Frozen in Time (8 page)

That night, desperate for a smoke, Paul Spina ignored the spilled fuel and Monteverde’s orders. The two had developed a warm rapport during their ferrying duties, and Spina knew that Monteverde was no disciplinarian. When everyone else fell asleep, he unwrapped his bandaged hands with his mouth. Awkwardly using both frostbitten hands, Spina fished out a cigarette and matches from his pocket, stuck the cigarette between his lips, and tucked a matchbox under his chin. When he struck a flame, his crewmates startled awake. Spina calmly lit his cigarette and asked if anyone wanted a drag. The plane didn’t explode and neither did Monteverde, who had a soft spot for the affable engineer. Spina also had a bond with copilot Harry Spencer, who soon held cigarettes to his mouth and slipped him extra bits of chocolate.

PRIVATE PAUL SPINA, ENGINEER ABOARD THE PN9E.
(COURTESY OF JEAN SPINA.)

Now that they could light matches, they used small fires to melt snow in a thermos cup. Little by little they had water to drink, not eat.

During their first three days on the ice cap, as the storm blew itself out, the crew of the PN9E listened for planes overhead, fantasized about long furloughs after being rescued, and got to know one another.

T
HE
PN9E’
S FAILURE
to return to Bluie West One doubled the job confronting searchers. No one knew where the B-17 had crashed, but the area near Koge Bay that had been assigned to Monteverde’s crew for the C-53 search seemed a logical place to look. Despite the storms, on November 10 seventeen planes left Bluie West One to search for the PN9E. Meanwhile, sixteen C-47s and six B-17s went out looking for McDowell’s C-53. The skies over Greenland were teeming with search planes diverted from the war. All returned that night with no sign of either missing crew.

The following day, two search flights went out for each of the downed planes, but heavy storms near Bluie West One drove them back to base. The same Arctic weather that contributed to or caused both crashes now conspired to prevent McDowell’s C-53 and Monteverde’s B-17 from being found.

A
LTHOUGH THE SKIES
on the west coast of Greenland were stormy, the weather on the east coast gave the men of the PN9E a break on Thursday, November 12. Dawn arrived clear and bright. The crew was weak and tired, but the blue sky gave them a lift. Radioman Lolly Howarth flew the Gibson Girl kite and looked more closely at the damaged equipment from the radio compartment.

Crew members strong enough to work crawled out of their hideout to rake several feet of windblown snow that had piled around and atop the olive-colored plane. The temperature was 30 degrees below zero, but the task kept their minds busy and their bodies active. They hoped that removing the snow would keep the B-17 visible from the sky if a search plane flew overhead. Despite all they’d been through, their spirits remained strong. They told each other that just as they’d been out searching for the C-53, someone would be out looking for them.

As his men kept busy, Monteverde ducked inside the tail section to keep Spina company. They talked awhile, and soon the pilot and the engineer realized that they needed spiritual help. They knelt together to pray.

Meanwhile, copilot Harry Spencer and navigator Bill O’Hara decided to have a look around. Despite O’Hara’s frozen feet, he wanted to tough it out. He was twenty-four, the hard-nosed son of a coal mine manager from outside Scranton, Pennsylvania. After working in the mines during his teenage years, O’Hara graduated from the University of Scranton with a degree in business administration. Awaiting him at home was a beautiful girlfriend, Joan Fennie.

LIEUTENANT WILLIAM “BILL” O’HARA, NAVIGATOR ABOARD THE PN9E.
(COURTESY OF JEAN SPINA.)

Spencer and O’Hara knew that Koge Bay was southeast of their wreck. On clear days like this one, they could see the water. Distances were difficult to calculate across the featureless expanse of ice, but they felt confident the bay was no more than ten miles away. If they could reach it on foot, they might be able to establish their position with greater precision. Maybe they could use the Gibson Girl to hail one of the Coast Guard ships patrolling nearby. The emergency radio had an automatic mode to send SOS signals and also a manual mode for custom messages. Spencer considered using a life raft from the PN9E to paddle along the coast to the weather shack at Beach Head Station.

