Frozen in Time (10 page)

THE
NORTHLAND
IN ICE DURING WORLD WAR II.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

The
Northland
was in dangerous waters, in heavy pack ice with icebergs and growlers all around. With no sign of the lost men, the
Northland
’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Frank Pollard, had to focus on the safety of his own men. The Canadians stared into the darkness as the ship steamed away from the coast.

Thirteen days had passed since their crash, five since they’d been spotted from the air. They were weak, wet, freezing, and out of food. They knew they’d never survive a trek back to the plane, and they saw no point in trying. They doubted they’d live through even one more night of 40-below-zero cold. Desperate, with nothing to lose, Goodlet thought they should try again to light their parkas. If it didn’t work and the coats were ruined, death by hypothermia would come mercifully sooner.

They tore the coats into strips to help them burn. Goodlet’s lighter was low on fuel, so it took repeated spins of the wheel to raise sparks. When it lit, he touched the flame to the parka strips. This time the fabric caught fire, and the men stoked the remnants of their coats into a glowing, smoky blaze. But soon the flames died into darkness.

The
Northland
’s crew hadn’t wanted to give up on the Canadians. Some kept looking back toward shore, hoping for a sign of life. Before the little parka fire went out, it caught the eye of the ship’s chief gunner’s mate, who’d been watching through binoculars.

“I just saw a light,” he told Ensign Charles Dorian, who rushed to the bridge to tell the captain. Pollard spun the
Northland
back toward shore. He ordered his men to turn on the ship’s big searchlight and shoot a half-dozen “star shells” that turned night into day as they fell to earth.

At the edge of the ice cliff, the three men yelled with joy and relief. Giddy and renewed, they pounded on each other’s backs. Weaver read a Morse code message from the ship’s blinking signal lamp: “Move back from edge of glacier and bear south to meet landing party.”

On the
Northland
, Pollard faced two decisions: who would carry out the rescue and how it would be accomplished. He settled on a plan that called for a small team to pilot a motorboat through the ice-filled waters, reach the shoreline, climb a glacier, avoid crevasses, guide or carry the three men back down the glacier, and get them to the ship in one piece. The dangers were too many to count, but no better ideas emerged.

Frustrated that he hadn’t been able to find the Canadians in his Duck, John Pritchard volunteered to lead the mission. Equipped with skis and snowshoes, the lieutenant and a ten-man team reached the shore by boat, roped themselves together, and found a back way to scale the icy cliff. Pritchard led his men across a heavily crevassed section of the unstable glacier. By shouting and flashing searchlights, they located Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver. A photograph of the meeting commemorated the happy occasion.

With darkness upon them and the glacier pouring chunks of itself into the water, the rescuers and the Canadians rushed back in the direction of the motorboat. Pritchard led the group down the face of the cliff, which seemed intent on tossing them into the sea. When everyone was safely aboard, Pritchard and his crew steered the motorboat through the dark to the
Northland
’s side.

When the Canadians stepped aboard the cutter, they were feted, fed, and coddled so thoroughly that Weaver said they felt like newborns. Pollard, the
Northland
’s captain, told the men he’d written them off as dead before the lookout spotted their burning parkas. The ship’s doctor treated their frostbite and windburns. He diagnosed the mental effects of hypothermia, a confusion that Weaver described as “twilight between sanity and insanity.” The doctor told them they were within a day of cracking altogether. On the bright side, Weaver said, their blurred judgment had allowed them to persevere when logic, hunger, thirst, and exhaustion might otherwise have made them curl up on the ice and die.

JOHN PRITCHARD, FAR RIGHT WITH ROPE AND POLE, AFTER LEADING THE RESCUE OF THREE CANADIAN AIRMEN WHOSE PLANE WENT DOWN ON THE ICE CAP. CANADIAN PILOT DAVID GOODLET IS FRONT LEFT, IN A FLIGHT SUIT; TO HIS LEFT, IN A BORROWED COAT, IS FLIGHT SERGEANT ARTHUR WEAVER. NAVIGATOR AL NASH IS IN THE ROW BEHIND THEM, IN A PARKA. IN THE BACK ROW, SECOND FROM LEFT WITH A CIGARETTE, IS ENSIGN RICHARD FULLER, WHO WOULD SPEND FIVE MONTHS LEADING ANOTHER RESCUE TEAM ON THE ICE CAP.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

All three were thin and hollow-eyed. Sleep would be a problem for the foreseeable future; they’d startle awake from shivering nightmares in which they were back on the glacier. But they were safe.

The Canadian trio spent the next six weeks aboard the
Northland
, celebrating their unlikely survival and regaining their health. Later they told their story to reporters, posed for photos, and saw their tale recounted in magazine stories and a comic book called
Lost in the Arctic
.

