81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  Ragle checked the instruments at the end of the climb. They were at nine hundred feet; airspeed was ninety miles per hour. If their ambush plan worked, the Japanese warships should be right below. Marks put the plane into a dive. Just before six hundred feet, while still in the clouds, they dropped the bombs.

  The first two 1,110-pounders detonated in the sea, kicking up monstrous columns of water. There appeared to be some slight damage to the back deck of the carrier, but far from a decisive blow. The third, and last, bomb had a quicker trigger and exploded above the vessels. As Ragle would later say: “All hell broke loose.” The shock wave was strong enough to tip the tail of Ragle’s plane in a queasy pirouette. They regained control, but the instruments had gone loopy from the jolt. It was time to get away.

  They guessed the direction back to the Aleutians and rode in a cloak of clouds back to Umnak, a garrison island of volcanoes and geysers about midway in the Aleutian chain. Despite the island’s awesome landscape, probably the most photographed site was the “Umnak National Forest”: a single tree flown in for the enjoyment of a colonel’s dog named Skooch.

  For five more days, Ragle’s B-17B limped around the Aleutians and into the Bering Sea on various search-and-destroy missions, once mistaking a flattop island for a Japanese carrier and later nearly crashing into a cloud-shrouded mountain. They had to pull up so quickly that some bombs broke away from their cradles and smashed shut the bomb-bay doors. There was not even enough downtime to plug the .50-caliber holes, which made the tail section look like a colander. By the time it was clear the bulk of the Japanese fleet was being pulled back from the Dutch Harbor offensive, the crew had a total of six hours of sleep. Meals were two thin sandwiches a day and rainwater dripping off the wings during refueling stops.

  On June 11, pilot Marks was too exhausted to keep flying and was left at a base to rest.

  I’ll catch up with you later, Ragle told Marks. I’ll take the ship back toward Anchorage.

  Take care, Marks said from his cot. See you soon.

  Ragle stopped for refueling on Kodiak Island. There were only a few aircraft at the field. Every plane that could get off the ground was farther down the Aleutians. Ragle’s plane—holes and all—was just what the field commander needed. Ragle was put in charge of a slapped-together mission to help a Navy troop transport ship under attack from a Japanese submarine. There was just one hitch. There were no bombs or ammo for Ragle’s plane. The munitions depots were emptied over the days of fighting. The only “weapon” on board was a heavy metal tool chest. Ragle cynically figured he could take out a single gun on the surfaced sub with a lucky throw. He decided on a bluff move instead. Ragle lined up the plane as if in a bombing run on the sub. Luckily, it worked. The sub dove and broke off the attack.

  But the days of high pressure and little sleep were catching up. Ragle was having a hard time keeping it together. Spells of dizziness were increasing, and he often had to rest his head on the cockpit window until it passed. Back at Kodiak, Ragle collapsed in a bunk for some sleep.

  Ragle awoke five days later in a hospital bed. He had fallen unconscious after his temperature sunk to critical levels. The nurse said they didn’t think he would make it. Ragle was shipped back to Ladd Field for recovery. It would be ninety days before he was allowed back in a cockpit. During that time, Marks was back in the air. He died days later when his bomber was shot down.

  Japanese amphibious forces, meanwhile, had staked out smaller targets while the Dutch Harbor battles raged, seizing control of two lightly defended Aleutian sites, Attu and Kiska. On Attu—near the western tip of the chain and closer to Sapporo than Anchorage—more than one thousand Japanese soldiers stormed a settlement with fewer than fifty people. One resident was killed, and the rest were sent to a prison camp in Japan. Attu schoolteacher Etta Jones said they passed the time sewing little silk bags for the religious items carried by Japanese soldiers. About a third of the Attu detainees died in Japanese camps. On Kiska, about two hundred miles toward the Alaskan mainland, a Japanese force of about five hundred marines came ashore and overran a U.S. Navy weather station with ten men and a dog. One soldier in the weather detachment managed to escape and survived fifty days roaming the island’s back hills, eating grass, plants, and earthworms until starvation forced him to surrender. He weighed eighty pounds.

