81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  I was sitting in the zoology lab at Bates with some classmates and we were all listening to a radio. We couldn’t believe what the announcers said about Pearl Harbor. The next day at dinner we moved a big radio in the mess hall and all of us listened to the president declare war. There were a lot of very serious men afterward. A lot of us soon left school. I left at the end of January and stayed around home until the middle of April. I was sworn in the Army on the 13th of April and arrived in Santa Ana on the 25th. Flying school came and went and on the first of January this year, I got my wings. On the 9th of August in ’42 I called you up and asked you to take me as your husband. You agreed and I started to become the happiest man alive. My commission made moving a sure thing. You came out . . . to Tucson and on the 19th of January at 2100 MWT we were married. I carried you across the threshold of 145 N. Main Street into our first apartment ($100 per). We were happy, but not too sure of ourselves. Remember how I left to fly at midnight and didn’t fly . . . Boy, was I mad because I didn’t call up first so I wouldn’t have to leave.

  And then when we were sitting in the movies and I sent you home because I had a pain in my stomach. The next morning I had my appendix out and in a couple of weeks we were home [in Maine].

  Then the long trip back to Tucson and me finally starting to fly again. We moved to Greenfields to save $50 a month. Soon we went to El Paso and I nearly lost you because I didn’t know where you were and you couldn’t reach me at the officers’ club.

  Our honeymoon at Ruidoso, something neither of us will ever forget . . . Buying Elizabeth—finding out about Dick—and then my alert planning ahead for after . . . Gosh, what a lot has happened in two years. I’ve been in the Army 19 months out of 24.

  Well, hon, I’ve got a hard day ahead, so I guess I’ll hit the sack. All my love to my dearest wife.

  Your husband,

  Hal

  Joann cried then. She cried now, sitting in the chapel waiting to hear words of remembrance for a father she never knew.

  When Joann was a young girl in Maine, she used to imagine—in that quicksilver time just on the cusp of sleep—that she would hear a knock on the door and her father would be there. Other times, she would think of her father standing on a snowy hill bathed in sunlight and telling her, “I’m happy here.”

  Farther back in the chapel, one of Richard Pompeo’s sisters, Ethel Myers, leaned heavily on a cane and was helped into her seat by son David, a retired Air Force and Pennsylvania Air National Guard airborne electronic systems operator who flew about two hundred combat missions from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Pompeo was now the only unaccounted-for crew member from the B-24.

  Doug Beckstead traveled from Alaska and basked in praise from the military brass over his dedication in searching the crash site and refusing to believe that Hoskin was forever lost. He took his seat near the front.

  The Bible reading was from 1 Thessalonians 4. “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first,” it ends. “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words.”

  Not far from the chapel, a section of the old parade ground at Fort Myer is surrounded by groves of beech and hickory trees that abut Arlington National Cemetery. In September 1908, thousands of spectators gathered at the spot for a spectacle that promised to be more astonishing than anything they had witnessed before, more wondrous than their first glimpse of electric lights, more spellbinding than moving pictures or gramophones. One of the famous Wright brothers was on hand with an honest-to-God airplane for tests with the military that would stretch for more than a week.

  The crowds got to see not only new flight records—set day after day—but also one of the sad firsts in military aviation.

  Just after five o’clock on September 17, with winds falling off just enough to try another flight, Orville Wright yelled over to a West Point–educated lieutenant to climb aboard. “You might as well get in,” Wright told Thomas Selfridge. “We’ll start in a couple minutes.”

  Wright and his team were at Fort Myer with the latest version of their biplane, Flyer, in hopes of persuading skeptical Army brass of the need for greater airpower in combat. Orville had already taken up two Army officers to show the craft could carry two people and exceed forty miles per hour, a requirement for the military deal. On September 12, Orville stayed up for one hour and fifteen minutes, making seventy-one laps around the field in a new endurance mark. Even the many doubters—who considered human flight little more than a carnival stunt—came away impressed.

