81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  Yet there was no way to keep it secret from anyone who ventured to Fairbanks. The Reds had full run of the town—then about four thousand people with just a few paved streets—and explored all it had to offer. One well-known stop on the footloose trail was a rustic red-light district known as the Line, where the working girls would place a curtain over their front cabin window as a sign they were otherwise engaged with a client. The Line was surrounded by a twelve-foot clapboard fence to protect, the town fathers said, the “sensibilities” of women and children. It was a bit of chivalrous overkill. In 1940s Fairbanks just about every vice was in ample supply. It was hard to walk one hundred feet without passing a saloon. Bets could be placed on just about anything, including the day’s temperature. For a slightly less tawdry outing, the list of nightspots included the Graehl-O-Bar, with “Fritz on the piano with old time tunes” and “Thelma and her accordion.”

  The Soviets also received special attention. A longtime bush pilot, Jack Jefford recalled how a representative for General Motors was sent to Fairbanks to keep in constant contact with the Soviets about their impressions of the P-39 engine, which was made by a GM division. The GM liaison knew his customers’ tastes. He kept cases of Old Grand-Dad whiskey on hand. “His job was to keep the Russians happy as far as those engines were concerned,” said Jefford. “And there’s nothing like a case of Grand-Dad to keep a Russian happy.”

  For the Soviet troops, however, the star attraction in Fairbanks was the shops. Here was eye-popping abundance compared to the state-regulated life back home. They gobbled up Fairbanks’s fare at a voracious clip: nylons, chocolate, lipstick for wives and girlfriends at home, and—the score of all scores—real denim jeans. Alaska, not being a state, was exempt from the wartime rations imposed elsewhere. One story says an American officer overheard a conversation that went like this:

  Soviet officer: “I want shoes.”

  Store clerk: “What kind?”

  Soviet: “All kinds.”

  Clerk: “What size?”

  Soviet: “All sizes.”

  The merchants were more than happy to oblige. At a major Fairbanks department store called Gordon’s, which stretched an entire block, it was hard to keep up with the consumerism of the Communists. Silk stockings, dresses, lingerie, skirts—it all went fast. One group wasn’t so happy: the Fairbanks ladies. They groused constantly about the siphon-style shopping of the Soviets.

  Irene Noyes, who worked at Ladd, went into a store for a pair of shoes. “The saleslady looked at me and said, ‘Are you kidding? We’ve sold everything,’” she recalled.

  “It is no strange site,” wrote a Ladd captain, Richard L. Neuberger, “to see a stoic Russian pilot, who has downed his share of Nazis over Rostov or Smolensk, lapping up a marshmallow sundae with chocolate ice cream and chopped nuts at a Fairbanks drug store.”

  The Soviet cadre in Alaska also stirred all manner of cloak-and-dagger theories, including speculation of efforts to steal details of the U.S. nuclear bomb program. Such tradecraft conspiracies fail to mention the huge improbability of Manhattan Project secrets trickling all the way to Alaska or Montana. But one incident opened some genuine intrigue.

  It involved a U.S. private named John White, who was assigned as a driver for the Soviet officers. One day in July 1943, he took two Soviet officers on a tour of Fairbanks with a stop at the radio station KFAR. At the time, the station had a back room used to send secret military communiqués by the then cutting-edge technology of primitive fax machines. The tour ended at Ballaine Lake, outside Fairbanks. The Soviets said they went into the woods “to pick wildflowers.” When they returned, they claimed White had vanished. Later, investigators found White’s uniform folded neatly near the water’s edge. Authorities drained the lake and found his body. The Soviets who accompanied White were believed to be intelligence agents. But they never faced intense questioning from U.S. authorities because of the international sensitivities and the desire not to disrupt the Lend-Lease flow. The cause of death was ruled drowning, and the case was quickly closed, even though White’s friends said he was afraid of the water and would have never voluntarily gone for a dip. To this day, the case remains riddled with questions.

  After sending off the reports on the B-24 crash, Ragle went home to his tidy four-bedroom log house on Cowles Street, separated from Weeks Field by a culvert. For the first time in months, it wasn’t necessary to light a fire in the big fireplace made of river stones. The brief push into the low thirties felt downright balmy.