  The Japanese held Attu for nearly a year, while the Americans waited until spring to stage a counterattack. They even told the Japanese it was coming. Japanese-language leaflets were dropped on the Aleutians during the long winter. They were among the most deviously creative attempts at mind games from the Army’s Psychological Warfare Teams—and this time with unusual consulting help from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The messages were shaped like the brown leaf of a kiri tree. It’s a powerful symbol of loss and regret for the Japanese. In the famous Japanese play The Kiri Leaf Falls, a fluttering leaf represents the end of the power-grab ambitions of the play’s central characters. “The Kiri leaf falls,” the U.S. message read. “Its fall is the ill omen of the inevitable downfall of militarism. With the fall of one Kiri leaf comes sadness and bad luck. Before spring comes again the raining bombs of America, just like Kiri leaves fluttering to the ground, will bring bad fate and misfortune.”

  It did little to shake the Japanese. More than two thousand Japanese troops were defending Attu when U.S. forces began a counteroffensive in May 1943. With little natural cover, the two sides were largely exposed to whatever was thrown at them. The Japanese, however, couldn’t hold out indefinitely without fresh supplies. In the end, with defeat only a matter of time, Japanese soldiers raced at the American lines in banzai suicide charges. A U.S. Army photo shows the bodies of Imperial Army soldiers piled atop each other—mowed down in formation by U.S. fire—on an open stretch of crowberry and sedge. Only a few dozen Japanese occupiers were still alive to surrender after weeks of fighting. On Kiska, meanwhile, the Japanese force slipped away under cover of fog without a fight.

  Back in the Ladd Field weather room, Ragle took the charts and ran his finger over the known course of the B-24.

  The exchange with the flight scheduling officer had him thinking. The officer was right in one sense, of course. It was futile to keep looking in the same area for the plane. But it also was a foolhardy strategy to have the searchers winging off in random directions.

  Ragle scanned the map. A spine of mountains runs to the east of Big Delta. The Charley River is on the other side. Ragle wondered if the Iceberg Inez could have veered off that way. Maybe. But it was too risky to send planes over in questionable weather. One crew lost was enough. Let’s not compound it. More often than most, Ragle faced the quandary of rescue leaders anywhere: how to balance the scope of a search against the risks for the searchers. There’s one fundamental rule: don’t turn one tragedy into potentially two.

  No, thought Ragle, the search will continue in the Big Delta area. Maybe if the weather predictions are accurate, they can use the greater visibility to expand the search perimeter in the coming days. But he also knew what it meant as the “results negative” reports piled up. It was becoming a total crapshoot.

  We’re looking for a bit of luck now, he told the crews at Ladd. We need it.

  Ragle knew what he was talking about. Finding wrecks, as well as possible survivors, is not easy even when searchers know where to look.

  With Crane’s B-24, they didn’t even have that. But Ragle tried to stay upbeat. The B-24 is a big target. The wing area alone is almost 1,050 square feet. That’s more than some two-bedroom apartments. The glass turrets in the nose, tail, and top can glint sunlight as well as any signaling instrument.

  Ragle filled out the flight roster for the Christmas Eve search missions. All were still directed toward Big Delta. Ragle looked it over again. He then crossed out one route and redirected it north, the opposite direction from Big Delta.

  It was against his instincts to send a plane on a l
ong shot, but time was fading and the Big Delta runs were bringing back nothing. Ragle assigned Lieutenant Arthur Jordan, an airman from Maine, to head toward Fort Yukon. The winds were coming from the southeast the day of the crash. Maybe, Ragle guessed, the B-24 was pushed toward the Yukon.

  “A desolate, God-forsaken part of the world,” Jordan later wrote in his diary after returning from the December 24 run. “We were able to see very well. Most of our area was clear. It was cold up there, flying close to the ground and straining our eyes for any glimpse of distress signals or wreckage.

