage. While inside their shelter, they aired out their boots as much as possible. Then they filled them with loose-fitting parachute silk, which provided insulation while allowing the men to move their toes to aid circulation.
Also, they learned to leave their gloves outside in the cold. Otherwise, each time the gloves thawed they absorbed more water, making it worse when they froze again. The men began to accept the reality that they were stranded in a place so cold that frozen gloves were better than soggy, half-thawed gloves.
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
LIKE 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 ba
ck, 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.
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