  Ragle, though, was not in the best of moods. He hated to be beaten by Alaska’s backcountry. The Iceberg Inez was out there, and Ragle was responsible for finding it. He wasn’t at all pleased about writing an inconclusive report. At least his family offered him some domestic downtime away from the base and its pressures. While airmen and crews were playing poker or chasing the local women, Ragle was tending to the routine of all families: homework, bills, meals. And there was also the constant home upkeep of varnishing the peeled logs and replacing the oakum caulking.

  His young son and daughter returned from Colorado after the Japanese were driven from the Aleutians. The family now had a third child and a collection of dogs, including a white Siberian husky with glacier-blue eyes. The den featured a wall for the family’s firearms, including shotguns, .30-caliber rifles, and the favorites of eldest son John: a .22 Mossberg and Savage lever-action rifle. All the kids learned how to properly handle a weapon as soon as they were strong enough to lift it. Ragle’s mania about drilling in the commandments of gun safety had a personal history. About thirty years earlier, Ragle’s uncle was accidentally shot and killed when a hunting partner fired on a rustling bush, thinking it was a deer. Ragle told the kids: a gun is always considered loaded until you have checked three times to make sure it is not, and then you still treat it as if it’s loaded.

  While Ragle fitted comfortably into Alaska’s frontier ethos, it was not so kind to his Chicago-raised wife, Jane, a statuesque presence who stood a few inches taller than her husband.

  Their first-born, John, recalled how his parents diligently researched the demands of life just below the Arctic Circle and rigged up a sunlamp for wintertime doses of vitamin D—also possibly in attempts to ease Jane’s seasonal doldrums. But Jane’s body and soul seemed to clash constantly with the Far North. She suffered from long bouts of melancholy during the twenty-hour winter darkness. At times, she was so incapacitated that chores such as wood collection and meal preparations fell to John while still in grade school. Jane also couldn’t quite find a social center of gravity. Base activities didn’t interest her. The university was a welcome haven for a while. But it quickly seemed too provincial and predictable for her sensibilities, which were shaped by the activist energy of Chicago’s Hull House community and its campaigns for social reform. After the war, Jane’s treatments for depression nearly bankrupted the family and, at one point, brought Ragle to tears after he was denied credit at the local Piggly Wiggly market.

  It was a rare breakdown. Ragle usually seemed to be in forward motion—doing his part to keep up with Alaska’s eccentric spirit.

  It’s a kind of Alaskan palimpsest: the nonstop waves of adventurers, visionaries, and misfits. They bring renewal that overlays, but never fully erases, the past. Fur trappers made room for gold rush stampeders; dogsledders passed the torch to bush pilots. Each period, though, left its mark for the next. War footing in Alaska brought its own share of splendid originals such as military advisers on cold-weather survival and tactics.

  There was a Canadian-born Arctic scholar named Vilhjalmur Stefansson. He avidly backed proposals to establish a Jewish republic in the Soviet Far East and once encouraged a small expedition to colonize a Siberian island. The only survivors were a Nome seamstress known as Ada Blackjack and the team’s cat, Vic. Stefansson’s former Arctic exploration companion, Australian adventurer and polymath Hubert Wilkins, also found his way into the ra
nks of the U.S. advisers. Wilkins led a failed attempt in 1931 to cross under the Arctic ice cap in a decommissioned U.S. submarine he named Nautilus after Captain Nemo’s vessel in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In January 1943 Wilkins boldly—or maybe recklessly—wore a light coat and no hat while posing for photos around military personnel bundled up against the subzero.

  Meanwhile, out on the Aleutians, a group of soldier-journalists was preparing the first edition of a base newspaper. The newsroom of the Adakian at the garrison on Adak Island was led by another singular personality brought north by the war: the dean of the hard-boiled detective novel, Dashiell Hammett.

