81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  The alarm clock clicked to 8:10.

  Crane threw on his flight suit and parka over thermal underwear. He suddenly felt uncomfortably warm. The radiators and insulation in the bachelor officers’ quarters were so good that—even in the harshest cold—their marathon poker games could be played in shirtsleeves. Such trappings didn’t extend to all at Ladd, though. Some of the enlisted men were put in hastily built barracks that earned nicknames like Pneumonia Gulch. In winter, mop streaks on the barracks’ floors would freeze before they could dry.

  Crane was among the fortunate airmen assigned the latest down-filled gear. It was made for the military under a deal with outdoor clothing pioneer Eddie Bauer, who began exploring new fabrics and fillings after a near-fatal brush with hypothermia while dressed in waterlogged wool. Cold-weather protection for soldiers, sailors, and airmen had taken on added urgency as wartime missions moved into places such as Alaska and Greenland. The down suits had gotten generally high marks from the Ladd pilots. They weren’t always so kind toward the design gatekeepers at the War Department. The canvas cockpit seats in the big bombers, for one, could become as cold and hard as marble slabs when the temperature slipped into the single digits. And who was the genius who decided that many of the warplanes didn’t need windshield wipers or decent heaters?

  As Crane zipped up his parka, he felt paper crinkle inside one of the pockets. He had forgotten about the letter. It arrived a few days earlier from his father, who ran an auction business in Philadelphia. Dad did well, and Crane was quite proud of him. The business was successful enough to keep four children and his wife comfortable during the Depression. Crane had read the single-page letter, but quickly. He figured he would linger over it later with a cup of coffee. He liked hearing about the family and neighborhood, written in his father’s precise but slightly overformal English, learned after emigrating from Ukraine. Crane thought about tossing the letter on his bunk.

  But why waste even a few seconds to dig it out? He needed to get moving.

  Even after more than two months at Ladd, Crane felt he was still a novice in the preparations and precautions to handle winter in interior Alaska. Sometimes he’d forget to pull up his parka hood and not realize his mistake until his ears were iced and aching. It took only a few seconds. The winter in Fairbanks is tricky that way. Winds are usually very light. Add that to the Fairbanks area’s typical low winter humidity—sometimes almost at desert levels—and it can, at first, feel less bone-chilling than a wind-whipped December day in Philadelphia. But below zero is serious business. Ignore it at your own peril. Just a few days earlier, a mechanic on the airfield lost most of the skin on his right palm after grabbing a pipe with his bare hands. It was minus twenty-five that day. Crane went through the learning curve like everyone: never forget your mittens or liner gloves; make sure your face is dry before going outside; don’t breathe too deeply to avoid what the medics called “lung frosting.” In a nutshell: respect the Alaskan winter.

  Somehow, Crane seemed to handle the subzero better than many other guys shipped overseas. That’s what the War Department termed the Alaska territory. It was the same designation for Hawaii and other U.S. possessions. This was the homeland and the stores were American and the currency was the greenback, but they still didn’t have a star on the flag.

  Leon, what’s the rush? asked his roommate, a beefy Mississippi lieutenant known as Stud.

  I’m way behind, Crane huffed, as he tossed on the rest of his gear. I forgot to set the alarm. Is that time right? Is it really ten after eight?

  That is it, said Stud.

  Under his breath, Crane grumbled his trademark curse: Hell’s bells. He jammed his feet into his boots and started for the door.

  Slow down there, Stud said. I’m not flying today. I’m making a run into Fairbanks. And that means I got the keys to a jeep.

  Crane brightened. Great. Can you give me a lift?

  Stud grabbed the keys. It was a bit of a surprise. Stud did just about everything he could to avoid being out in the cold. He never stopped grousing about the winter and how he missed the sticky warmth and Spanish moss of Dixie. Crane would remind him to be careful of his wishes. There was more than enough heat and humidity to go around in the horrific South Pacific battles. Alaska wasn’t such a bad deal, Crane told him. Crane tried to keep a good attitude about the place. It was a lot better than being shot at. And Crane was also built well for these extremes: a shade under six feet and 170 pounds, with the muscles of a natural athlete—although he usually preferred playing his clarinet to playing ball. He was on the lanky side and wore his trousers high up on his narrow waist. Yet he had just enough heft in his twenty-four-year-old biceps and thighs that no one would call him scrawny. If he had been born a generation earlier, it would have been easy to imagine Crane as a silent-movie star. His dark almond-shaped eyes and thick lashes demanded attention.

