Frozen in Time (16 page)

The crew of the
Northland
knew that Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth were in danger, or worse, but they refused to write them off. Maybe Pritchard had turned back toward the PN9E to land on the ice cap. Maybe,
Northland
crew members told themselves, he’d landed somewhere else safely but his radio had been damaged. Or maybe the Duck had set down on the water and was floating in Koge Bay. Perhaps the Duck’s radio signal was blocked by the storm, and that’s why no one could reach them.

A
FTER STRUGGLING TO
use Howarth’s patched-together radio, Don Tetley told the
Northland
the bad news at the crash site: “Demorest and one motor sledge in crevasse. Unable to get help to him. Please send help immediately. . . . No word from
Northland
plane.”

In reply, the ship told Tetley that the Duck hadn’t returned to the
Northland
, either.

News of the plane’s disappearance fell hard on the PN9E crew, most of all O’Hara and Spina. That morning, before the Duck left with Howarth, the other crewmen had helped to dress the two most seriously injured men, expecting that they’d be next to leave. With the Duck nowhere to be found, and with one motorsled gone, O’Hara and Spina seemed to be running out of ways to leave the glacier for medical care. Maybe running out of time altogether.

Still, the men on the ice and on the
Northland
retained hope that Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth were alive, and that they’d landed somewhere between the PN9E and the ship. Until there was proof one way or another, the Duck’s crew and the PN9E’s radioman were missing, not dead.

During the next few days, Greenland Patrol commander “Iceberg” Smith exchanged a series of messages with the
Northland
in which he expressed concern for the lost Duck and told the ship to leave Comanche Bay “if by remaining, ship and personnel are endangered.” The PN9E rescue was supposed to take about three days, and it had already stretched longer. Each day the
Northland
waited, the threat of ice capturing the ship in Comanche Bay increased. A follow-up message from Smith delivered the point more sharply: “Emphasize that remaining to continue rescue operations must be secondary to the safety of
Northland.
” The ship was his primary workhorse along the coast, and he couldn’t afford to lose it. And yet, despite his doubts, nowhere in the radio messages did Smith question the decisions by the ship’s top officers or by pilot John Pritchard.

A
WEEK AFTER
the Duck’s last flight, an American B-17 flew over the Koge Bay glacier. Its pilot, Captain Kenneth Turner, reported a sad but unsurprising discovery: “Grumman [Duck] located. No sign of life. Badly wrecked.”

The broken remains of the plane were about three miles from the water, Turner said, although later sightings claimed that he overestimated the actual distance. No one would question Turner’s heartbreaking description of what he saw. The Duck’s tail pointed skyward and its wings were broken off. Its fuselage was intact, but “front part of ship demolished.”

The evidence pointed to a nose-first dive. Still, investigators, Coast Guard officials, and armchair historians would speculate for decades about what happened. Above all, they’d argue whether Pritchard had tried to turn back to his takeoff area when he ran into the fog, or if he’d continued heading for home, toward the
Northland
. The latter seemed more likely to most, as the navigator for Turner’s B-17, Herbert Kurz, created a map that showed the downed Duck pointing in the direction of Comanche Bay.

However it happened, the sighting by Turner and his B-17 crew established that Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth were gone and the Duck was destroyed.

In the end, Tetley’s initial radio message—“Demorest and one motor sledge in crevasse. . . . No word from
Northland
plane”—disclosed the failure of two rescue methods, by air and by motorsled. More important, it reported the deaths of four American heroes, all of whom had died after volunteering to help fellow servicemen.

In the weeks that followed, a Coast Guard team from the
Northland
attempted to reach the little plane. Yet from the very first, there was no hope that the three men had survived. Still, one overly optimistic message from the
Northland
five days after the crash requested that the Duck be dropped a cache of supplies and tools, including a new battery, sixty gallons of fuel, eighteen spark plugs, and several wrenches that would be needed to prepare the engine for takeoff. The message also requested three sleeping bags, animal hides, coffee, food, and spirits.

In reality, after Turner spotted the Duck, all the efforts to reach the plane were motivated by a desire to recover the three men’s remains, to honor their sacrifices, and to grant peace to their families. But storms, billowing snow, and uncertainty about precisely where to look forced the searchers to abandon the effort. Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth were left where they fell.

