81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  Midnight was near. His buddies at Ladd would soon raise a glass to welcome 1944 and make the toasts of all soldiers in all wars: loudly to victory, but privately to the hope that the coming year would see them head home. Many still buzzed about the USO visit a few days earlier headlined by the elegant Ingrid Bergman, fresh off her latest movie, the Hemingway classic For Whom the Bell Tolls. Some others, like Crane’s Mississippi roommate, Stud, might take a swig in Crane’s memory. The clocks had ticked past twelve long before on the East Coast. No doubt it was more somber with his parents on Baltimore Avenue. Their son was missing somewhere in Alaska and, in the minds of many, would never return.

  Crane stopped. Again, it was decision time.

  Make the right one, he told himself. There is no room for error. Here’s how it stood: To continue onward into the night was packed with perils. His hands were too numb to attempt to light a match for a fire. What if he dropped them in the snow while trying? It was colder tonight than any since the crash. It’s unthinkable that he could ride out the rest of the night without a fire if he stopped walking.

  The best move was the most painful one. Crane knew he had to turn around if he had any hope of returning to the cabin.

  It was crushing to retreat. All his hope, which drove him ahead for twelve hours, drained away in an instant. He would not be saved. There was no village. No easy way home. He was alone. Suddenly, Crane felt the vastness of the wilderness again. This time, though, it was not to marvel at the stars or the shimmering northern lights. He now felt only small, vulnerable, and scared.

  Crane remembered the raisins. He hadn’t touched them since leaving the cabin. He dug into his pockets. Crane stuffed them in his mouth as he stood motionlessly on the frozen river. He then turned around to look at his tracks, which were a faint shadow in the eggshell-white snow.

  It was 1944 now. The hours began to blur. Often, Crane wandered off course until he stumbled onto the rocks on the river’s edge. Each fall was another punishment for his hands. He tried to keep them pulled deep into the sleeves of his parka. But instinct took over with every tumble. His hands would poke out as he tried to cushion his fall. The front of his parka was encrusted with ice from his breath. Icicles hung from his nose. It hurt too much to brush them off.

  To stop was to give up. To give up was to perish. Crane had no idea how many hours had passed. His concentration was riveted on trying to follow the path of broken snow and keeping his legs moving. One breath, one step. Crane was like the machines he loved: all about function, movement, efficiency. There was no room for anything else. Don’t think, just do.

  Dawn came. That meant it had been twenty-hour hours since he had set off. Still, there was no sign of the cabin. He knew he couldn’t easily walk past it since his outbound tracks were still clear. But the landscape was no real help. Crane paid little attention while heading out, thinking he was only moments away from rescue.

  It was close to noon—about thirty hours of walking—before Crane saw the cabin’s outline.

  Crane staggered through the small door. He stayed awake long enough to make a fire, using all his focus. He pulled out his parachute, which was tucked inside his parka for extra protection. He wrapped himself in its silk folds. Crane collapsed into the bunk.

  He didn’t leave it for forty-eight hours.

  Hunger finally forced Crane to his feet. He took that as an encouraging sign. The raisins and cocoa must have been enough to stop his starved body from flipping off more biological switches. There were still the sugar, tallow, and baking powder in the cabin’s supplies. He wondered what he could make that would be reasonably edible. Crane then remembered that he never looked under the second tarp in the stilt-raised shelter.

  He climbed the ladder and yanked away the covering. There were two large boxes. Crane read the stenciled name. Phil Berail. Then the next line. Woodchopper, Alaska. He didn’t remember seeing Woodchopper on any of his flight charts. Or was that even a town? Could it be this guy Berail’s profession?

  He used a hammer to pry open one box. Burlap bags were inside. He tore into them.

  My God, Crane stammered. Why the hell didn’t I look here before? It was, without exaggeration, salvation. The backcountry version of lifesaving flotsam to a shipwrecked soul.

  The abundance was staggering.

  flour, twenty-five pounds

  rice, thirty pounds

  dried beef and beans, thirty pounds

  The next box was perhaps more generous:

  a bearskin

  a wool blanket

  two pairs of overalls

  long underwear

  three pairs of wool socks

  two pairs of mukluks (not the military-issue kind, Crane noted, but the superior traditional style)

  snowshoes

  a .22-caliber rifle with ammunition

  candles

  and more food: tea, dried eggs, powdered soup mix, dried onions, sugar, another can of cocoa

  What’s this? Crane pulled out the last item at the bottom of the box: moose-hide mittens.

  Crane carefully lugged the supplies into the cabin. The bearskin, blanket, and clothes were piled on the bunk. The food was stacked near the stove.

  He then got down to making a meal. Tallow went first into the frying pan. He dumped in two handfuls of flour and some baking soda. In a second pot, he melted snow and brought it to a boil. He tossed in rice and sugar. Crane finished with hot cocoa.

  He finally made his New Year’s toast. It went to a stranger named Berail.

  Nine

  August 31, 2006

  64 Degrees 49.072 Minutes North,

  143 Degrees 31.361 Minutes West

  Doug Beckstead watched the military forensic team move with crisp precision around the wreckage.