  The next in line for a flight was Selfridge, who was on the Army review board studying the plane. Selfridge was a believer. He had become fascinated by the nascent age of flight. Just nine months earlier, Selfridge went aloft in Alexander Graham Bell’s audacious kite known as the Cygnet, made of nearly thirty-four hundred tetrahedral cells. He was also one of three officers trained to command U.S. Army Dirigible Balloon No. 1.

  Selfridge was picked to lead exhibition flights of the blimp in Missouri as soon as Orville wrapped up his tests at Fort Myer. A Navy officer had been scheduled to go up with Wright on September 17, but he gave up his spot so Selfridge could get a jump on his travel to the Midwest.

  The Flyer’s 39-horsepower engine fired up, and the craft was soon circling over Fort Myer. During three laps it rose as high as 150 feet. The crowd applauded in appreciation. Just before Wright began his descent, the right propeller began to falter. The plane shook. One of the props broke, clipping a guy wire. The craft’s nose dipped. Wright could not regain control. The Flyer nose-dived into the grass from about 75 feet. It was a tangle of splintered spruce, still-warm engine parts, and torn muslin. Selfridge, who was not wearing headgear, suffered a fractured skull and died that evening. Orville Wright had head protection, but was left with several broken bones and spent seven weeks hospitalized. It’s widely considered the first aviation fatality by the American armed forces.

  After the Hoskin service in the chapel, the casket was placed on a caisson, drawn by six chestnut horses—two of them without riders as part of the solemn tradition. Joann again burst into tears. “I just totally let go,” she said later. “To think they were doing all this for my dad.”

  The cortege moved slowly toward the grave site in Section 60.

  The few direct living emissaries from World War II—John Hoskin leaning on his wife’s arm and Pompeo’s sister holding tightly to her cane—passed by reminders of those who didn’t return from war in this new century. Section 60 is one of the main burial grounds for war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the graves were visited frequently by young spouses and small children. They left behind trinkets. Maybe a wind chime. Or a balloon. Sometimes a photograph or letter, now tattered and curled by the weather. Such gestures were against the protocol of the Arlington caretakers. But, this time, they looked the other way. No one could bring themselves to clear away the personal remembrances. They would remain for years.

  A group of Patriot Guard Riders—bikers who gather to pay respects to veterans—snapped to attention with crisp salutes as the Hoskin procession neared the grave site. Mary draped her arm around John. The flag was taken from the coffin. It was folded into a ceremonial triangle shape by an honor guard. A military chaplain presented it to Joann.

  Beckstead stood off to the side. He would have liked to have shared the moment with one of Crane’s children. They were invited by the Hoskin family, but none could carve out the time. Bill, who visited the crash site with Beckstead, especially wanted to attend. He simply couldn’t break commitments already made. He called Beckstead in Washington just before the funeral.

  You know, Bill said, none of this would be possible without you.

 
Bill passed along thanks from the entire Crane family. Beckstead promised they would see each other soon. They never did.

  A bugler played taps. A B-2 stealth bomber passed overhead. The honor guard raised their rifles and fired. The shells from the twenty-one-gun salute were gathered and distributed. Beckstead received one.

  It was carried back to Alaska.

  Epilogue

  Crane stepped onto the scale. The Army doctor, assigned to give Crane a physical after his return, nudged the lead weights along the balance. He jotted down 165. Then he looked at the records from Crane’s arrival at Ladd Field. He did a double take and checked the scales again. Remarkably, Crane weighed about the same.

  Other tests brought the same results: Crane’s health was nearly perfect except for some minor frostbite damage to his fingers and abrasions from the sledge’s rope harness.

  Ladd Field commanders quizzed Crane for anything that could pinpoint the crash site. Crane gave his best guesses based on the location of Berail’s cabin, which he assumed would be visible to spotters in the air. That’s good, said the Air Forces brass, but what would be better is having you show us in person. When would you feel ready to head back into the Yukon? Crane said he was ready now.

