Frozen in Time

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  After the war, while awaiting word on whether he’d been chosen to box for Norway in the Olympics, Balchen gave up his athletic career to become a pilot in the Norwegian Naval Air Force. Commissioned a lieutenant, in 1925 Balchen joined a rescue mission for famed Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen, who had hoped to be the first man to fly over the North Pole. More polar adventures followed, as Balchen alternated between working with Amundsen and Amundsen’s great rival, U.S. Navy commander Richard E. Byrd.

  LEGENDARY AIRMAN BERNT BALCHEN. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

  With Byrd, Balchen piloted the plane that made the first airmail delivery from the United States to France. He took the controls during fierce storms and heavy fog over Paris, winning acclaim for saving the crew by setting down in the waters off Normandy. Already famous, Balchen gained worldwide renown in 1928 when he flew to remote northern Canada to rescue a German crew that had crashed after a transatlantic flight.

  Balchen and Byrd had a contentious relationship, yet Byrd respected Balchen’s flying skills and invited him to immigrate to the United States. In 1929, Balchen served as the chief pilot when a Byrd-led crew made the first flight over the South Pole. His exploits became so celebrated during the early years of flight that he found steady work as a test pilot for extreme weather conditions and as a consultant for aircraft makers and other fliers, including Amelia Earhart. In 1930 Congress passed a special act making him a dual citizen of Norway and the United States.

  In an era of self-promoting aviators, some of whom were more skillful in press conferences than in the sky, Balchen was described as modest, even shy, despite a reputation among his peers as one of the best and bravest fliers of the age. Later in life, he’d shed his youthful reserve and display a streak of braggadocio.

  Balchen kept busy throughout the 1930s, including a stint as chief pilot for a journey through Antarctica led by the American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth. He served as chief technical adviser for Norwegian Airlines from 1935 to 1940; as a cocreator of the Nordic Postal Union; and as a negotiator on an aviation treaty between the United States and Norway.

  When Russia attacked Finland in 1939, Balchen was in Helsinki trying to obtain U.S. fighter airplanes for the Finnish Air Force. When Norway fell to the Germans the following year, he established the Norwegian Air Force training base known as Little Norway in Canada, to train pilots who’d escaped the Nazis. After handing that task to others, Balchen ferried bombers for the British. He also found time to indulge in his hobby as a watercolorist, favoring bold colors and the powerful scenery of Arctic vistas he knew and loved.

  In 1941, an aide to U.S. Army general Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold met Balchen in the Philippines to ask him to command a secret air base in Greenland that would be used as a ferrying stop over the Atlantic. Soon Balchen was a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps and commander of its northernmost base, Bluie West Eight.

  The Operation Bolero ferrying effort had barely begun when Balchen had a chance to demonstrate his rescue skills. In June 1942 a B-17 called My Gal Sal with a crew of thirteen ran out of fuel in bad weather and went down in Greenland. A radio operator at Bluie West Eight picked up the crew’s distress calls and determined that the plane was about one hundred miles from the base. My Gal Sal was soon located from the air, but it wasn’t clear how to rescue the crew. After dropping supplies, a search pilot noticed that melting ice had formed a temporary lake about sixteen miles from the downed B-17.

  With Balchen aboard, a navy pilot named Dick Parunak landed an amphibious plane on the meltwater lake. Balchen hopped out and led a ground party on a two-day trek across soft ice, around open crevasses, and through glacial rivers. After reaching My Gal Sal, Balchen guided all thirteen members of the crew back to the rescue plane, and Parunak made two trips to return them all to Bluie West Eight.

  Balchen received the Soldier’s Medal, the army’s highest award for heroism outside combat, and Parunak received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Two weeks later, the pair teamed up again to rescue Colonel Robert Wimsatt, commander of the U.S. Army’s Greenland bases, and another flier whose plane went down on a patrol flight. After two successful missions and fifteen men rescued in two weeks, Balchen and Parunak jokingly named their army-navy partnership the Greenland Cooperative Salvage Company.

  Now, four months later, Balchen faced a new test: guiding a commandeered C-54 Skymaster through late-autumn storms toward Koge Bay, hoping to add the nine men of the PN9E to his rescue total.