In March 1943 Colonel Bernt Balchen also flew over the wrecked Duck, afterward drawing a rough map of its location, with an X marking the plane’s spot. The result was a sketch that looked like a pirate’s treasure map. Although the map was accurate in several important respects, Balchen invented several geographical features and omitted others. Complicating any future search for the Duck and its men, Balchen’s errors compounded flawed longitude and latitude data reported by Turner’s B-17 crew. Some of those errors were later corrected, but the combined effect was to create confusion and false leads about the Duck’s resting place. That problem would reverberate for decades, as a steady accumulation of snow and ice buried Pritchard, Bottoms, Howarth, and the Duck.

A
FTER THREE MILITARY
plane crashes in November 1942 in which all men aboard initially survived—McDowell’s C-53, Monteverde’s PN9E, and the Canadian A-20—Greenland had struck back. In less than two hours on the morning of November 29, 1942, a Coast Guard pilot, a Coast Guard radioman, an Army Air Corps radioman, and an army lieutenant motorsled driver were killed trying to save others.

That death toll soon rose, as the search for McDowell’s C-53 crew was abandoned a month after their crash. “Concentrated search was discontinued,” the official report declared, “because it was believed that the crew could not maintain life more than thirty days with the short rations they had on board, and during which time extremely cold weather prevailed. It is believed the crew perished. Aircraft is considered a total loss due to the inaccessibility of the Ice Cap, should it ever be located.” Official declaration of their deaths would come on November 5, 1943.

THE MAP COLONEL BERNT BALCHEN DREW IN HIS NOTEBOOK AFTER FLYING OVER THE WRECKED DUCK AND THE KOGE BAY AREA.
(U.S. COAST GUARD IMAGE.)

Frozen in time in November 1942 were Lieutenant John A. Pritchard Jr., Sergeant Benjamin Bottoms, and Corporal Loren “Lolly” Howarth of the Duck; Captain Homer McDowell, Lieutenant William Springer, Staff Sergeant Eugene Manahan, Corporal William Everett, and Private Thurman Johannessen of the C-53; and motorsled rescuer Lieutenant Max Demorest.

As Greenland’s god-awful winter approached, seven men remained trapped on the ice: Armand Monteverde, Harry Spencer, William “Bill” O’Hara, Alfred “Clint” Best, Paul Spina, and Clarence Wedel from the PN9E, and their new companion, motorsled driver Don Tetley.

In a battle against nature, fought at the far edge of a war among men, Greenland had regained the upper hand.

P
OSTHUMOUSLY, JOHN PRITCHARD
and Benjamin Bottoms each received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Both also were recommended for the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration, but the award was never made.

Pritchard’s Distinguished Flying Cross citation honored him “for heroism and extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flights as pilot of a plane which rescued Army fliers stranded on the Greenland Ice Cap, on 28 and 29 November 1942. . . . By his courage, skill and fearless devotion to duty, Lieutenant Pritchard upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.” The medal was presented to his parents in a ceremony at their Congregational church in Los Angeles, with music by Rudy Vallee and the Coast Guard Band. For the loss of her firstborn child in heroic circumstances, Virginia Pritchard was honored as the “California Mother of the Year” for 1944.

Ben Bottoms’s Distinguished Flying Cross citation read, “He rendered valuable assistance to the pilot on the two flights to the Ice Cap, maintained excellent contact by radio between his plane and their ship, and assisted the pilot in rendering aid to the injured and stranded fliers.”

For repairing the radio at the risk of his own life, and for trying to help Max Demorest when he fell into the crevasse, Loren Howarth received the Legion of Merit, the sixth-highest military award, for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievements.”

W
ORD OF THE
Duck’s crash reached Al Tucciarone and Woody Puryear while they were recovering aboard the
Northland
. Several weeks after his rescue, Tucciarone gave military investigators a sworn account of the PN9E crash and its aftermath. At the end, he veered from formal chronology and wrote, “I want to stress that I owe my life to Howarth, Pritchard, and his radioman, Bottoms.” Thinking about the men still awaiting rescue on the ice, Tucciarone wrote, “I can only hope and pray that those other unfortunate fellows get away from that ‘Death Hole’ as lucky as Sergeant Puryear and myself. May God bless them.”

From his hospital bed, where he’d remain for more than two months, Puryear wrote to Pritchard’s and Bottoms’s families to offer thanks and condolences.