  The dig leader, anthropologist Gregory L. Fox, wanted to set up camp as soon as possible and get work started. Their window was small. Snow was not impossible in late August. The weather in 2006 was already uncommonly threatening. Low temperatures were dancing around the freezing mark in one of the coldest snaps on record for this time of year in the Charley River valley. Sporadic rain—sometimes near the verge of sleet—rode in on north winds.

  Fox wiped the lenses on his square glasses, covered with dirt kicked up by the two Black Hawk helicopters that had ferried them from Fort Wainwright, the former Ladd Field.

  “Let’s get going,” Fox urged. “We have a lot of work.”

  The team didn’t need coaching. They had been through this before many times.

  A search perimeter was set up, fanning out from the shattered fuselage and wings. Tents sprang into place, sleeping bags were rolled out, and generators were switched on. Bits of debris and rocks—some coated with melted aluminum from the B-24’s fireball—were cleared away from the first grid marked out for the dig.

  Some members of the eight-person search team, wearing sweatshirts and fleeces against the growing chill, crouched close to the rocky soil at an elevation fifteen hundred feet above the Charley. Their trowels began to scrap at the ground, clearing fractions of an inch at a time.

  The team planned to spend a week at the site. Then they were looking forward to some rest. The Charley River was the second leg of a summer mission in Alaska. Earlier in August, they were on Alaska’s rugged Kenai Peninsula, south of Anchorage, at the crash site of a Catalina Flying Boat that went down during the Aleutian battles in 1942. It was a near certainty that the pilots’ remains were at that site. It was just a question of finding them.

  The wreckage of the Iceberg Inez had less clarity for the searchers.

  Only Beckstead was convinced that Hoskin’s remains were there. It was essentially a gut feeling, but one increasingly bolstered by his own research and evidence. Beckstead had uncovered bits of gear, including parachute buckles, during his visits to the Iceberg Ine
z since his first stop in 1994 on the helicopter trip. As his research piled up, Beckstead never bought into the theories that Hoskin could have bailed out at the last moment.

  His persistence paid off. He sent some bone fragments to the U.S. military, believing they could be human remains. They weren’t. But the parachute buckles and other items were enough to move the crash site high on the priority list. The Pentagon decided to send experts in field forensics to the site. The military also allowed Beckstead to tag along as an observer and National Park Service liaison. Still, there was nothing stronger to go on than Beckstead’s hunches and his collection of random debris.

  “It was one of those roll-the-dice situations,” said Fox, a Nebraska-based expert who had led dozens of missions around the world for the Pentagon’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, known as JPAC.

  The unit, pronounced Jay-Pak, is often the last of any American boots on the ground in many former battlefields and crash sites.

  Their undertaking, in the widest sense, seeks to write wartime epilogues that were once out of reach. Until the twentieth century, a soldier missing in action most likely remained missing. The fighters knew it. So did their families. It had been that way since antiquity. Rarely were bodies returned for funerals. Instead, their battles and deeds were celebrated in poems, fables, or song. Students of imperial Rome know well the many tales built around the mysterious fate of the Ninth Legion, which was last seen during clashes with tribes in Britain in the northern reaches of the empire. Centuries earlier, Herodotus recounted a tantalizing head-scratcher about a fifty-thousand-strong Persian force that disappeared in the Egyptian desert.

  And even if someone wanted to comb the old battlegrounds, the corpses hold their secrets tightly. Few soldiers before World War I carried formal military identification, and the dead often ended up in mass graves or were left where they fell. Some soldiers during the Civil War made their own dog tags from wood or metal disks. But the lack of standardized ID made identification a sketchy proposition at best. Modern advances in postmortem detection, such as dental records, offered new tools to give a name to the remains of someone missing in action. Vietnam was a turning point.

  The Pentagon opened an identification lab in Thailand in 1973, focusing on MIAs across Indochina. There had been previous labs following the Korean War, but the Thailand-based facility was a chance to employ new forensic techniques. The lab shifted to Hawaii three years later. Its mandate also expanded to cover cases from all conflicts involving U.S. personnel, including the Cold War. Various units merged in 2003 to form JPAC.

  Nearly all its cases are from World War II and conflicts since. But some reach back earlier. Just a few weeks after the JPAC mission to the Charley River site, the remains of a World War I veteran, Francis Lupo, were interred at Arlington National Cemetery. In the casket were fragments of bone and teeth recovered from a French field. JPAC labs have also analyzed the remains of crew members from the Civil War ironclad warship USS Monitor, which sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras on the last day of 1862. The pieces of bone and teeth were studied after a lengthy process to desalinate the remains and remove ocean sediment. It was determined they belonged to two of the sixteen seamen lost in the sinking—one likely in his late teens and the other in his thirties—but experts did not have enough evidence to pinpoint their identities.

  More than eighty-three thousand U.S. military personnel are listed as missing in action or killed in action and not recovered since Pearl Harbor. The overwhelming majority—more than seventy-three thousand—were listed alongside Hoskin as veterans from World War II.

