Frozen in Time (30 page)
Authors: Mitchell Zuckoff
Not really, but I’m staying anyway.
Five minutes later, WeeGee and I are alone on the ice at BW-1, the final two searchers atop the Koge Bay glacier for the final hours of Duck Hunt 2012.
W
ASTING NO TIME,
WeeGee replaces the O-ring in the hose and tries to restart the generator. It refuses to turn over, so he takes it apart, checking the oil, the connections, the spark plug, the filters, the carburetor, the fuel cap, everything he can think of. Few people know as much about engines, and the generator is a pretty basic machine. Yet no matter what he tries, WeeGee can’t restart it. Without a way to draw water into the Hotsy, we can’t melt holes. Our effort feels cursed.
WeeGee calls base camp on the walkie-talkie, asking that a backup generator be dropped off to us when the first helicopter arrives. Frustrated, I start breaking down equipment to shove into the Pelican case. WeeGee carries Alberto’s camera and the case containing the video screen to the unfinished second hole. It’s about fifteen feet short of the desired depth, but with nothing better to do, WeeGee wants a look. It’s 4:00 p.m.
He covers his head with a black puffy coat to view the screen and feeds the camera to the hole’s bottom. I watch him as I work, hoping. WeeGee pulls up the camera as patiently as a fisherman testing his line. After a few feet he stops. I hold my breath.
“Hey, Mitch,” he calls, “come here. Take a look at this.”
I race to his side, drop to my knees, and duck under the puffy coat. Our heads almost touching, his right shoulder against my left, WeeGee points to the bottom right corner of the screen. It’s unmistakable, a sight so beautiful, so satisfying, so perfect, yet seemingly so impossible that I blink several times to be sure: a black plug with a wire extending from it, with a white band wrapped around the wire.
My eyes dart around the screen. I spot a cable on the opposite side of the hole. Nearby are objects that look like fuses. Rivets. More wires. We see dark shadows just beyond the camera’s view that promise more vintage World War II aircraft parts where they don’t belong: under thirty-eight feet of ice, on a glacier several miles from Koge Bay, in almost the precise spot where a 1943 military report says a rescue plane called a Grumman Duck, serial number V1640, crashed on November 29, 1942, with three heroes aboard.
As WeeGee and I stare at the screen, we see the final pieces of the puzzle that reveals what happened that fateful morning seventy years ago. Under the original plan, John Pritchard and Ben Bottoms would have landed the Duck, then hiked to the PN9E to get Bill O’Hara and Paul Spina. By the time they returned with the injured men, visibility likely would have been too poor to take off safely, and they would have waited for the weather to clear. But Max Demorest’s fall into the crevasse changed everything. When Lolly Howarth ran to the Duck with the terrible news, Pritchard and Bottoms knew that waiting wasn’t an option. They hustled Howarth aboard the Duck and took off immediately for the
Northland
, to collect ropes and tools and able-bodied men for an emergency rescue attempt. Pritchard bravely flew into the teeth of the storm, lost his bearings, called for guidance, then slammed into the glacier at the exact spot where WeeGee and I kneel.
We came within a hairbreadth of failure. With the Hotsy idle and time running out, if we had bored the hole a few feet in a different direction, we might have been standing atop the Duck without ever knowing it.
WeeGee and I throw our arms around each other, both of us grinning like new fathers.
“We’ve got it,” WeeGee says.
T
WO HOURS LATER,
darkness is falling and the storm is bearing down. There’s no time for the helicopter pilot to shut down the engines, so WeeGee and I rush aboard under the spinning blades. We’re met by cheers, hugs, and backslaps. Our walkie-talkie call informing base camp—WeeGee made sure that Lou was the first to hear—had the predictable effect on the team: disbelief, followed by jubilation.