  A few days later, Crane was again over the mountains rising up from the Charley. It took almost no time to spot the B-24 wreckage. There it is, he said quietly. The reconnaissance plane took a few circles over the area to precisely log the location for the later recovery teams, which found the bodies of James Sibert and Ralph Wenz.

  On one pass, Crane was able to look north up the Charley one more time. The plane then banked and set a course for Ladd. Crane would never return.

  He was given a short leave to return to Philadelphia. Crane was relieved in more than one way. Ladd Field authorities had interviewed Ames, Berail, and others to confirm Crane’s account of his passage down the Charley River and close the book on the investigation. “I was more worried about their asking where the devil I’d been,” he told the Philadelphia Record after arriving home.

  His plans in Philadelphia were to rest, eat, and spend “all that back pay” from his time lost. He did pose for one press photo at home at 5464 Baltimore Avenue. He pulled out a map to show his father, dressed in a suit and tie as usual, his route over the Charley.

  Less than six months after returning to Ladd Field from leave, Leon Crane was assigned a test flight on a P-63 Kingcobra. Crane’s task on September 3, 1944, was to give the plane a test run to check on reported “engine roughness” before it was to be handed over to a Soviet flier. The Red Army star had already been painted on. After about forty-five minutes circling Fairbanks, Crane brought the plane in. The landing looked fine, but a tire blew out seconds after touching the tarmac. The plane swerved sharply to the right. Its nose jammed into the scrubland. One propeller was bent. The crash alarm sounded on base. Crane cut the fuel, unstrapped his harness, and jumped from the cockpit. He was not injured.

  An investigation concluded the right brake had locked up. The heat from the friction fused together three of the brake discs, blocking the tire from spinning and causing the blowout. The report urged the manufacturer, the Bell Aircraft Corporation, to redesign its braking systems. “Landing accidents of this nature . . . are entirely too common for this model aircraft.” The plane was abandoned by the U.S. military after the war, but lived on as target-practice aircraft for gunners.

  At some point, Crane started dating the Army nurse from Iowa, Lieutenant Wilma Koehrsen, who was on duty the night he returned to Ladd Field. She had been reassigned to Ladd from Cold Bay in the Aleutian Islands. They were married in Fairbanks in January 1945. Crane’s last moments in Alaska came on July 24, 1945, just two weeks before the first atomic bomb attack on Japan, when he and Wilma boarded a southbound plane. Crane remained in the Army Air Forces until December 1945.

  Crane had a career in aeronautical engineering at Boeing Vertol and, later, as a home builder in and around his native Philadelphia. He rarely spoke of his time lost in Alaska. His six children—who mostly called him Leon rather than Dad—grew up knowing only loose threads of the story.

  On the times he did share some small recollection of Alaska, it was always diminished further by his own caveats. Other people faced far worse in the war, he’d say. This was a breeze in comparison, he would add. Think of all those who didn’t come home, such as the crew of the Iceberg Inez. Or those who were horribly maimed. Or were lost in the Holocaust, like those in his ancestral lands in Ukraine. He would shake his hand. What did I do? I just walked.

  But in the late 1990s—as he slowed down and, like many, had more time to reflect on the war—Crane sat down with the son of a onetime business partner and former Army Air Forces buddy to give a videotaped oral history. He brushed over his time along the Charley River, still refusing to assume any heroics. He did, however, share a bit more about his last moments inside the B-24.

  “Scared shitless,” he said.

  “I grabbed my chest chute, snapped on the harness . . . opened the bomb-bay doors, and I was gone.”

  “God-awful place, Alaska,” Crane continued. “Ice and snow and cold as hell.”

  Crane kept a single souvenir: one of the photos snapped outside the Ames family cabin.

  Crane died on March 26, 2002. Death notices and the short obituaries made no mention of the Charley River. If Crane shared much about the crash and the Charley with Wilma, she never let on. She gave no more details after Leon was gone. She did, however, live long enough to hear stories from two of their children.