Asked what kept them going, Weaver said, “Dave had his wife and baby daughter. Al was worried about his mother, alone out in Winnipeg. And I had my wife. Do you see what I mean? We had something to live for.”

John Pritchard’s heroism didn’t go unnoticed. The unassuming young lieutenant was a Coast Guard search pilot, yet he captained a motorboat and climbed a glacier to rescue three men, jeopardizing his own life. He and the
Northland
’s captain, Frank Pollard, each earned the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, the second-highest noncombat award for bravery.

Pritchard’s citation read, in part, “Lieutenant Pritchard’s intelligent planning, fearless leadership, and great personal valor aided materially in the gallant rescue of the stranded men, and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”

I
N THE TAIL
section of the PN9E, no such celebrations were under way.

The men of Monteverde’s crew didn’t know that the Canadians had walked off the ice, or even that they’d crashed. It wouldn’t have mattered. After Harry Spencer’s fall into the crevasse, walking toward the water wasn’t an option for them.

On the other hand, Monteverde, Spencer, and O’Hara discussed whether some or all of them might walk to a weather station in the opposite direction from the water that they’d noticed on a map salvaged from the cockpit. Spina joined the conversation and pronounced the idea suicidal. He told them he’d rather remain with the plane than freeze to death along the way. After a long talk, everyone agreed.

For military planners, the
Northland
’s success in reaching Goodlet, Nash, and Weaver demonstrated that the Coast Guard needed to be more heavily involved in the search for Monteverde’s B-17 and McDowell’s C-53, lost for fourteen and eighteen days, respectively. After the Canadians’ rescue, the ship received a congratulatory message from “Iceberg” Smith, the rear admiral who commanded the Greenland Patrol: “Well done. Suggest
Northland
proceed . . . for search of Baker Seventeen [the B-17 PN9E] and . . . Cast Five Three [the C-53].”

The two American crews still on the ice cap hadn’t been forgotten, and Pritchard and the Duck might have another chance to bring lost men home.

8

THE HOLY GRAIL

JANUARY 2012

I
F THE
P
ENTAGON
is a battleship, Coast Guard Headquarters is a tugboat. Located near the mouth of the Anacostia River, in a far southwest corner of Washington, D.C., the headquarters building is like the service itself: modest, practical, without flash or self-importance.

The main lobby resembles the entrance to a struggling small-city hospital. On this bright winter day, the smell of glue is overpowering, wafting from a nearby hallway where workmen repair broken floor tiles. A portly janitor swabs the floor. A bored security guard leans back in his chair and talks movies with a colleague.

Into the lobby blows the Duck Hunter, Lou Sapienza. He’s here to press his case yet again with Defense Department officials for money to support his plan to lead a team to Greenland, find the lost Duck, and recover the remains of its three occupants. Lou’s unmistakable voice precedes him, bouncing off the walls as he saunters through the lone metal detector.

More so than on his last visit to Washington, three months ago, Lou is in seemingly friendly waters here. The Duck’s heroic story is braided into Coast Guard lore, and the service’s top brass would like Lou to succeed. The headquarters building, tired as it may be, is home to an elaborate scale model of the little plane, and talk has percolated here for years about exhuming the real thing from under the ice cap.

Still, money is tight, and there’s only so much the Coast Guard can do. That’s why Lou’s real audience today are military and civilian members of the Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, DPMO, the same men and women who poured cold water on him in October.

A
S A MILITARY
service, the Coast Guard is something of an odd duck itself. It has a Swiss Army–knife mission of law enforcement, humanitarian relief, and military tasks, including coastal security, drug interdiction, search and rescue, marine safety, and environmental protection. Those roles aren’t a natural fit for the Defense Department, so the Coast Guard has bounced over the years from the Treasury Department to the Transportation Department to its current home in the Department of Homeland Security. And yet, at times of war, the Coast Guard can be swallowed by the navy, as it was during World War II.

Unfortunately for Lou, pretty much the one job not included in the Coast Guard’s mission statement and $10 billion annual budget is recovering lost World War II airmen and missing biplanes. That work is funded by a tiny fraction of a sliver of the U.S. Defense Department’s $525 billion annual budget.

Still, Coast Guard officials have offered to consider using a C-130 Hercules transport plane to haul Lou, his team, and the necessary equipment to Greenland. The service also has provided advice, research assistance, general support, and a boardroom for this morning’s meeting.

As he readies himself for his pitch, Lou seems oblivious to the skepticism that his contacts at DPMO have expressed in e-mails about the million-dollar price tag for a mission to find the Duck as well as McDowell’s C-53. Lou seems equally unaware that DPMO’s entire projected budget this year is about $22 million, and its staff consists of just forty-six military personnel and eighty-seven civilians. Maybe worst of all, DPMO’s already approved budget calls for the office to “deploy investigation teams to Serbia, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Tunisia.” Nowhere within a thousand miles of Greenland.

