Frozen in Time (27 page)

In the command tent, Jim is optimistic but cautious. For one thing, if BW-1 is the crash site, he has to abandon his hard-earned theory about Balchen’s X, which is about a mile largely downhill from BW-1. Glaciers don’t move uphill, so even with glacial movement, there’s no chance that the Duck migrated from Balchen’s X to BW-1. In other words, if BW-1 is the Duck’s resting place, Balchen’s X was in the right general vicinity, but misplaced.

A
S NIGHT FALLS,
Lou and I agree that we might never have a better opportunity to break out Shackleton’s Scotch. If we wait and the BW-1 anomaly is a bust, we’d be drinking fine whiskey to wash away the bitter taste. If, on the other hand, the news is good, opening the historic blend will mark the start of our celebrations.

I pull the bottle’s wooden case from my duffel bag as everyone gathers in the dome. Our plastic cups held high, Lou offers a toast: “To Lieutenant John Pritchard, Radioman First Class Benjamin Bottoms, and Corporal Loren Howarth. Your families want you home. We’re here to bring you home, and may we be successful.” His cheeks flushed, his silver hair flowing from under a North South Polar baseball hat, Lou thanks us one by one for our contributions to the mission.

I’ve never seen him in finer form or the team in better spirits.

The question now is whether, as on Shackleton’s failed mission to the South Pole, the best part of our expedition will be the Scotch.

23

“SOME PLAN IN THIS WORLD”

MARCH–APRIL 1943

C
AUTIOUSLY AVOIDING CREVASSES
during the first mile to the Motorsled Camp, Monteverde, Best, and Spina each walked under his own power, as did the three-man trail team. The nine dogs pulled a main sled, behind which was a tow sled loaded with everything the men and beasts would need until Barney Dunlop’s Dumbo returned to fetch them or Pappy Turner’s B-17 resupplied them.

The team’s lead dog was Rinsky, a fierce husky born in Antarctica and brought to Greenland by Healey, its owner. Two other dogs on the team were called Pat and Mopey. Raised in barren lands with no trees or hydrants, male sled dogs had no targets upon which to relieve themselves, so they usually squatted rather than raising their legs. Sometimes, though, a man’s pant leg might get watered in a display of disdain or dominance. Greenland dogs tended to be aggressive, often fighting among themselves for scraps and power. Straddling the line between wild and tame, most had little use for affection or human company. Some were whip-smart and some were dumb as sleds. Some were handsome and some were not. All were tough and seemingly immune to pain and cold. Most seldom barked, but they’d howl like their ancestors at night and at meals. When tired, they’d curl into tight balls of fur, their faces against their flanks, to sleep through Arctic winds.

As the men and dogs marched across the snow-covered ice, Spina was the first to falter. During more than four months since the crash, the farthest he’d walked was fifty feet in pursuit of the milk can. He tried to keep up but soon he fell to his knees every twenty or thirty feet. He’d rise and stumble forward with his eyes shut, then fall again into the snow. After one fall Spina made no effort to rise. He felt resigned to die in place. Strong had other ideas; he bundled Spina aboard the tow sled. Best fell next. Monteverde teetered, tempted to pitch forward into a snowbank and sleep forever. Strong called a halt.

Dolleman raised a tent and climbed inside with Best and Monteverde. They’d remain behind to rest while the others raced ahead to the Motorsled Camp. Strong and Healey continued on foot while Spina reclined on the tow sled. As they hustled across the ice, Strong stepped over the edge of a crevasse. But he was no greenhorn in Greenland; he held tight to a rope attached to the dogsled, and the sled’s momentum pulled him up to safety.

Along the route, they planted red warning flags to mark crevasses and yellow guide flags to mark the safe path. When they reached the empty Motorsled Camp, Strong and Spina climbed into a tent. Healey and the dogs swung around to retrieve Dolleman, Monteverde, and Best.

Once reunited, the six men spent the next two nights in tents on the ice. During the day, Strong, Dolleman, and Healey enlarged and improved the warren of snow caves left behind by Don Tetley, Harry Spencer, and Bill O’Hara. When they climbed inside, Monteverde, Spina, and Best were astonished: their friends had created an underground ice palace.

The entrance was a large hole with a fifteen-foot staircase cut from snow. That led to a hallway about six feet wide, twenty feet long, and ten feet high, with an oil stove at the far end to keep the lair warm and to dry their clothes. Along the hallway were openings that led into small sleeping rooms, like berths on a train. Each was about five feet off the ice floor, to keep water from accumulating in them. The hallway also led to a kitchen with shelves cut into the ice and a vent to the surface for cooking and heating fumes. A large room off the kitchen was the pantry. Past the stove at the end of the hallway was a second set of stairs, leading down another ten feet, to a latrine carved from ice and snow. The three remaining PN9E survivors were so impressed that they renamed the Motorsled Camp: now it was the Imperial Hotel.

The six men enjoyed several days of good weather, during which Turner’s B-17 boosted their supply cache. But several days of storms followed. The wind was so strong and the snow so fierce that Healey brought the dogs down into the human quarters. One husky that refused paid for his disobedience with a case of frostbite, though he recovered. The dogs treated the underground maze like a kennel, fighting and running through the rooms. When the dogs settled down, they became warming blankets for the men, who tucked their sleeping bags against them at night.

T
WO WEEKS PASSED
during which Strong, Healey, and Dolleman cared for the needs of their three Imperial Hotel guests. Healey cooked, and with a wide variety of available supplies he took dinner orders from each man. Healey didn’t like coffee, so he resisted making it, but he kept a pot of tea boiling on the stove around the clock. They stayed up late every night, talking by candlelight and telling jokes. Spina, the jokester of the PN9E, credited Dolleman for keeping them all in stitches. Between laughs, the three trail men told the three fliers stories from their Arctic adventures.