  “The job is beginning to look hopeless now. I think the ship either blew up for some reason or rammed into a mountain trying to get below the overcast. Went to midnight Mass tonight. There was a big attendance.”

  In Washington, it was nearly sunrise on Christmas Day. The newspapers carried accounts and analysis of the president’s third yuletide address since Pearl Harbor. This time, Roosevelt wanted to reach beyond the morality play of freedom versus tyranny and remind Americans of tangible gains on the battlefield. The year 1943 saw some Allied setbacks. German U-boats also continued to menace Atlantic shipping routes. But there were strategic Allied gains in Sicily and North Africa and on the Russian front. In February on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, the last Japanese units abandoned their posts after six months of battles against U.S.-led forces on beaches and in jungles. In August, north of Bucharest, refineries were blasted by B-24s flown out of Libya in a bold mission that degraded some of Germany’s oil lifeline, but Axis gunners were waiting and American losses were heavy.

  As Ragle plotted the search for Crane and his crewmates, British Lancaster bombers—the Manchester-built cousin of the B-24—were leading another raid on Berlin.

  “But on Christmas Eve this year, I can say to you that, at last, we may look forward into the future with real, substantial confidence that, however great the cost, peace on earth, goodwill toward men can be and will be realized and ensured,” Roosevelt said in his radio address, reaching Ladd Field via Fairbanks’s KFAR radio. “This year I can say that. Last year, I could not do more than express a hope.”

  “American boys are fighting today in snow-covered mountains, in malarial jungles, on blazing deserts,” he said near the end of the address. “They are fighting on the far stretches of the sea and above the clouds, and fighting for the thing for which they struggle.”

  That night in the Yukon, Crane watched the purple and green ribbons of the aurora dance through the breaks in the clouds.

  Four

  June 23, 1994

  Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve

  A helicopter banked over the Charley River valley in late June 1994. From this height, the water glistened silver-gray among the spruce and birch.

  “There it is,” said the pilot, maneuvering the chopper closer to a hillside about 120 miles due east of Fairbanks.

  Below, shining in the same metallic hues as the river, was the resting place of the B-24D, whose paint had been burned away by the fire in the crash. Decades of subarctic weather scrubbed away whatever was left, leaving only the gleaming raw steel and other metal. The wreckage spilled over slabs of granite, ancient greenstone, and quartz-laced shards churned up by the same tectonic forces that formed Alaska’s ranges and drained away teeming Jurassic seas.

  The nose of the Iceberg Inez and its two inner engines were shattered and scattered as if lopped off with a giant hammer. Other parts of the wings, incredibly, withstood the impact. Some of the wing lines were as sharp and clean as the day the plane left Ladd Field. But two huge spaces—like missing teeth in a smile—were gouged out from the wings when the outer engines ripped away. The steel propeller blades, dinged and scarred from slicing into the rocks, stood like sentinels on the edge of the debris field.

  Portions of the bomber’s internal frame jutted from the twisted and folded metal.

  It all spoke of details that Crane couldn’t have seen as he watched the plane pinwheel into the snow. The B-24 apparently struck nose first. The force sheared away everything down to the wings. But the Iceberg Inez must have been falling flat enough to avoid disintegrating the rear sections and was likely skidding to a stop when fire swallowed the entire wreckage.

  The prop specialist, Sibert, was farthest back in the plane. He could have had a minuscule chance of surviving the crash, but apparently had no way to get out. He could well have perished as the flames spread during the plane’s plummet. The space where Crane last saw Hoskin struggling with his chute was obliterated. If he didn’t bail out, then he was certainly killed when it struck the hillside.

  The starboard wing, the side where Crane sat, pointed downhill toward the river. Over the decades, a few trees sprouted around the crumpled fuselage.

  From the helicopter, local National Park Service historian Douglas Beckstead pressed his face to the glass. He had, of course, heard about the crash site as he researched the rich lore of the wilderness preserve, which covers the entire Charley basin and a portion of the much bigger Yukon River, stretching to the Canadian border. The region has been home to prehistoric nomads hunting caribou, Native tribes hunting for fishing grounds, and prospectors hunting gold. And one crash site where an iconic bomber from World War II dropped from the sky.