What Lou doesn’t know can hurt him, but at the moment he’s in high spirits. His zip-up fleece jacket is adorned with five brightly colored patches, the most prominent one for the Duck Hunt. Another displays the logo of his expedition company, North South Polar Inc. Two more trumpet other potential recovery missions, one in Greenland for McDowell’s C-53, and one in Antarctica for a lost World War II–era navy plane called the
George 1
. The fifth patch is for the Fallen American Veterans Foundation, a nonprofit organization Lou created to pursue corporate and private sponsors who share his vision of recovering American MIAs from around the world.

“Hey there!” he calls. I’m pressed against the patches in a hug.

Since the last Washington meeting, Lou has been a round-the-clock dervish of research and logistics. On the research front, his priority has been to pinpoint where to dig and melt through the ice for the Duck and its men. To narrow the search, he’s been comparing historical documents and clues against data from modern technology, including sensor findings from NASA survey flights and ground-penetrating radar from U.S. military planes on their way home from Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s become an amateur authority on the flow of glaciers, knowing that in Greenland, anything from a pebble to a plane moves along with the ice in which it rests. Lou has also learned how ice and snow build up over the years in different parts of Greenland, which leads him to estimate that after seven decades at Koge Bay, the Duck is thirty to fifty feet below the surface.

On the logistical side, Lou’s been pricing helicopter time from Air Greenland, evaluating cold-weather gear from possible sponsors, and choosing freeze-dried foods from a company beloved by apocalypse-minded survivalists. Its nitrogen-packed, enamel-coated cans of beef stew promise to taste good until 2037. I worry that it might take that long to raise the money needed for the Duck Hunt.

Although Lou is point man for the search effort, he’s not its natural father. He adopted that role from a retired Coast Guard captain named Tom King, a barrel-chested, sixty-year-old fireplug of a man who suffered from a recurring nightmare about eBay.

K
ING GREW UP
in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with boyhood hopes of attending the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and captaining a submarine. By the time he assembled the required recommendations, the seas had shifted and he was instead headed toward the Air Force Academy. But his heart wasn’t in it. His high school German teacher suggested the Coast Guard. At seventeen, King caught sight of the
Eagle
, the Coast Guard’s three-masted cutter, known as “America’s Tall Ship.” A service that sailed such a magnificent ship was the place for him.

During a thirty-year career, King rose to chief of the Coast Guard Office of Aviation Forces. After retiring in 2004, he launched an aviation and homeland security consulting firm. He also became involved with the Coast Guard Aviation Association, a fraternal group known jovially as the Ancient Order of the Pterodactyl, a title befitting members’ proud self-image as flying dinosaurs. Their motto: “Flying Since the World Was Flat.”

His work with the Pterodactyls gave King time to reflect on the case of Lieutenant Jack Rittichier, the first Coast Guardsman killed in Vietnam. In June 1968, piloting a combat rescue helicopter known as a Jolly Green Giant, Rittichier was hovering over an injured Marine Corps pilot when North Vietnamese troops opened fire. He tried to land, but his craft exploded on impact. At the war’s end, Rittichier was the only member of the Coast Guard still declared missing in action from that conflict. A quarter century passed before a joint American-Vietnamese search team found his remains. In 2003 Rittichier was buried with honors on Coast Guard Hill at Arlington National Cemetery, a hallowed section normally reserved for top commanders. Delivering the eulogy, Coast Guard commandant Admiral Thomas Collins declared, “All hands are now accounted for.”

That was true for Vietnam. But it troubled King that the same couldn’t be said for Coast Guardsmen from World War II, notably the pilot and radioman of the
Northland
’s Duck, John Pritchard and Ben Bottoms.

King’s focus on the Duck intensified in 2007, when he learned that a Coast Guard Academy ring was being auctioned on eBay. The ring had belonged to the late Captain Frank Erickson, a Coast Guard giant who pioneered the use of helicopters on rescue missions. King shuddered at the thought of Erickson’s ring being melted down or worn as a golden bauble on some rich guy’s knuckle. King and his friend Captain Mont Smith, president of the Pterodactyls, won the eBay auction for $2,025. They carried the ring to Coast Guard events and reunions, treating it like Cinderella’s shoe by allowing fellow aviators to try it on for size.

Coast Guard relics became King’s passion, and he was named the Pterodactyls’ vice president for museums, aircraft, artifacts, and restorations. By the time he and Smith won Erickson’s class ring, King had sent an e-mail to fellow Pterodactyls asking what they considered to be the Holy Grail of Coast Guard aviation artifacts. King knew the answer before the survey was done: John Pritchard’s Grumman J2F-4 Duck, serial number V1640, lost in Greenland.