Now, everyone on this last flight to Kulusuk crowds around to see the camera images I made from the video screen. Smiles spread from one to the next as they witness what we came for: hard evidence of the Duck’s crash site. The more we analyze the images and the circumstances, the more certain we are. Everything adds up: the depth of the discovery, which matches the predicted ice accumulation of seventy years; the precise coordinates of the 1943 crash report; the absence of any other known plane crash on this area of the glacier; metal and electrical parts found in a Grumman Duck. Add that to a radar hit showing a large under-ice anomaly and signals from the magnetometer. Proof positive.
We’ll have to return to Koge Bay, ideally next summer, with heavy equipment to excavate perhaps fifty tons of ice atop the plane to reach the bodies of John Pritchard, Benjamin Bottoms, and Loren Howarth. But we’ve solved the mystery of where they’ve been all these years. They had to go out, and now they can come back.
Aboard the helicopter, Lou fights tears: “I’m just so happy for Nancy.”
Jim can’t stop smiling. “Everything that went wrong,” he says, “it’s like it was supposed to happen. It’s like divine intervention.” Our handshake expands into a bear hug.
Watching from his seat, WeeGee shoots me a grin.
“Hey, Mitch, how does it end?”
“Like this, WeeGee. Like this.”
1943–PRESENT
T
HE FIRST HALF
of 1943 was a busy time for war news, from the German surrender at the Battle of Stalingrad, to U.S. troops’ capture of Guadalcanal, to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Yet when the press blackout lifted, the crashes and rescues in Greenland became a momentary sensation.
The biggest splash occurred in May 1943, after the U.S. Army issued a lengthy press release describing the extraordinary events of the previous six months. Newspapers across the country, including
The New York Times
, ran page-one stories based on the military’s account. The
Los Angeles Times
enhanced its coverage with an exclusive interview with native son Armand Monteverde. Uncomfortable talking about the experience, Monteverde said his goal was to resume ferrying bombers, “preferably in the South Pacific.”
Coinciding with the press release, Monteverde, Harry Spencer, and Don Tetley went to the White House on May 3, 1943, where they met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They emerged from the meeting spit-shined and smiling for an official photograph with General H. H. “Hap” Arnold.
Several days later, newspaper readers nationwide awoke to a twelve-part syndicated series written by Oliver La Farge, an Army Air Forces captain who’d won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1930. The series focused on the PN9E crash and aftermath, mentioning the crashes of John Pritchard’s Duck and Homer McDowell’s C-53 almost in passing. Later, La Farge’s series became part of a book called
War below Zero
, written with none other than Bernt Balchen and the writer Corey Ford.
The popular radio program
The Cavalcade of America
turned the PN9E saga into a twenty-five-minute radio play called
Nine Men against the Arctic
. The fictionalized account featured cheesy studio sound effects; the crunch of feet on snow sounded suspiciously like a man squeezing corn starch in a leather pouch. Worse yet was the stilted dialogue, which put the turgid in dramaturgy. Consider this imagined exchange between Monteverde and Spencer in the cockpit shortly before the crash:
Monteverde (From California)
You know, Spence, I don’t like this place.
Spencer (Texas Drawl. Aged 22)
It sure is a long way from Texas.
Monteverde
You can’t see anything. All this whiteness everywhere. No horizon. How high are we, anyhow?
Spencer
Reckon we’re plenty high, but you can’t be sure. It’s like flying through milk.
Not long after the radio play, the story of the Greenland crashes faded from view. Like most of the men and women who served during World War II, the survivors and rescuers rejoiced at the war’s end and returned to ordinary lives. In doing so, they joined a generation that endured terrible threats and remarkable events, only to tuck away their memories with their old uniforms.
A
LTHOUGH HE BORE
the brunt of blame for the PN9E crash in official reports, Armand Monteverde received the Legion of Merit for his actions during the months that followed. His citation credited him with “high devotion to duty and complete disregard for his own safety” in caring for his crew after the wreck. Legion of Merit medals also were given to the six other PN9E survivors and Don Tetley.