  War is always a negative-sum outcome. It subtracts, removes, empties. No one who has witnessed combat can, with any honesty, describe it another way. “We know more about war than we know about peace,” said five-star general Omar Bradley in an Armistice Day address a few years after the end of World War II, “more about killing than we know about living.” Think of it like this. For every soldier’s grave in places such as Arlington or Anzio or Normandy, there are more forgotten burial sites for civilians—parents, children, newlyweds, and newborns—claimed in some way by the same fighting.

  Digital-age warriors can tap the precision of microchips and lasers to try to pinpoint attacks. But old-style firepower—with wide and random killing range—still occupies arsenals around the world and will be there for a long time: missiles, mortar rounds, artillery, and bombs for air strikes. Combatants die and suffer. So do people caught in the middle. No euphemisms—such as counting civilian casualties as “collateral damage”—can cloud this fact. Another phrase coined from the battlefield describes a nation’s fighting forces as its war machine. This one is on point. The science of warfare is, at its core, about finding ways to build new tools to scare, shock, and raze.

  Never have the world’s industrial giants been more focused on that task than during World War II. Japanese powerhouse Mitsubishi produced the feared Zero fighters; Kawasaki developed a light bomber that later was converted to the infamous kamikaze craft near the end of the war. Germany’s Krupp manufacturing dynasty built U-boats. The United Kingdom responded by cranking out more sub-hunting Corvette escort ships from the Harland and Wolff shipyards.

  Nothing, though, compared with the wartime audacity of the B-24.

  It literally cast a huge shadow. The hulking, fearsome glass-nosed bomber came to exemplify the American war effort as much as buying bonds or collecting scrap metal. Airpower had redefined conflict in the short decades since the first gun was bolted onto a plane. Control of the skies quickly became as important in the overall strategy as holding a line or capturing a hill. World War II made every military look skyward. America’s government vaults were thrown open to keep pace. Suddenly, there was a generation of airmen to train and new fleets of planes to build. No expense seemed too high, no plan too outrageous. The B-24 literally rode into the skies on this spirit of urgency.

  In the popular mind, meanwhile, the plane became indelibly linked to the blitz of wartime propaganda. Homespun actor Jimmy Stewart flew missions in Europe in one. The always-suave Clark Gable, then a first lieutenant, posed for publicity photos aboard a B-24 while on military assignment in England, making Army combat films with a B-17 squadron. But perhaps the biggest feel-good bonanza w
as a fictional character, Rosie the Riveter, the archetype of the bandanna-clad woman doing her part to build fighting machines for the men on the front. The song “Rosie the Riveter” became a hit in 1942, and Crane and his crewmates certainly knew the words:

  Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage

  Sitting up there on the fuselage

  That little frail can do more than a male can do

  Rosie, brrrrrrrrrrr, the riveter

  The precise origins of Rosie are blurry. Some believe it was based on a woman from a California factory line. Others think a Canadian gal was the inspiration. In May 1943, Norman Rockwell came up with his own vision: a muscled-up Rosie for the Saturday Evening Post with a rivet gun on her lap and her penny loafers resting on a copy of Mein Kampf.

  But the American government—hand in hand with Hollywood—wanted to cast the right Rosie for a short inspirational film. Scouts blanketed the country. On the list was Michigan’s Willow Run Aircraft Factory, built by the Ford Motor Company specifically for the B-24. The eighty-acre assembly-line floor was pumping out B-24s at a furious pace and with some novel innovations. Flight crews slept on factory cots so they could get airborne within hours of the last bolts being tightened. A team of midgets—as they were called then—was put to work crawling into tight spaces to buck some of the plane’s more than 313,000 rivets. Women were part of every step of the B-24 construction. For those who had doubts about factory work, wartime film clips tried to sell the idea that it was well suited for a female touch. “The rivets are but the buttons of a bomber,” said one pitch.