Certain that the Duck should be displayed in the Smithsonian or a Coast Guard museum, King felt sickened by the possibility that a wreck hunter might recover the plane from the ice and sell it to a private collector of warbirds, as vintage military aircraft are known. King knew that the lucrative market for warbirds had led salvagers to seek them out in jungles, on mountaintops, beneath the seas, and on glaciers. Only thirty-two Grumman J2F-4s had been built, and only one of those Ducks remained in flying condition, making it one of the rarest warbirds. Because Pritchard’s Duck carried a heroic backstory, it could be worth several million dollars on the private market. Even more horrifying to King was the possibility that a wreck hunter might disturb the human remains and grave-rob personal items.

“I don’t want to see John Pritchard’s wallet being sold on eBay,” King says, shaking both his head and his fist. “We can’t allow that.”

The Coast Guard did try to reach the Duck in 1975, using two helicopters and a shore party. Conditions for the search were ideal, but they were looking in the wrong place. As King talked up the idea of a new search, he got word that a private collector had already obtained permits from Greenland to launch an expedition to retrieve Pritchard’s plane. King’s eBay nightmare seemed to be coming true.

Back-channel messages were sent to Greenland government officials that the remains of American World War II casualties were believed to be inside the plane. That made the Duck an overseas American military gravesite. Wreck hunting was one thing; disturbing the resting place of heroes was something else entirely. The wreck hunter’s permits were squashed. Still, it was a close call. Considering the Duck’s potential value, other wreck hunters might start circling, perhaps without going through the formal permitting process. Fears about the Duck’s fate rose further amid reports of rapid melting of the Greenland ice cap. The plane and its occupants might be exposed to the elements and treasure seekers both. A sense of urgency took hold.

King enlisted his friend Mont Smith, the Pterodactyl president, and Smith buttonholed Vice Admiral Vivien Crea, at the time the Coast Guard’s second-ranking officer. Crea held an exalted position as the Pterodactyls’ “Ancient Albatross,” an honorary title bestowed on the service’s longest-serving aviator. Crea passed the mission of saving the Duck to Captain Mike Emerson, then the Coast Guard’s chief of aviation.

In February 2008, Emerson walked into the aviation office on the third floor of Coast Guard Headquarters. Pausing at a cluster of cubicles, he dropped a pile of papers on the desk of one of his project managers, Master Chief Petty Officer John Long.

“Hey,” Emerson said, “see if you can find something out about this.” The papers contained the outlines of the Duck story.

Long and Commander Joe Deer, later replaced by Commander Jim Blow, spent the next two years working as historical sleuths, haunting archives to dredge up declassified reports, details, maps, photographs, obscure references, and even rumors about the plane, its men, and their final flight. They pored over radar data and studied the movement of glaciers. They tracked down family members of the lost Duck crew. One goal of those contacts was to discover how family members felt about a mission to bring the men home. Another was to collect DNA samples from relatives of the lost men, to prove their identities if bodies or bones were found.

In 2008 and 2009, radar and sonar scouting missions identified what seemed like a promising place to dig, and an expedition took shape for 2010. When Coast Guard officials began looking for help from outside experts to carry out the mission, they teamed up with a guy named Lou.

T
HE ELDEST OF
four boys, Luciano “Lou” Sapienza spent his childhood in suburban New Jersey, thirty miles from Manhattan. His father, a World War II navy veteran, worked as an import-export manager for a brewery supplier. His mother founded the Somerset County Association for Retarded Citizens and served as its executive director, a role that fit her work helping one of Lou’s brothers, who was developmentally disabled.

As a child, Lou was quiet and withdrawn, “a little bit of a mama’s boy.” Beyond his driveway were woods where he’d have imaginary adventures until he heard his mother’s booming voice, “scaring the hell out of me” and calling him home. He went to parochial school, where he won a camera as a prize in a third-grade magazine drive. “I was tied with this girl, and Sister Mary Lawrence told me, ‘Be a gentleman and let her have the camera.’ I said ‘No.’ I really wanted that camera.” The nun thought of a number between one and ten; Lou picked three and won. He walked away with a box-shaped Imperial Satellite 127 camera and his first calling.

“I’m one of those people who always feel as though I was born in the wrong generation,” Lou says. “Photography for me, in retrospect, has always been about preserving the past. I have this thing about the past.”

Before embracing photography, though, he had been on a crooked path toward the priesthood. He attended a seminary during freshman and sophomore years of high school, but the priests gave him the option of leaving on his own or being thrown out. “It had something to do with girls. Nothing major,” he says. Lou ended up at an all-boys parochial high school where he had few friends and felt most comfortable behind a camera. “Photography helped me. It helped me to relate.”