  Hammett’s best creative years were already a decade behind, with The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man coming in a literary burst in the 1930s. After that, he drifted along in socialist political currents, which carried him into the American Communist Party and, for a time, as a leading proponent of keeping the United States out of the war. At the same time, his lover, the prolific playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman, was dismayed by the Nazi’s anti-Semitic policies and became a leading voice of alarm in America about the Third Reich.

  Like many—including the original Lend-Lease opponents—Hammett’s views on neutrality took an about-face after Pearl Harbor. He somehow wrangled a place back in uniform despite being emaciated and weakened from tuberculosis lingering from World War I. The now Corporal Hammett was shipped off to Adak and got permission to put out the mimeographed newspaper. The trial edition came out January 19, 1944, and Hammett soon recruited a staff that included future journalistic standouts such as Bernard Kalb.

  About two months later, actress Olivia de Havilland made a morale-boosting stop in Adak and met with the crew from the paper. Hammett penned a letter to Hellman about the starlet’s visit. “She seems nice,” he wrote.

  As a matter of strict fact, she seemed a little more than that to me, but I’m not unmindful of the fact that she’s the first woman I’ve really talked to in nearly nine months. The softness is what really gets you. Suddenly you realize that everything you’ve touched for months and months has been harsh in texture. . . . The snow here is granular, with a good deal of ice in it; the tundra is coarse; even the mud is gritty. Visually there is no softness here. I’m, if possible, more convinced than ever that this is the most beautiful part of the world, but it’s an almost metallic, two-dimensional beauty with no warmth or gentleness to trick or woo you into liking it. Its great bleak loveliness is just there, hard and sharp, forever and ever.

  Eleven

  January 19, 1944

  Charley River

  For a full day, Crane watched the wind spin heavy snowflakes into a veil of white.

  He drank cocoa, tended the fire in the stove, and stayed within the cabin’s walls. By the door, he leaned a makeshift rucksack. It was fashioned from one of Berail’s tents and a wool blanket, threaded together with rope. Packed inside were beans, rice, and other supplies to last several days. A frying pan was tied to the pack with parachute cord. Resting atop it all was Berail’s .22 rifle, oiled and cleaned, along with boxes of ammo.

  The only thing standing in the way was the storm. When it eased, Crane was ready to set off for the first time since his all-night odyssey nearly three weeks earlier.

  In that time, he had healed.

  His hands were the biggest concern. Crane first tried to massage them with warmed tallow, but its oils stung the cuts and scrapes. Instead, he devised an ingenious remedy. Crane melted candle wax onto his palm and spread it like a lotion until it encrusted both hands. He then tucked them into Berail’s moose-hide mittens. For six days, he kept at it. Gradually, color and movement returned to his fingers. Meanwhile, he slept nearly eighteen hours a day. His body seemed to crave the warmth of the bear skin. When he woke, he feasted on all manner of pancakes: sometimes with soup vegetables stirred in the batter or fortified with strands of chewy jerky. Berail did not leave a mirror. Crane used his revived fingers to assess his condition. He felt the inward sag of his cheeks and the sharpness of his jawline. But he could also sense he was putting some weight back on and regaining strength. He felt strong enough to begin exploring the river.

  Crane planned to hike downstream for a day or two until he reached the midway point of his supplies. Then he’d head back to Berail’s cabin. The idea was to get a better sense of the terrain and, possibly, a clearer fix on his location without taking any unnecessary risks with the weather. No doubt it was far easier to stay put. Crane felt the instinctive hesitation when he thought about facing the wilds again. He pushed back, forcing himself to pack and prepare for the scouting run.

  Fifteen years earlier, an ethnographer named Cornelius Osgood grappled with a similar inner struggle during a winter of research spent in far northern Canada. The inertia of the season set in. It seemed natural to stay put and hibernate. Why fight the elements? Why not just hole up in his cabin until the weather broke as long as the supplies held out? Osgood felt himself foundering deeper in his hermitage, with chores left unattended and cooking pans unwashed. “I would say to myself, ‘For God’s sake, do something!’ . . . Hour after hour I would stay in the little room from which I could not see, alternately dreaming and hating myself,” he wrote.