To Bottoms’s parents, he wrote, “I am one of the boys whose life was saved through the heroic efforts of your son, Benjamin A. Bottoms, and Lieutenant John A. Pritchard. Two braver men I have never seen. I knew your son for only a short while and had never seen him until the day of the rescue. He was more than willing to go to the limit to save our lives, even though endangering his own.”

After receiving a similar letter from Puryear, Virginia Pritchard wrote back, “I breathed a little prayer of thankfulness when I learned you were back in this country and able to wire. We know how very ill you were from hunger and exposure. We have no hope whatever that our son still lives, but until the final chapter is written, we have faith that somehow a miracle will bring him back.”

Virginia Pritchard died in 1976 with that prayer for a miracle unfulfilled.

13

TAPS

JANUARY 2012

W
ALKING THE CORRIDORS
of Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, Lou looks more excited than nervous, a prizefighter heading toward the ring. Alongside him is John Long, who retired from the Coast Guard in 2011 but remains deeply involved in Duck Hunt research. Long is an ideal cornerman: steady, reserved, a font of knowledge about Duck sightings. The size of a longshoreman, the former master chief petty officer flew to Washington from his home in northern Michigan to lend his support and expertise. They walk shoulder to shoulder into the boardroom.

The seats around the table are filled with many of the same men and women from the October meeting at the DPMO offices, along with a half-dozen new faces from the Coast Guard and other agencies. Leading the DPMO delegation again is Lieutenant Colonel James McDonough, a friendly but no-nonsense soldier.

Coast Guard Commander Jim Blow kicks things off with a positive spin: “It’s really good to get all the players in one room to see what we as a group can do to pull the pieces together to get on site and effect a location and a recovery.”

Blow hands off to Lou, who’s loaded for duck this time. He distributes a nineteen-page memo that’s thick with data suggesting that he knows where on the ice to dig for the plane, along with day-by-day plans for the mission. Lou guides the room through a PowerPoint presentation, confidently fielding questions and explaining a thicket of technical information. He describes primary and secondary locations where modern radar and sonar findings overlap with historical sightings, including Bernt Balchen’s detailed, if geographically imprecise, hand-drawn “Treasure Map” from 1943.

McDonough wonders how much of the Koge Bay glacier Lou intends to search. “What dimensions are we talking about?” he asks.

Lou: “One and three-quarters of a mile by three-quarters of a mile, tops.”

Next McDonough jabs Lou about whether anomalies labeled “Points of Interest” on a radar readout are definitely metal objects. Or, he wonders, are they natural variations within a glacier made by a rock, a crevasse, or even water?

Lou counters: “Metal comes back differently than rock.”

Lou explains that, despite his confidence in the available data, he hopes to confirm the findings with additional high-tech devices, one that hangs beneath a helicopter and another that drags behind a snowmobile. “We have the technology to find it,” Lou says. “We have a very limited area in which to look. We will find it.”

McDonough asks: “So, you think you can find the aircraft in three days on the ice?”

Lou’s on a roll. He snaps back: “Weather permitting, yes.”

The give-and-take moves to what Lou might do with the plane after carving it from the ice. “We’re not wreck hunters,” he says. This is a point of pride with him, and he puffs his chest a bit. “We’re not interested in recovering the plane to sell it.”

Lou says he respects the Coast Guard’s policy that the service retains possession of all downed planes and shipwrecks. His only desire would be for the Duck to be restored and displayed for posterity. This, of course, is exactly what retired captain Tom King wanted in the first place, to keep it off eBay and away from private warbird collectors and souvenir vultures.

McDonough says DPMO would have no objection to that plan. “The plane is not the priority,” he says. “Our primary interest is in the remains. What I’m wondering is, will the bodies be encased in ice?”

Lou: “If snow has gotten into the Duck, yes, they’re probably encased in ice.”

McDonough: “Could you bring it up without disturbing the remains?”

Lou: “That’s possible.”

He explains how
Glacier Girl
was brought to the surface twenty years earlier, and tells McDonough that this would be easier because the Duck should be located at less than one-fifth the depth. A friendly discussion follows about the best ways to recover, preserve, and transport human remains. The difference in tone from the October meeting is stark.

I start to believe that Lou is winning. I imagine McDonough raising Lou’s arm in triumph and presenting him with an oversize check while cameras flash. But then the bell rings for the next round.

McDonough asks: “Lou, do you have an underwriter at the moment?”