ARMAND MONTEVERDE IS WELCOMED HOME BY HIS SISTER ADA LEHR (LEFT) AND HIS MOTHER, VIRGINIA MONTEVERDE, WITH NIECE DEANNE LEHR ON HIS SHOULDERS.
(U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH.)
While on leave in California after being rescued, Monteverde enjoyed a brief moment of celebrity. Newspaper photos showed him being greeted by his beaming mother and sister, with his seven-year-old niece on his shoulders, wearing his new captain’s hat.
After recuperating, Monteverde returned, as he had hoped, to ferrying planes for the Air Transport Command. He continued his service during the Korean War, and spent twenty-two years in the air force before retiring as a lieutenant colonel. Along the way he married and had a son. Armand Monteverde died in California in 1988. He was seventy-two.
Like Monteverde, Harry Spencer also was promoted to captain during his time on the ice. Afterward, he too continued to ferry bombers for the Air Transport Command. In August 1943, Spencer wrote a letter to leaders of the Boy Scouts of Dallas explaining all that he’d been through in Greenland. In it, he credited God and his Eagle Scout training for his survival. The letter made one request: “I have not been where I could pay my dues,” Spencer wrote. “If you can tell me what that amount is, it would be a favor to me, as I would like to be connected with Scouting always.”
After the war, Spencer opened a hardware store in Texas with his brother-in-law, then launched a successful air-conditioning business. Everything he might have imagined about his life when he fell into the crevasse came true. He and his wife, Patsy, had two daughters, Peggy and Carol Sue; a son, Tommy, who died in childhood of leukemia; and three grandchildren. When Patsy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Spencer dedicated himself to caring for her.
He served as a city councilman in Irving, Texas, as director of a local hospital, and as district commissioner of the Boy Scouts of America. He was a board member of the local branch of the Girl Scouts and served on the boards of the Irving Chamber of Commerce, the Texas Commerce Bank, and the Irving YMCA. Spencer taught Sunday school at his Methodist church for thirty-five years. He won the Distinguished Irving Civic Award and the High-Spirited Citizen Award for Extraordinary Contributions to the City of Irving, and was named Rotarian of the Year, among other honors.
Spencer’s family knew him as warm and funny, and they’d remember him as a man who bought toilet paper in bulk long before warehouse stores. When his younger daughter Carol Sue asked why, Spencer explained: “I have been without toilet paper,” he told her, “and I am never going to be without toilet paper again!”
At Carol Sue’s urging, in 1989 Spencer returned to Greenland to visit the site of the PN9E crash. He wrote afterward that he was motivated by a desire to revisit “the pristine whiteness of the Ice Cap snow, which seems to have no dimension, the crystal blue of the bay water, and the lurking shadows of the crevasses [which] hold me in deep awe of God’s wonderful creation.”
After flying over the crevasse-laden field where his bomber went down and where he nearly died, Spencer asked the helicopter pilot to land at the site of the long-gone Motorsled Camp. “As I stood in the sunny Arctic silence and looked south toward the bay, it all came back to me,” he wrote. “The view that was etched in my mind all the years came into view. I can’t tell you the feelings that came to me. Nothing can equal that moment.”
Spencer stepped onto the ice cap carrying two items: an American flag and a small plaque with the names of Max Demorest, Clarence Wedel, John Pritchard, Benjamin Bottoms, and Loren Howarth. It read, “In Memory: Five valiant men. They gave their lives in effort to save others.”
“When we took off,” Spencer wrote later, “the American flag and plaque remained on that vast sea of silence and nothingness to mark the spot of our experience so long ago.”
Harry Spencer died in Texas in 2004. He was eighty-three. Carol Sue Spencer Podraza wanted to fill her father’s tombstone with his war record and his many other honors and achievements. But Spencer had extracted a promise from her that his stone would bear only the insignia of the Boy Scouts, because its oath had guided him through boyhood to Greenland and beyond. Harry Spencer’s tombstone reads, “On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country. To help other people at all times, to obey the Scout Law, and to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”
HARRY SPENCER ON THE ICE CAP WITH A FLAG AND PLAQUE HONORING THE LOST MEN.