  Beckstead stayed to the side as the investigators moved ahead with their work. Dirt was sifted through quarter-inch metal mesh. Some soil was still so saturated with oil from the crash that it was picked through by hand. A military photographer documented each step. Also on hand was an explosives expert in case the cold-weather test flight had munitions that were never listed in the military reports.

  It was a moment of runaway emotion for Beckstead.

  Since his first impromptu visit in 1994, Beckstead had pored over any material he could find on the crash, including a detailed 1944 account in the American magazine under Crane’s byline but crafted from an extensive interview by a celebrity journalist team of Gerold Frank and James D. Horan. Frank pioneered the “as-told-to” biography whose subjects included Judy Garland and Zsa Zsa Gabor, who once said she told Frank “more than I would ever tell a psychiatrist.” Horan was a prolific writer of historical nonfiction, including Wild West tales about desperadoes, lawmen, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  Beckstead returned to the crash site several times, poking through the debris and crash-rippled metal. Hoskin was always on his mind. The pilot remained the biggest question mark from the crash. The crew chief, Pompeo, bailed out. No one doubted that. The fates of the two other airmen, the radio operator, Wenz, and the prop specialist, Sibert, were known.

  A military investigation filed December 22, 1944—a year and a day after the B-24 plunged from the sky—concluded that Hoskin and Pompeo “cannot be presumed to be living” and recommended their status be changed from missing to deceased. It further dismissed the speculation that Crane may have seen Hoskin’s chute. The pilot, the report said, “would normally be the last to jump. He was still in the plane when Lieutenant Crane bailed out.”

  Most of JPAC recovery efforts are still in the jungle highlands and tropical coasts of Southeast Asia, but cold-climate missions occur with some regularity. In 2013 on a Greenland glacier, surveillance cameras probing thirty-eight feet under the ice sheet spotted cables believed part of an amphibious Grumman Duck aircraft that disappeared during a snowstorm in 1942 carrying three crew members. In June 2012 JPAC teams began work on an Alaskan glacier after a military helicopter spotted the wreckage of a C-124 cargo plane that went down in November 1952. Eleven crew members died in the crash.

  In comparison, the site above the Charley River was easy despite the weather. The subfreezing chill was enough to keep away Alaska’s dreaded summertime mosquitoes. “Cold, wet, windy,” recalled Fox. But there were advantages. The soil has relatively low acidity, which aids in the preservation of human remains. The fire that engulfed the B-24 also served to slightly harden the bone fragments that were not burned to cinders.

  One area of high interest for the forensic team was shielded by a bent strut from the fuselage. It acted as a bit of a canopy from the harshest weather and kept plants from taking root. Animals, too, were blocked from rummaging through the soil. Here, some of the most promising artifacts emerged.

  More than 102 square meters—about the footprint of a small home—were covered by the JPAC teams, digging to an average depth of about 10 centimeters, or nearly 4 inches. Clear plastic evidence bags began to fill.

  “Here’s something!” one of the diggers shouted excitedly. The others rushed over to see. Dirt was brushed away from the object.

  It was the eagle insignia from the cap of an officer in the Army Air Forces.

  Leon Crane, right, with his father Louis, who emigrated in 1913 from Ukraine to Philadelphia along with his wife Sonia. Crane had a letter from his father in his parka when he bailed from the crippled B-24. The letter helped Crane make a life-saving fire as he waited for a rescue that never came. Courtesy of the Crane family

  Leon Crane during training as a military aviator. Crane was called up by the Army Air Forces in 1941 just months after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Courtesy of the Crane family

  The row house at 5464 Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia where Crane spent much of his boyhood with his two brothers and a sister. The neighborhood became a magnet for immigrants as the city’s trolley lines pushed outward. Author photo

  Second Lieutenant Harold E. Hoskin of Houlton, Maine. Hoskin’s wife Mary was pregnant at the time of the B-24 crash. The couple believed they would have a boy. Instead, Mar
y gave birth to a daughter who, as a young girl, imagined that her father would one day walk through the door. Courtesy of John and Mary Hoskin

  Master Sergeant Richard Pompeo, the only member of the B-24’s crew still missing. Pompeo bailed out of the plane just seconds before Crane, but was only wearing a plug-in flight suit that offered almost no protection against the cold. Courtesy of the Pompeo family

  A B-24 bomber at Ladd Field outside Fairbanks. Ground crews were constantly advised about the dangers of winters in interior Alaska, where even brief exposure can lead to frostbite. US Army

  Staff Sergeant Ralph Wenz, the radio operator on the B-24. Wenz was no stranger to the rigors of Alaskan aviation. He worked on mail routes around the territory for several years before the war. Courtesy of Ann Chambers Noble and the Wenz family

  The head of Ladd Field’s search-and-rescue wing, Major R. C. Ragle, who came north to teach geology but became enamored by the adventure of Alaska’s bush pilot culture before the war. Ragle’s military career included air combat with Japanese invading forces in the Aleutians, the only major battle of the war in North America. Courtesy of John Linn Ragle

  The enlisted men’s barracks at Ladd Field, where winter amenities were so sparse that they earned nicknames such as Pneumonia Gulch. US Army

  An aerial view of Ladd Field during the war years. The massive Hangar 1 still dominates the base. US Army