For the first time, Lou pauses to catch his breath. “No,” he says flatly. “That’s what we’re working on.” What he means is, That’s why we’re here.

McDonough bores into the budget that Lou included in his briefing package, asking about how large a team he would bring, whether he’d have a medical officer for emergencies, how he’d get supplies to the campsite, even whether he’d feed his team with military meals-ready-to-eat, MREs, or commercially purchased freeze-dried foods. Lou tries not to show it, but the meeting has gone more than two hours, and the unrelenting questions have a desiccating effect on him. His answers come more slowly.

McDonough circles back to the question of money and drops the hammer. “To be honest with you,” he says, “a lot of us were under the assumption that you had found private funding to get out onto the ice.”

Lou tries to regroup. He explains that he’s been seeking support from corporate and media sponsors and private individuals, though none are firmly on board. This is the source of McDonough’s misunderstanding: During the weeks leading up to the meeting, Lou sent group e-mails with glowing reports of sponsorship discussions he’s had with wealthy World War II history buffs and others. McDonough interpreted the e-mails to mean that Lou had landed a big fish.

Jim Blow steps in, trying to help Lou: “When do you think you’ll have something back from the private funders?”

Lou is reeling. He can’t see that Blow is trying to help, and he answers flippantly: “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, I guess.”

McDonough is ready to end it with a knockout. He wants no further misunderstandings or, apparently, further meetings: “I think it’s very admirable what you’ve done,” he says. “I want to compliment you. But funding is always the long pole in the tent. . . . I don’t believe there’s any funding available on our end, certainly not this fiscal year, to support an investigation on the ice.

“In a perfect world, we’d go after everyone we can get,” McDonough adds. “But the reality is, the money isn’t there.”

As an aside, he offers a small ray of hope: if Lou can somehow get to Greenland, and if he can confirm beyond any doubt that he’s found the Duck and its occupants, the Defense Department would be obliged to get involved.

McDonough’s comment is a sideways reference to a congressional mandate. In 2010, under pressure from families of missing servicemen, Congress told the Defense Department to speed the pace of MIA recoveries. Specifically, federal lawmakers amended a law known as the Missing Persons Act, or Title 10. In the amendment, Congress ordered the creation of a “comprehensive, coordinated, integrated, and fully resourced program to account for designated persons who are unaccounted from World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Persian Gulf War.” Congress also required that by fiscal year 2015 the Defense Department spend enough money to bring home at least two hundred MIAs annually, a sharp increase from the current yearly average of eighty-five.

Later, McDonough reiterates the point in an e-mail: “Don’t forget what I said about Title 10. Should you get onto the ice and make a discovery it would be a game changer.”

But as the meeting draws to a close, McDonough focuses on delivering the bad news, knowing that Lou sees silver linings in the darkest clouds. He defines the current situation: “It’s January now. You’re looking at going there in May. If you don’t have an underwriter, you won’t get up there?”

Lou acknowledges: “It’s looking that way.”

Yet Lou still won’t surrender, offering one more shot that falls somewhere between a pitch and a plea: “Where do we go from here? Can anybody go back and look at this? Why stop now?” He tries to build momentum: “There’s a lot of congressional interest in this. Have you seen the letters they’ve sent?”

This smacks of desperation. Everyone at the table knows that the real trick would be finding a member of Congress who’d publicly
oppose
retrieving World War II heroes. Joan Baker, a forensic anthropologist for DPMO, rolls her eyes when Lou mentions the letters. Wearing the expression of a person who thinks her time is being wasted, Baker answers coolly: “We see a lot of letters in our office. Perhaps some of the congressmen can contribute.”

Lou says softly, “I can find these guys.” Speaking more to himself than to the dwindling crowd, he adds: “It’s just a question of money.”

FEBRUARY–MARCH 2012

The phone rings four times before a woman answers.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Nancy, it’s Mitch. Calling again about John.”

I quickly get to the point: “Nancy, I have a question. If John’s body were found, where would you want him buried?”

“Oh. Let me think a moment,” Nancy Pritchard Morgan Krause says in her lilting voice. “He was Coast Guard, so it would be nice if he were returned to the Coast Guard Academy. But they have to find him first.”

I update her on the financial and other hurdles facing Lou, North South Polar, and the Duck Hunt. I thank her and say good-bye.