  Thanks a lot, Crane said to Stud, who was jingling the jeep keys. I really appreciate the ride.

  Stud drove Crane the short hop over to the Officers’ Club. It gave Crane enough time to gulp half a cup of coffee and snag a piece of buttered toast. Crane then raced down the stairs into one of the tunnels that allowed Ladd personnel to pop from building to building while avoiding the winter blasts. On the way, Crane passed the exchange, the all-in-one store on the base. On a whim, he grabbed two packs of matches—a total of forty sticks. Crane didn’t smoke. But the pilot who would sit in control of their B-24D Liberator bomber that day, Second Lieutenant Harold Hoskin, was always nursing a pipe. Maybe he’ll need a light, Crane thought. It was a tacit rule that the copilot’s job was to make life just a little easier for the guy to his left in the cockpit. They’d probably be up for a least a couple hours on another test mission. Hoskin—pronounced as Haw-sken in his northern Maine accent—would definitely want to puff away if they were lucky enough to hit some smooth air.

  By the time Crane arrived at Hangar 1, the ground crews were pulling away the cold-stiffened tarps from their Liberator, serial number 42-40910. It was christened the Iceberg Inez after arriving at Ladd about a month earlier.

  Some mechanics in the hangar were gabbing about the morning radio bulletin. British warplanes had hammered Frankfurt with two thousand tons of bombs in a single day. That type of pounding was hard to grasp, even for those who spent all their time around warplanes. Guys in the hangar were trying to get their heads around 4 million pounds. Let’s see, a B-24 weighs about thirty-eight thousand pounds with its bomb bays fully loaded. That would be the equivalent of more than 105 of those four-engine monsters. Buddy, can you imagine that?

  From the vantage point of Alaska, there was a strange seesaw relationship with the war. The battles sometimes seemed to be taking place in another world, distant snippets from radio reports and newsreels. Then, at other times, the airfield would kick into round-the-clock operations, with a huge array of aerial firepower coming and going. Suddenly, the war felt much closer. Japan had already taken a swipe at Alaska. That was among the reasons so many airmen were now packed into Ladd. If the Japanese came back for more—doubtful yet not impossible—America would be sufficiently muscled up this time. But Fairbanks had a bigger role than just bolstering defenses. It was a key transit point in one of the most massive movements of fighting machinery in history. Under a deal with the Kremlin, wartime ally Uncle Sam was sending a steady flow of planes and equipment to Alaska as part of a critical back-channel supply line. The planes were handed off to Soviet crews at Ladd, flown over the Bering Sea to Siberia, and, often within days, in the skies on Europe’s Eastern Front.

  With so much airpower passing through, Alaska also became a convenient proving ground for the broader concerns of waging war in the high latitudes or extreme cold. No one knew where the next front could be. Iceland? Norway? It made sense to be prepared.

  This is where the test crews, dubbed the Cold Nose Boys, came in. Their flight reports allowed military desig
ners to make needed tweaks and modifications. America’s interest in getting it right was elevated after watching how the Russian winters foiled the often superior German planes and artillery. Yet extreme cold can be a hard puzzle to crack. It did a lot of mischief. The cold gummed up hydraulics, seized oil lines, locked up flaps, made some wire as brittle as straw, and vexed just about every onboard system on the planes. At the beginning of the war, the Ladd commander sent an urgent message to Washington, warning there were no American planes fully reliable at temperatures below minus twenty-five. It could be colder than that just on the Ladd runway in winter. Ladd’s Cold Weather Test Detachment was a chance to explore what was needed for an all-weather fighting force. Defense contractors—always eager to cut a new deal—sensed the opportunities, too. Technicians from alpha-dog firms such as Lockheed and Pratt & Whitney became frequent visitors at Ladd to look over the test results. Trouble was that sometimes there was only wreckage to try to deduce what went wrong. More than thirty planes with connections to Ladd Field had crashed or experienced some kind of major failure between April 1941 and the morning Crane and Hoskin were ready to take up the Iceberg Inez. That didn’t count the hundreds of other crashes and mishaps on other Alaskan bases and among the Soviet pilots heading west with their American-made planes.