  BALCHEN VIVIDLY DESCRIBED the challenges facing pilots in the far north: “When you fight in the Arctic, you fight on the Arctic’s terms. . . . In the air you fight ice that overloads your wings and sends you out of control; you fight eccentric air currents over the ice cap that rack a plane and drop it several thousand feet without warning; you fight the fog. Most of the time you win, but sometimes you lose, and the Arctic shows no mercy to a loser.”

  A search flight he made for the PN9E nearly proved his point. “For twenty minutes our four-engine ship is tossed like a leaf in a cyclone. It’s the severest turbulence I have ever encountered in an airplane, and I think in all my flying this is the narrowest escape of my life.”

  Hoping not to repeat the experience, on this day Balchen skirted around the storms. As he approached Koge Bay, the sky was getting dark. But before Balchen turned back, he saw a small red star rising in the distance. Then another. Then a third. He changed course to head toward the flares and dropped to a lower altitude. Looking down through the windshield, he saw the broken PN9E. He thought it resembled a crushed dragonfly on the ice.

  He noticed how the bomber had snapped in two, and how the tail hung down at about a thirty-degree angle toward a gaping crevasse. Scouting the area beyond the wreck, Balchen concluded that the plane had gone down on the worst possible area of the ice cap: an active, crumbling glacier, surrounded by crevasses and deep ice canyons. The only approach on the ground, he thought, would be from the north, where the glacier seemed more stable, with fewer crevasses. Balchen considered it a miracle that anyone had survived the crash, not to mention the two weeks that followed.

  Balchen noted the wrecked plane’s position near Koge Bay, placing it around the intersection of longitude 65 degrees, 15 minutes north, and latitude 41 degrees, 18 minutes west. As he brought the big C-54 lower, Balchen ordered the crew to prepare bundles and crates of cargo they’d brought along, a cornucopia of food, fuel, two stoves, sleeping bags, clothing, and medical supplies.

  WHEN BALCHEN’S PLANE approached the crash site, the men of the PN9E were clustered inside the tail section. At the sound of the four-engine Skymaster, all but O’Hara and Spina spilled outside onto the ice, tripping over each other like roaches startled by light. Monteverde and his men didn’t believe their eyes until they saw packages falling from the plane at the end of parachute lines.

  They’d been lost, but now they were found. Lolly Howarth’s radio magic had led to their discovery. They huddled together for a prayer of thanks.

  As he watched Balchen’s plane circling overhead, Monteverde began to weep. He looked around and saw that his men were crying, too. Every last one. Tears rolled down their chapped faces and froze on their reddened cheeks.

  ON THE FIRST three passes by Balchen’s plane, fierce winds caught the cargo parachutes, turning them into sails and carrying the supplies into crevasses or far from the PN9E. One crewman grabbed a bundle only to be swept away by its wind-filled parachute. He let go just in time to avoid being pulled into a crevasse. Watching in horror, Balchen ordered the parachutes removed.

  He made contact with Howarth by radio and told the men of the PN9E to take cover inside their living quarters. Balchen flew a death-defying fifty feet above the glacier and treated the next ten cargo drops like pinpoint bombing runs. As he swept over the wreck, turbulent air treated Balchen’s ninety-four-foot-long plane the way a bull treats a rodeo rider. Tucciarone felt certain that the C-54 and its crew would be joining them on the ice. Yet the low-altitude cargo drops
without parachutes made a difference; several bundles even bounced off the B-17’s fuselage. Still, Tucciarone estimated that he and his crewmates found only about one-fifth of the dropped cargo.

  So eager were the men to gather the supplies that they ignored the cold wind raking the ice cap. One after another they stumbled back into the tail section nearly blind, their eyelids frozen together. The injured Spina and O’Hara blew warm air on their crewmates’ faces to thaw them.

  Within a day, the men had recovered medical supplies and five days’ worth of food, mostly C rations, consisting of tin cans of “wet” meat with hash or beans, and D-ration survival bars. Tea and sugar had mixed together on the way down, so the men separated the two using mosquito nets from the jungle kits. They found two sleeping bags, which they gave to O’Hara and Spina. Both men soon had company from crewmates, who took turns doubling up with them for warmth. They recovered an Arctic Primus stove that looked like an upturned blowtorch. But it was useless because it wouldn’t burn the leaded gasoline from the plane’s tanks, and they couldn’t find any fuel dropped by Balchen.