I met Nancy seven months earlier, at her retirement home in Annapolis, Maryland. At eighty-eight, she’s a trim, lovely woman with snow-white hair that she keeps short and stylish. Nancy and her second husband, Bill Krause, who’s ninety, are competitive croquet players who enjoy travel, easy banter, a civilized cocktail hour, and each other’s company.

Nancy married Bill after the death of “Tick” Morgan, her brother John’s best friend. Tick died in 2004, shortly before he and Nancy planned to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary with a big family reunion. She turned the reunion into a memorial. “That was closure for my husband,” Nancy says. “We’re still waiting for that with my brother John.”

The day we met, as Bill served drinks, Nancy ran her long, elegant fingers over the cover of the Coast Guard Academy’s 1938 yearbook. Its spine is like a hinge to the page with “Johnny” Pritchard’s entry: two years of football, two years of boxing, yearbook staff, newspaper staff, basketball manager. Then a short profile of her eldest brother that Nancy has read too many times to count: “Before you is a product of the fair state of California—a person whose disposition bears out the reputation of that state for sunshine. His ready smile and overflowing chatter have not only become a tradition at the Academy, but have buffaloed many a member of the fair sex into believing all his promises.”

Nancy smiles as she talks about her “confident, self-assured” big brother, nine years her elder, and about how gentle and caring he was toward her. Nearly seventy years after the fact, she cries when she describes the phone call she received from her mother while at college. “She said, ‘Nancy, John’s been lost.’ That was it.” Nancy left her dormitory, went out into the falling snow, and walked around the block, knowing that she’d never fully recover from the loss.

With her parents and other brothers gone, Nancy is John Pritchard’s closest surviving relative, what the U.S. military calls his PNOK (pronounced “
pee
-knock”) or primary next of kin. That gives her final say over where his remains would rest, should they be recovered. In 1975, when the Coast Guard first tried to find the Duck, Nancy was skeptical. “I said at the time, ‘Leave him there. Let him rest in peace. That’s where he went down, and I would hate to see anybody else put in danger.’ ”

Now Nancy feels differently. “Congress has said they want all the MIAs, the missing in action, to be brought back to this country, and I agree. If they bring everybody back, then by God, you bring my brother back.”

A
T AGE SEVENTY-SEVEN,
Edward “Bud” Richardson still sees his stepfather Benjamin Bottoms through the eyes of a small boy.

“The biggest thing I remember about him is that he taught me not to be prejudiced,” Bud says. “Sometimes he’d show up at home with two or three soldiers or sailors, whoever was at the bus stop that night, looking to go into town to have a few drinks or whatever. He’d bring them home for dinner instead.

“I recall him bringing home a black man, and I had never seen anybody other than people who were white. I must’ve looked surprised, and he told me, ‘There are different people in this world, different colors, different eye shapes, but they’re all people. That’s just how God made them.’ That’s the biggest lesson I learned from him, and I remembered it always.”

The rest of what Bud knows about Ben Bottoms is from snippets and snapshots, some drawn from his own memory, some from stories told by his mother. Bud remembers Ben teaching him to swim in the ocean off Gloucester, Massachusetts; riding on his shoulders to buy an ice cream cone; losing his sailor’s cap when they ran home to avoid a storm; unwrapping skis from Santa Claus. Bud always knew that the skis came from the other man in his life with a bushy beard.

Though unrelated by blood, these days he bears a distinct resemblance to his stepfather, with a rounded face and a receding hairline. He remembers his mother, Olga, a pretty woman with coal black hair, refusing to accept that her husband was dead. “She had a belief that maybe he was alive up there, maybe Eskimos rescued him.” Bud says she only relented after a Coast Guard officer assured her that a pilot had seen the wrecked Duck and the bodies of its crew. The part about the bodies was doubtful, but it had the desired effect, putting to rest Olga Bottoms’s dream that Ben had survived.

“As a young boy, I had illusions about going up there to Greenland and bringing his body back,” says Bud, a retired construction manager and stable owner. As he got older, he considered going to the Coast Guard Academy, but that plan washed away when his mother married a navy officer. Bud thinks the marriage was mostly designed to give him a secure home and a father figure.

If his stepfather were found, Bud says, he’d probably be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But Bud wonders if instead Ben Bottoms should rest in his native Georgia. Either way, Bud wants him home. “I feel very good they’re going back to get him,” he says. “It’s just a shame it couldn’t have happened when my mother was alive. He was the love of her life.”