  Crane wandered through the cavernous Hangar 1, looking for Hoskin. Huge polished steel panels divided the American and Soviet sections. The hangar was the biggest enclosed space north of the forty-eight states, measuring nearly 330 feet long and more than 270 feet wide. Like every airman at Ladd, Crane liked the energy of Hangar 1. It smelled of fuel and coffee and was alive with the sounds of phones ringing, orders being barked, and tools clanging. High-wattage lights, fixed three stories above, gave everything the slightly washed-out tinge of a flashbulb photo. It was nearly nine o’clock, and there was still no hint of dawn. That was almost two hours away.

  Crane found Hoskin checking the weather reports. He offered his excuses for being late. Hoskin gave a not-to-worry wave. He was never one to make a scene. Hoskin liked to keep it light, the mark of someone who always had an easy relationship with success. He kept his gaze fixed on the weather forecast.

  Well, it’s messy, Hoskin told Crane. But what else is new, right?

  No one could count on easy flying conditions this time of year. There was deep cloud cover. The winds were just a puff in the Fairbanks valley, but above five thousand feet they were roaring in from the southeast at up to fifty miles per hour. They were expected to increase later in the day.

  Crane had missed the morning rundown on the mission. He knew Hoskin as one of the new pilots around base, but hadn’t been teamed with him before on a flight. For Crane, it was an interesting change of pace to be aboard the B-24. He normally flew far smaller fighters on cold-weather tests and, in his role with the 6th Depot Repair Squadron, helped prep them for the Soviets.

  Hoskin quickly filled him in on the day’s run. They’d head east and conduct feathering tests. This required shutting down one of the B-24’s four 1,200-horsepower engines and adjusting the props until they offered the least resistance to the airflow. It’s similar to the effect of sticking your hand from a car window on the highway and finding the most aerodynamic position. This is vitally important for a plane with a failed engine. A dead prop not properly feathered can cause dangerous drag as the flat blade surface is slammed by the airstream. The need for feathering is far greater in a single-prop plane, which needs to be as trim as possible to successfully glide down without power. But feathering was still important on the multiengine bombers to avoid straining the remaining engines. The onrushing air could also turn the props if not properly feathered, something logically known as windmilling. This can make the plane harder to handle and mess up the inner workings with negative torque, which means the propellers are driving the engine mechanisms rather than the reverse. In other words, it’s better to have no engine than one with the props turning on their own. Feathering is a standard test, but nothing in Alaska’s supercold is routine.

  Crane had heard all the hair-raising stories as soon as he arrived on base: the crashes, near misses, and how systems simply went dead in midflight. For combat crews, such talk would seem foolhardy. Among the many superstitions on the battlefield was keeping gossip to a minimum about missions that ended badly. What’s the point in tempting fate? At Ladd, though, there was no antiaircraft flak or enemy fighters to worry about. The common foe was the winter weather. The thinking went: the more the pilots swapped theories about frozen flaps or cold-clogged oil lines, the better the chances of anticipating a problem in flight. Plus, Cold Nose duty was an open-ended proposition. Combat aircrews were usually sent home after a couple dozen missions or so. Each time back at base was one step closer to getting those see-you-later papers. At Ladd, some pilots logged thousands of hours over many months with no finish line in sight.

  Among the latest Ladd stories involved two B-24s and a cursed stretch in February 1943, eight months before Crane’s arrival. On February 4, a B-24D took off from Anchorage on a mission to photograph a solar eclipse while heading to Ladd. Fourteen people were aboard. Two engines failed, and the pilots were unable to properly feather them. They managed to ditch the aircraft in a snowfield. All survived, although some suffered severe frostbite before rescue. Eight days later, another B-24 mission was staged to mimic the conditions of the previous flight, suspecting that the cold had fouled up the hydraulic and oil lines. Two engines were shut down with instructions to feather them and then allow them to windmill. The plane went into a nosedive. All seven aboard were killed.