  A quart bottle of whiskey, dropped for “medicinal purposes,” made the rounds, then reached Spina. A note in pencil on the label said, “Take only in small quantity.” Others heeded the advice, but Spina belted down shot after shot. His compromised circulation system experienced a powerful jolt. At first, his hands and feet tingled; within ten minutes they throbbed with pain. Spina howled. When the pain ebbed, he took the penciled instructions to heart.

  Talking with Howarth by radio, Balchen offered a piece of advice that the PN9E crew, Harry Spencer in particular, could have used twelve days earlier: don’t leave the wreckage unless everyone is roped together. Balchen reported that a dog team or motorsled team would soon be on the way. He also told them to watch the bay for a Coast Guard rescue ship, the cutter Northland. Before flying off, Balchen made plans with Howarth to stay in contact with twice-daily radio calls between the PN9E and Bluie West Eight.

  On his way back to the base, Balchen tore a page from his diary and drew a sketch showing the location of the wreck, along with possible routes for an approach across the ice. He flew over Beach Head Station and dropped the weighted note for delivery to its commander, Max Demorest, the glacier scholar turned army lieutenant. Eleven days earlier, mechanical problems had forced Demorest to abandon the motorsled search for McDowell’s lost C-53. With Balchen’s map showing the site of the PN9E, Demorest would try another rescue, this time for the men of the B-17.

  Although the frozen crewmen had food and basic supplies, time remained their enemy. Warmer weather during the two days following Balchen’s flight caused the crevasse under the tail to open with a roar, reaching as wide as fifty feet across in spots. There was no suitable place for the men to hole up in the cramped front section, so they tightened the ropes anchoring the tail and hoped.

  A more urgent worry was O’Hara’s health. Gangrene gripped both feet. Monteverde fed him sulfa pills, but they made O’Hara delirious. The navigator talked gibberish and wouldn’t eat. The worst soon passed, but his crewmates worried that O’Hara might die.

  On November 26, Thanksgiving Day, two days after Balchen spotted them, Howarth sent the PN9E crew’s most urgent call for help. With O’Hara’s deteriorating condition preying on everyone’s mind, he tapped out in code:

  “Situation grave. A very sick man. Hurry.”

  AFTER RESCUING THE Canadians, the Northland had been ordered to cruise through the thickening ice toward the presumed vicinity of McDowell’s C-53 and Monteverde’s B-17. Now, with Balchen’s discovery, the priority became the B-17.

  The Greenland Patrol commander, Rear Admiral Edward “Iceberg” Smith, told the Northland’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Frank Pollard, to head toward Koge Bay, as close as possible to the PN9E location described by Balchen. Smith had concerns about sending the ship into the ice-filled waters so late in the season, but he understood that Monteverde’s crew needed the Northland’s help. Because ice already clogged parts of Koge Bay, the Northland would anchor to the east, in the body of water known to the Americans as Comanche Bay, named for a Coast Guard cutter by that name. Once there, the Northland would be close to Beach Head Station and about thirty miles from the wrecked PN9E.

  THE MOTORSLED TEAM of Lieutenant Max Demorest and Sergeant Don Tetley also joined the rescue effort. Their attempts to find McDowell’s C-53 had failed when their sleds conked out, but the sleds were back in working order, and now they were headed toward a known destination. Joining them was a dogsled team led by Johan Johansen, a Norwegian fur trapper and survival expert who’d been stuck in Greenland since the Nazis had invaded his homeland. Johansen had become a civilian adviser to the U.S. Army, a job that distracted him from his worries about his wife and son in occupied Norway.

  The evolving plan was modeled on the rescue of the three Canadians, with a few wrinkles. On paper, it called for the motorsled and dog teams to travel over the ice cap on the inland side of the rugged coastline and mountains. They’d go from Beach Head Station to Ice Cap Station, then approach the PN9E from the northeast to avoid the worst crevasse fields. After reaching the bomber, they’d lead or carry Monteverde’s crew back the same way to Beach Head Station, where the Northland would be anchored just offshore in Comanche Bay. The PN9E crew would be taken by motorboat to the waiting ship.