  In the summer of 2005, Miriam and Bill Crane—she a pilot, he a builder—joined Doug Beckstead to retrace Leon’s journey. For eight days they traveled the route by plane and raft. At Phil Berail’s cabin, now just ruins, they found some of the tools from the cache described by Crane. They later stood outside Ames’s cabin on the spot where their father saw the front door open and a trapper with a smoldering cigarette stare back and ask, where did you come from?

  By the time Beckstead led the trip, there were few people left from Crane’s time on the river.

  The unyielding Phil Berail died in 1961, five years after breaking his hip in a fall off a pickup truck at Coal Creek mining camp. “As far as is known,” said the funeral notice in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, “he has no family.”

  A few years later, pilot Bob Rice finally decided he needed a break from the Alaskan bush and flew his plane south, bound for the Caribbean, making it as far as St. Lucia. It didn’t take. He eventually returned to Alaska. Rice died in 1983.

  At Ladd Field in 1950, a building was named in honor of Master Sergeant Richard Pompeo.

  In 2005 Pompeo’s nephew David Myers also visited the crash site with Beckstead. Myers climbed inside the crumpled fuselage to the spot where his uncle would have been onboard. “I tuned the knobs and they worked like new,” Myers wrote. “I was sensing an amazing feeling as I did it, realizing that my uncle used that very unit and those knobs would still have his fingerprints on them.”

  Myers and Beckstead looked over the country where Pompeo may have landed after bailing out. “I am at peace with the idea he will always remain on that beautiful, quiet mountain,” Myers wrote, “and I feel I was able to give him a proper goodbye from a family member.”

  In Pinedale, Wyoming, an airfield carries the name of Staff Sergeant Ralph Wenz. His body was moved from Fairbanks to his hometown of Sutton, Nebraska. His daughter, Carol, died in 2012. She named the first of her two sons after her father.

  The remains of First Lieutenant James B. Sibert were interred at Arlington National Cemetery in 1948.

  Harold Hoskin’s wife, Mary, worked as a bookkeeper and remarried twenty-four years after the B-24 crash. She died in 2005, a year before JPAC opened its investigation that would uncover and identify her husband’s remains.

  Crane’s wife, Wilma, died on May 1, 2007.

 
John and Mary Hoskin had one encounter with Crane. They were visiting relatives near Philadelphia in 1991. On a lark, they decided to contact Crane. At first, John hesitated. He didn’t see the point in revisiting what could not be changed. Let it rest, he urged. Mary, though, wanted to see Crane. Who knew what details he might cough up? She told John to remember his father and how he pestered the military for more information on his son. Mary knew the acclaimed writer and journalist John McPhee was able to pry a little from Crane in the 1970s. It was worth a try to get more, she told her husband.

  As usual, Mary’s spark-plug personality ruled the day. John agreed.

  It wasn’t so easy to find Crane. They couldn’t locate a phone listing. But there was one for a Dr. Crane. It turned out it was Leon’s older brother Morris. Sure, he said after a moment’s pause, I can give you Leon’s number and address. As it turned out, this was exactly how McPhee tracked down Crane years before.

  John and Mary had tea with Leon at his home, which was then in one of Philadelphia’s pleasantly pastoral suburbs. Crane was courteous and attentive. But, to their surprise, he was somewhat defensive when the conversation moved toward the crash. Crane repeatedly said it was no one’s fault. He couldn’t have done anything more. The plane was uncontrollable. It was, he said, just one of those things.

  “I would call it something like survivor’s guilt,” said Mary. “It’s as if he seemed troubled by what happened, why Harold couldn’t get out and why he was the only one to live.”

  They asked about his struggles on the Charley. Leon offered nothing they didn’t already know. He just didn’t want to talk about it. Nothing could budge him.

  “Strange,” recalled John. “The whole thing was strange. In my mind, the whole affair was closed, even though we didn’t have Harold’s body. But not for Leon Crane. It still seemed to eat at him.”