  Osgood climbed out of the funk with a time-tested method of survival: narrow your goals. Concentrate on one specific thing—darning a sock, fixing a broken clasp—that helps keep the psychological gremlins at bay. Osgood called them the “little things, perhaps the unimportant things, the predicaments in the process of learning to stay alive.”

  Crane had always been a quick study. He intuitively deduced that it was crucial to stay busy and focused. Yet he still fought constantly against the urges to simply conserve his supplies and allow the days to pass. Crane found a 1938 calendar along with some old magazines in one of the cabin’s many cubbyholes and crannies. It was remarkable to think that perhaps no one had been inside the cabin in more than five years. Crane started a daily routine of punching a nail through each day on the calendar to keep track of his own time. In this way, too, he could calculate the date since the crash.

  One morning, the calendar slipped from the wall. Crane noticed a simple map of Alaska printed on the other side. There was Woodchopper. Of course, Crane thought. It’s a town, not Berail’s job. The settlement was on Woodchopper Creek, just south of the Yukon River. That at least validated his suspicions that the river outside flowed into the Yukon. But was he on Woodchopper Creek or the bigger Charley River to the east? Regardless, Crane figured it meant that Woodchopper couldn’t be too far.

  The map was useful but crude. There were no suggestions of topography, and only the most prominent features were marked. Still, Crane thought, the river valley had seemed to widen during his near-disastrous trek on New Year’s Eve. Crane had enough grasp of Alaska to know that the Yukon River cut a wide floodplain and the land on approach would flatten out.

  The planning for his next trip downriver weighed every contingency.

  Crane’s out-and-back New Year’s struggle underscored how just one miscalculation, one overreach, can level a heavy price. This time, however, Crane was healthier and exceedingly better equipped. He’d become a rather good shot with Berail’s rifle. His main target was the Arctic ptarmigan, a melon-size grouse whose feathers had molted from summer brown to winter white. Crane also exacted some satisfying revenge on the red squirrel population.

  He was learning how to read the Alaskan bush. When he bagged one of his first ptarmigan, he noticed its stomach was full of a reddish brush. He found a grove about a quarter mile downriver and turned it into a private shooting gallery. Crane badly butchered some of his first prey—so much so that it looked more like road kill than freshly downed game. He had since become quite efficient in field dressing the birds and squirrels. The trick was to clean them and strip the fur before they froze solid. He’d toss away the guts and wrap the heart and liver in cloth to
add to his evening stew.

  Even some of the old issues of the Saturday Evening Post left behind by Berail played a part in Crane’s backcountry education. A couple of the stories were about outdoor life and cowboy ways. Crane read them at night by a Coleman lamp he found under the bunk. He mined the articles for tips. One caught his eye: in wind, build your fire in a hole. Perhaps obvious, but it was another aha moment for the city-bred Crane.

  Crane had planned to set off January 19. The storm killed that. The next day came up clear, but distressingly windy. The swaying spruce made creaking sounds that reminded Crane of huge door hinges in need of oil. Fresh snow kicked up in stinging gusts. Crane, however, had tired of waiting. He decided to give it a try. He passed his pack and gun through the cabin door. He checked his pockets for the bullets and matches. The snow was over his knees.

  He turned north. It was minus thirty.

  From the first steps, this was a wholly different experience than the mad dash weeks before. He was now something of an explorer. Crane took his time and stayed attuned for signs of habitation: the possible smell of burning wood or a path in the snow leading from the river. He also converted a burlap sack into a windbreaking tunic by cutting holes for arms and his head. He congratulated himself on the idea.

  The first day out was uneventful.

  He watched for places that attracted ptarmigan and noted elk tracks, mentally filing away the details in case they were needed later. On the second day, about five miles downriver from Berail’s cabin, he came across another log shelter. In his last journey, he walked right past this place. It was in far worse shape than Berail’s and was not brimming with supplies. But inside, Crane came across a heart-soaring find: a sleeping bag, musty and worn, yet still very serviceable. Outside was a canoe, whose shell had been eaten away by the elements. Its metal ribs were still sound, though. This brought more forward planning. If he was stuck until the spring thaw, he might try to repair the canoe with canvas and bark and attempt to paddle out.