Even if they couldn’t hike to the bay, Spencer and O’Hara intended to plot the locations of nearby crevasses, to keep everyone safe when they ventured away from the plane. They hoped that a map of ice fissures would also provide a pathway to the crash site for rescuers on foot, motorsleds, or dogsleds.

Aware that some crevasses were covered by snow or ice bridges, the two lieutenants walked slowly, testing the ground in front of them before each step. They found one crevasse and made their way around it, then found another and again took evasive action. About fifty yards from the plane, Spencer stepped on what felt like a patch of solid ice.

A moment later, he disappeared.

6

MAN DOWN

NOVEMBER 1942

H
ARRY
S
PENCER THOUGHT
he was a goner.

As a boy, he’d devoured books about adventures in the Arctic. He marveled at its wonders and respected its dangers. The young Texan knew that he’d fallen through an ice bridge covering a hidden crevasse. He also knew that being swallowed by a crevasse is like being swallowed by a whale: after a brief, exhilarating rush, it rarely ends well.

As he fell, Spencer retained enough presence of mind to understand that his life expectancy was pitifully brief. If the crevasse was deep, say three to four hundred feet, he could expect to live for about five seconds before staining the ice red at the bottom.

A five-second fall might be just enough time for the handsome young lieutenant to see the life that he was supposed to live flash before his eyes. There might be time to picture his pretty young wife, Patsy, and to imagine the pleasures and sorrows they’d share. If Spencer could think as fast as he fell, five seconds might be enough time to envision three fine children, three wonderful grandchildren, and an unbreakable Friday date night on their houseboat. He might see himself endure heartbreaking loss and celebrate great joys; become an admired business, community, and church leader in Irving, Texas; and win local office and an armful of civic honors. He might have time to imagine his own obituary. Yet five seconds wouldn’t be enough time to appreciate such an obituary’s closing lines: “Harry’s intelligence, wit, laughter, sense of adventure, commitment to enabling the city of Irving to be a home for all people, commitment to education and good medical care for all, deep love for the Creator, and devotion to family and friends, touched everyone he met along the way. He believed the Boy Scout motto and lived out the creed in his daily walk. He will be missed!”

With every second, with every foot Spencer fell deeper into the abyss, he moved further away from the rich, full life he seemed destined to enjoy.

Nature wasn’t likely to offer any help. Crevasses are caused when adjacent parts of a glacier move at different speeds toward the edge of Greenland. Some portions of glaciers creep while others race, as though eager to fling themselves into new lives as icebergs. As physical tensions rise between fast- and slow-moving portions of a glacier, the ice fractures. The rifts that result are crevasses. Because most crevasses have unbroken vertical walls, Spencer had every reason to believe that he had fallen into nature’s equivalent of a twenty- or thirty-story elevator shaft.

But something unexpected and extraordinary happened. After falling through the ice bridge, Harry Spencer didn’t drop for five seconds to the bottom of the crevasse. Time seemed to slow as he fell—he felt as though he were falling forever—but in fact he fell for less than three seconds. And that made all the difference.

Spencer’s fall was cut short by a block of ice the size of a Jeep that had somehow wedged itself between the walls of the crevasse, below the spot where the ice bridge broke. The ice block created a natural platform large enough to halt Spencer’s fall about one hundred feet from the surface. Spencer landed on his back, dazed but unhurt. An agnostic might call it an astonishing piece of good fortune, but Spencer was a churchgoing man, so he’d forever consider it divine intervention.

As he took stock of his situation, Spencer realized that he was covered by a blanket of snow; the top layer from the surface had followed him into the crevasse. He brushed himself off and counted his blessings. He was alive and well, but his predicament wasn’t over. Now he had to get out.

Peering downward beyond the edge of the ice platform, Spencer saw that the crevasse continued far below into deep, blue-ice darkness. As he shifted his weight to turn around, the block slipped, threatening to take him crashing to the bottom with it. But the gaps in the walls of a crevasse tend to narrow the deeper they go, so the block wedged itself into the walls again, at a spot just below its original position. Spencer got to his feet to look around. As he gazed left and right, he noticed that his platform was the only one like it as far as he could see. If he’d fallen through the ice bridge a few feet in either direction, he’d almost certainly be dead at the bottom of the crevasse.