  Crane’s job as copilot included eyeballing the plane, checking the fuel, and loading the parachutes. He needed a bit of extra time with the big bomber. Crane was far more familiar with the P-39 Airacobra fighter, which could fit under the shadow of a B-24 wing.

  “How’s it going, Leon?” yelled Hoskin over the hangar din. Hoskin’s baby-face cheeks seemed perpetually chapped by the weather. But he had a closer relationship with cold than most from “outside,” which is what longtime Alaskans call the rest of the world. In the Hoskin family home back in Maine, there was no heat in the upstairs bedrooms. The family oven-baked soapstone to use as bed warmers.

  We look good to go? said Hoskin.

  Crane gave a thumbs-up with his sheepskin-lined mittens. We’re good, Crane shouted back.

  Crane and Hoskin left the hangar and climbed aboard the B-24 through the open bomb bay. They first wanted to make sure all was fine with First Lieutenant James B. Sibert, a prop specialist in charge of the equipment to measure the feathering tests and monitor related aspects, such as engine oil pressure. Sibert, a new arrival from Wright Field in Ohio, set up in the rear of the plane. Hoskin and Crane then squeezed along the narrow catwalk through the center of the aircraft. They ducked past the radio operator’s post and into the cockpit. On their radio, they rechecked the crew.

  “All set,” said Sibert.

  “Roger,” added radio operator Staff Sergeant Ralph Wenz, who was in the nook directly behind the cockpit.

  “All good,” said the crew chief, Master Sergeant Richard Pompeo, who assisted with takeoff procedures from a hatch behind Hoskin.

  Outside, a ground crew engineer manually rotated the propellers on each of the engines to clear any excess fuel or oil in the combustion chambers. A fire extinguisher was always on hand. B-24 engines had been known to flare up when the batteries were switched on. Crane stuck his head out the cockpit to check the flaps and rudders.

  Crane jabbed the engine prime pump and made sure the fuel mixture was on auto lean, increasing the air level in the fuel to avoid fouling the spark plugs. Hoskin pulled back the throttle to about one-third open. The first engine to fire up was number three, which was closest to the copilot and powered the hydraulics. Engine four, farther out on the copilot’s wing, was next. Then engines two and one on the pilot’s side. Crane checked the engine temperatur
e and oil pressure. All fine.

  Just before 9:40 a.m., the Iceberg Inez taxied out. A salmon-colored smudge of dawn painted the southeast sky. The sun, however, wouldn’t poke above the horizon for another hour.

  Crane looked over at Hoskin. Not bad, Crane smiled. We got off on time for once.

  In winter, crews lobbied hard to be among the first flights of the day. After a dozen or so takeoffs, the runway could be shrouded in superchilled exhaust clouds. It’s an effect known well in Alaska as “caribou fog,” describing how herds become covered in an icy mist from their own breath.

  Crane flicked the fuel mixture to auto rich, cutting down on the air ratio in the fuel lines. External flaps were set at a 20 percent angle. Hoskin pulled down on the four throttle levers. The big plane lumbered down the runway toward takeoff speed, about 110 miles per hour. It was only slightly more than needed to get the P-39 off the ground. But to Crane it felt much slower in the bomber, sitting more than seventeen feet above the tarmac instead of hugging the ground in the fighter. He kept a careful eye on the supercharger pressure, which registers the flow of compressed air into the engine for greater efficiency.

  The nose lifted. Hoskin pulled back on the yoke. The Iceberg Inez climbed.

  Hoskin banked the plane to the southeast, directly into the wind. He wanted to check out a place called Big Delta, site of a smaller air base about sixty miles to the southeast. Hoskin arrived in Alaska in late October—more than two weeks after Crane—and was eager to learn nearby landmarks on the ground.

  They flew into the wind, down the Tanana River valley. Rolling hills rise along its banks. From the air, only a few dots of green spruce were seen as the gloss from the coming sunrise touched the high ground. In the Alaskan interior, the early winter storms do not melt until spring. Snow sits heavy on the spruce and glazes the barren birch and other trees in near-postcard perfection.