  If everything went smoothly, all nine men would be safely aboard the Northland in three or four days. The plan sounded so straightforward that it was easy to imagine Monteverde’s crew sharing stories and toasting their good fortune alongside Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver in the ship’s sick bay.

  But as the events of November 1942 had already proved, almost nothing goes as planned on Greenland’s ice cap.

  No one understood that better than Balchen, who once wrote, “The Arctic is an unscrupulous enemy. It fights with any weapon that comes to hand, it strikes without warning, and it hits hardest just when you think the fight is won.”

  11

  “DON’T TRY IT”

  NOVEMBER 1942

  AS THE NORTHLAND fought through gales toward Comanche Bay, the rear admiral at the helm of the Greenland Patrol, Edward “Iceberg” Smith, expressed second thoughts about its role in the rescue mission. Smith wanted as much as anyone to save the PN9E crew. But he didn’t want to lose 130 Coast Guardsmen and a vital ship under his command.

  Smith’s PhD in oceanography and the quarter century he’d spent in icy waters made him one of the world’s foremost authorities on the awful conditions facing Lieutenant Commander Pollard and the men of the Northland. Although the ship had a reinforced hull and was built for Arctic operations, it wasn’t an icebreaker. That meant ice could be a ship-breaker. Calamity could come swiftly, from an iceberg, or slowly, if the Northland became trapped in Greenland’s coastal ice pack. In that case, the ship would be lost to the war effort for months, and the crushing pressure might leave the Northland crippled or worse. Smith knew the Northland’s strengths and limits firsthand: he’d been its commander for more than a year.

  One of the Greenland Patrol’s converted fishing boats, the Aklak, had already abandoned the search and left the coast after its anxious captain told Smith that “further delay will seriously endanger ship and personnel.” Smith’s radio messages to the Northland urged Pollard to consider the same prudent course.

  At first, Smith trod lightly, respecting Pollard’s prerogatives as the ship’s captain. The admiral issued an inquiry rather than an order: “In view of lateness of [the] season and relative risks involved, and latest information you may have received from Ice Cap Station,” he radioed the Northland, “do you consider further operations advisable?” It was easy to read Smith’s message as offering an exit strategy, a way for Pollard to pull away from the rescue effort without losing face.

  The response couldn’t have been clearer, and it couldn’t have comforted Smith. “Extremely hazardous . . . five miles south of Comanche Bay entrance . . . in rafted pack
ice thickly interspersed with floe bergs, growlers around us . . . visibility poor.” But then, to answer Smith’s question, the ship radioed flatly: “Continuing attempts to work free and make base at Comanche Bay.”

  Smith didn’t relent. Perhaps, he said in a follow-up message, the Northland’s doctor should go ashore to spend the winter at Beach Head Station. The injured PN9E crewmen could be brought to him there, allowing the Northland to head toward safer waters. The ship could return and fetch everyone from Beach Head Station in the spring. Smith still wasn’t issuing an order, but he punctuated the suggestion with a warning: “Do not take risks this late in season.”

  Again Pollard demurred: “Do not, repeat not, deem it advisable for Northland medical officer to proceed with rescue party, and will keep him aboard ship unless otherwise directed.” In other words, unless Smith gave a direct order, the Northland and its crew would remain on the job. Pollard’s reply also informed Smith that the Northland had carved through the ice and had nearly reached Comanche Bay. The message ended with an ominous weather report: “Fog.”

  Pollard and Smith were locked in a respectful standoff, and both men knew that Pollard would prevail barring a dramatic change in circumstances. Central to the Coast Guard culture was a belief in testing every reasonable limit to complete a rescue. A decade earlier, in the 1930s, the service’s highest-ranking officer captured that outlook in a Coast Guard creed built around the phrase “I shall sell life dearly to an enemy of my country, but give it freely to rescue those in peril.” Pollard couldn’t bear to turn away from Howarth’s plaintive message: “Situation grave. A very sick man. Hurry.”

  Smith might have taken a harder edge with Pollard had he known that a new rescue plan was brewing aboard the Northland. Despite repeated back-and-forth messages between the two, the captain of the Northland curiously, perhaps purposefully, failed to mention that the approach used to rescue the Canadians might not apply, after all, with the American crew.