A CREVASSE NEAR THE PN9E CRASH SITE, DATED 1942. HARRY SPENCER IS BELIEVED TO BE ONE OF THE THREE MEN PICTURED.
(COURTESY OF CAROL SUE SPENCER PODRAZA.)

Spencer felt strangely serene. He drank in the ethereal beauty of his surroundings, a cathedral of ice in shades of blue and white. His eyes followed the translucent light-blue crevasse walls upward to the white hole through which he fell. He looked up to a sky that was its own winking shade of blue. Sunlit clouds completed a scene fit for a ceiling fresco.

Halfway down the gullet of a crevasse was the last place the twenty-two-year-old newlywed airman expected to find himself. Climbing out on his own wasn’t possible; the crevasse walls were too vertical and too slick, and Spencer had no tools to make handholds. But at that moment, encased in natural splendor, standing on his little platform, Harry Spencer felt confident that it wouldn’t be his final resting place. He thought: “God must have a plan for me, or this block of ice wouldn’t be here.”

W
HEN
S
PENCER FELL
, Bill O’Hara called for help from the men in and around the carcass of the PN9E. When no one responded, O’Hara repeated the distress call three more times. When he got their attention, O’Hara ordered, “Get rope! Get rope!”

Roused from his prayer session with Spina inside the bomber’s tail, Monteverde ran toward the hole, ignoring the risk of crevasses and the frostbite gnawing at both his feet. Following close behind were several others who’d been searching the snow for rations and equipment lost in the crash.

The break in the ice bridge revealed the crevasse to be fifteen feet wide, more than capable of swallowing them all. Fearful of joining Spencer, they tiptoed toward the opening like soldiers approaching a minefield. The PN9E crew had no previous idea what a bridge-covered crevasse looked like, and until the crash none thought he’d ever need to know. Soon they would begin to recognize what Tucciarone described as a telltale sign of danger: “Small ridges, two or three inches in height, drifted over with snow.” But not all hidden crevasses had those markings, so every step on the glacier carried deadly risk.

Monteverde dropped to his belly and wriggled to the edge. He shouted down to Spencer, who called back that he was OK.

Other crew members hurried back to the bomber and gathered nylon lines from the parachutes they’d sliced into bedding. They braided six lines into a long, strong rope, followed their footsteps back to the crevasse, and lowered the rope to their copilot. Spencer tied the last few feet into a loop and slipped his head and arms through. The makeshift lasso settled securely under his armpits.

Seven of Spencer’s crewmates, all but the injured Spina, grabbed onto the other end of the rope and hauled him toward the surface. With each pull, the nylon threads sawed a narrow channel deeper and deeper into the edge of the crevasse. When Spencer neared the top, Monteverde and the others realized that they were pulling him toward the underside of an impassable shelf of overhanging ice. Already weak and tired, they lowered Spencer back down a hundred feet to the platform. They pulled up the rope and plotted a new strategy.

First, they attached a parachute harness to one end of the rope. On the initial rescue attempt, Spencer felt as though the nylon loop under his arms was cutting him in half. The harness had straps that went over his shoulders, across his chest, and between his legs, and was far more comfortable and secure. Along with the parachute harness they lowered a bolo knife from the survival kit. When everything was in place, the seven able-bodied crewmen returned to the rope line and pulled Spencer back up. This time when he reached the ice ledge near the top, Spencer used the bolo knife to hack from below while Monteverde used another knife to chop away from above. Together they carved a V-shaped notch at the lip of the crevasse, a passage large enough for the rope team to pull Spencer through.

More than three hours after he fell, Spencer was out of the crevasse and back on solid ice. He was in relatively good shape—cold to the bone and suffering from a lost glove and frostbite on his exposed hand, but otherwise unhurt. He might yet enjoy a long and fruitful life, capped by lavish tributes in a distant obituary.