(COURTESY OF CAROL SUE SPENCER PODRAZA.)
L
OSING BOTH FEET
seemed to make William “Bill” O’Hara even tougher. After recovering from surgery, frostbite, and other injuries, O’Hara graduated with honors from Georgetown University Law School. After a brief time in a wheelchair, he was fitted with prosthetic limbs, and for as long as he lived O’Hara never returned to the chair. Even after a late-in-life stroke, he resented needing a cane.
Although he was a lifelong New Deal Democrat, O’Hara harbored lasting bitterness about not being invited to the Roosevelt White House along with Monteverde, Spencer, and Tetley. He blamed the president. “Dad was still in a wheelchair then,” his daughter Patricia said, “and Roosevelt refused to have someone in a wheelchair there. Dad said, ‘That son of a bitch is in a wheelchair himself!’ ”
At the end of the
Cavalcade of America
radio play, O’Hara spoke briefly on the air as a special guest. “With the passage of time,” he said, “I have regained some of the one hundred pounds I lost in weight, and the experience grows more and more unreal, a bad dream that one wants to forget. The only reality now is the reality of the day-by-day winning of the war.”
For two years after his return from Greenland, O’Hara refused to see his girlfriend Joan, feeling as though he was no longer the man she’d fallen in love with. But she persisted. They married, and together they had a son, three daughters, and eleven grandchildren. O’Hara became a clerk in the Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, Commissioners’ Office, and spent three terms as the county’s register of wills. He also served a dozen years on Pennsylvania’s Public Utility Commission before opening a law practice in Scranton.
Years after Greenland, O’Hara tried to find his fellow PN9E crew members but was stymied by military rules. He complained to a reporter: “The Army has some screwy regulation that it won’t divulge the addresses of veterans.” In time, though, he succeeded in reaching several. He and some of the other PN9E crewmen crossed paths now and again, but for the most part they had little contact after their ordeal.
On several occasions, journalists sought out O’Hara to discuss his wartime experiences. He’d oblige, to a point: “All I have left is the pain and suffering,” he told a reporter in 1982. “I can recall it being a son-of-a-bitch for eighty-eight days.” That was as deeply as he’d reflect for public consumption.
“I haven’t dwelled on what happened to me and the others forty years ago,” O’Hara said. “I’ve been too busy for that kind of stuff.”
His eldest daughter remembered him as an Irish charmer, a straight-talking man who liked several drinks better than one, a father who could be difficult but also supremely capable, a “tough nut” who wouldn’t let Greenland get the best of him. William “Bill” O’Hara died in Pennsylvania in 1990, at seventy-two.
P
AUL
S
PINA RETURNED
home to upstate New York and worked odd jobs before becoming a factory foreman at the Chicago Pneumatic Tool Company. He loved to fish and to drink beer, ideally at the same time. He never lost his good cheer. “Anytime it was a bad situation,” said his daughter, Jean, “he would turn it around and make you feel better about it.”
Spina told her about his Greenland adventure and later shared the story with her children. Occasionally he’d pull out a yellowed scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings and mementos to relive it himself. Spina didn’t need the scrapbook to remind him, though. He remained susceptible to the cold, and at times his hands and arms swelled and ached. Spina dismissed it as arthritis, but his wife and daughter believed that a more accurate diagnosis was Greenland.
Paul Spina died in New York of a sudden heart attack in 1978, at age sixty-one. His family blamed that on the ice cap, too.
Alfred “Clint” Best recovered fully from his physical and mental distress. After the war, he graduated magna cum laude with an accounting degree from Baylor University. Best went to work for Dow Chemical and rose through the ranks during a thirty-five-year career before retiring in 1970. He was active in his church and president of the Tulsa Rose Society. Never an athlete himself, Best coached Little League baseball because his son, Robert, was on the team.