S
PENCER’S FALL FORCED
the PN9E crew to accept that they’d crash-landed on a glacier shot through with hidden crevasses. Even a cursory inspection revealed that they were hemmed in on all sides. The most worrisome crevasse was the one that crossed underneath the PN9E’s tail. Small at first, it grew at an alarming rate. Within days, it would threaten the crew and their living quarters.

If the PN9E had crash-landed in late summer, the ice bridges might have already melted, revealing the crevasses like highways on a road map. But in November they were no more visible at the surface than subway tunnels.

The crevasses forced the PN9E survivors to abandon hope that they could hike to Koge Bay. No longer could they dream of hunting seals on the coast until being spotted by a Coast Guard ship. Any thought of paddling a life raft to Beach Head Station was abandoned, too. They were trapped on the ice cap, their survival dependent on someone spotting them from the air. Yet even if they were found, a new question arose: How would anyone reach them? A plane couldn’t land among the crevasses, and motorsled or dog teams would face the same hidden dangers that nearly killed Harry Spencer.

The exhausted, bone-chilled crew of the PN9E trudged back to the broken bomber. They collected scraps of felt from the ruined radio compartment, drained fuel from the plane’s tanks, and made a fire on the icy ground. To celebrate Spencer’s survival and to replenish their energy, Monteverde issued the men full meal rations. They thawed snow for water to drink and heated canned meat over the open flame. They warmed themselves before the fire and pulled off their boots to rub blood back into their feet.

Then, all nine men prayed together, offering thanks for the survival of their friend, crewmate, and companion. Afterward, they prayed as a congregation every day. There were no atheists in their ice hole.

E
VEN BEFORE
S
PENCER’S
rescue, several men were hobbling on frostbitten feet; now they were in worse shape. Men whose shoes or flying boots were leather, as opposed to rubber, suffered the most. Woody Puryear discovered that his unlined leather boots were warm and soft during the day, but every night they froze, encasing his feet in blocks of ice. O’Hara’s leather dress shoes hadn’t dried since he’d jumped into the snow to help Paul Spina after the crash. Hours of trying to rescue Spencer from the crevasse left O’Hara with no feeling below the ankles.

Inside the bomber’s tail, O’Hara confided to Monteverde that he thought his feet were frozen solid. Spina heard the navigator say, “I don’t even know if I have any feet or not.” When Monteverde helped to remove O’Hara’s shoes, the men saw an awful sight: the skin on his feet had deep, ugly cracks, and they’d turned sickening shades of blue, yellow, and green.

Monteverde was stunned to find that O’Hara’s feet felt nothing like flesh and bone. An awful comparison rushed to his mind: they felt like the cold, hard metal on the butt ends of the plane’s machine guns. Monteverde knew that the cause wasn’t just O’Hara’s leather shoes. The navigator had been among the toughest and most selfless of them all. His feet had frozen after the crash when helping Spina, and he’d made matters worse by trying to hike with Spencer to the sea. Working to rescue Spencer from the crevasse had been the final straw.

Hoping to reverse or at least limit the damage, Monteverde rubbed O’Hara’s feet for hours, holding them against his body for warmth until they began to soften. He sprinkled sulfa powder into the cracked skin to fight infection. Within a day, O’Hara’s feet turned a mottled, multicolor mess, as blood and feeling returned. To relieve Monteverde, fellow crew members took hours-long shifts rubbing the navigator’s feet. The process could be excruciating. O’Hara’s feet didn’t hurt when they were frozen; frostbite by itself isn’t especially painful, because the flesh becomes numb. Burning pain accompanies the return of blood.

O’Hara’s plight put a scare into every man among them. Crewmen who’d been wearing leather dress shoes traded them for rubber or leather flight boots they found in the wreckage. While inside their shelter, they aired out their boots as much as possible. Then they filled them with loose-fitting parachute silk, which provided insulation while allowing the men to move their toes to aid circulation.

Also, they learned to leave their gloves outside in the cold. Otherwise, each time the gloves thawed they absorbed more water, making it worse when they froze again. The men began to accept the reality that they were stranded in a place so cold that frozen gloves were better than soggy, half-thawed gloves.