When it was light they climbed up from the cave, and Healey strapped Spina to the sled for daily exercise runs with the dogs. They made multiple passes over the designated landing area, to tamp down new snow.

When Strong was still at Bluie East Two, Don Tetley gave him a detailed map of the Motorsled Camp that included the general location of the buried motorsled. When the weather cleared, Strong decided to get some exercise by digging for it. Dolleman and Healey joined in, and in time so did Monteverde and Best. Spina, his arm still recovering, appointed himself foreman. They dug for three solid days before finding the missing motorsled under twenty feet of snow.

A
T
B
LUIE
E
AST
T
WO,
rain replaced snow and coated the runway with slush. A bigger worry for Balchen was that melting would make the snow at the Motorsled Camp/Imperial Hotel sticky, preventing the PBY from taking off after it collected the six men and dogs. Adding to Balchen’s concerns were high winds that wreaked havoc on the two PBYs on the tarmac. Both suffered broken ailerons, the hinged sections on the trailing edge of the wings that allow an aircraft to bank left or right. Time was passing, and repairs added to the delays.

O
N
A
PRIL
5, 1943,
nineteen days after the trail team arrived on the ice, Harold Strong radioed Bluie East Two with good news. The ground temperature was relatively warm and the wind had taken the day off. Balchen ordered him to break down the sled and get ready to load everything aboard the rescue plane.

Worried about the Dumbo’s weight on takeoff from the ice, Balchen had crews strip the plane of everything not essential to flight or stability. He filled its fuel tanks with only enough for the round-trip, plus a little extra for safety in case of delays.

Before the Dumbo arrived, Pappy Turner flew over the Imperial Hotel in his B-17. Spina got on the walkie-talkie and promised his friend Carl Brehme, Turner’s engineer, that he’d buy him the biggest steak he could eat if the rescue succeeded. During the same conversation, Monteverde heard good news: he’d been promoted to captain during his nearly five months on ice.

As the Dumbo approached, the six men on the ground turned themselves into human weathervanes: they lined up facing into the wind, a signal they’d devised to let pilot Barney Dunlop know the wind direction. He landed as smoothly as he’d done twice before, sending plumes of snow into the air that briefly obscured the plane. Dunlop taxied in a wide circle and stopped near the waiting men.

Balchen wanted to hustle the six men, dogs, and equipment aboard to keep the Dumbo’s belly from freezing to the ice. But the plane’s crew hopped off, wanting to take pictures and to welcome the long-missing men. When the greetings ended, the dogs and equipment were loaded first, followed by the six men. Balchen noticed that Monteverde, Spina, and Best boarded in silence, as though unable to believe that their long wait was nearly over.

STANDING ATOP THE IMPERIAL HOTEL ARE (FROM LEFT) BARNEY DUNLOP, HENDRIK “DUTCH” DOLLEMAN, ARMAND MONTEVERDE, JOSEPH HEALEY, AND PAUL SPINA.
(U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH BY BERNT BALCHEN.)

But once again, the Dumbo’s belly froze to the ice. Strong and Healey got out and rocked one wing, while Dolleman and the plane’s engineer, Alex Sabo, rocked the other. Dunlop gunned the engines and the plane shook as it fought to free itself. When the Dumbo broke loose, Dunlop made four laps around the field. Each lap allowed another man on the icebreaking crew to board on the run through the side blister.

Dunlop steered the plane into position for a long, uphill takeoff run. The passengers stood as far back in the tail as possible, to make it easier for the Dumbo’s nose to lift. Dunlop leaned hard on the throttles and the plane sped across the ice, rising three or four feet then dropping back down, then rising, then dropping again. Dunlop turned around and tried a downhill run, but again he couldn’t gain enough lift. He eased back on the throttles just short of a crevasse.

The Dumbo had four pilots aboard: Dunlop, Balchen, Monteverde, and the copilot, Nathan Waters. By the second failed attempt, none could have doubted that they faced a nasty combination of too much weight from the passengers, dogs, and cargo, and too much friction from the slush coating the Dumbo’s fuselage. A strong headwind would have lowered the ground speed needed for takeoff by creating greater airflow over the wings. But even that might not have been enough, and it was a moot point, anyway. On the one morning when they needed it, the notorious Greenland wind was nowhere to be found.

The Dumbo’s twin engines began to overheat, but Dunlop pressed on. He turned the plane uphill for one more run. As he gained speed, the right engine burst into flames. A line broke and shot black oil onto the wings and fuselage. Dunlop shut down both engines, and crew members jumped out to extinguish the fire. The vacuum pumps were damaged, the fuel pressure gauge line was burned, the cowling on the damaged engine was melted, the engine had lost oil, the exhaust rings were burned out, and the entire works were black with soot. The engine wasn’t quite dead, but any hope of flying that day was gone. Dunlop taxied back to the Imperial Hotel.

Monteverde, Best, and Spina couldn’t believe their bad luck. They seemed doomed to remain on the glacier.

But Balchen and Dunlop weren’t done. The crew began emergency repairs, holding together the damaged, twelve-hundred-horsepower engine with steel straps from equipment cases. Pappy Turner dropped them fresh oil and a replacement oil line, but installing it would mean the time-consuming task of taking apart the engine. The repair crew held off, waiting for a decision from Balchen on whether to make the repairs quick and dirty, or take several days to install the new oil line. His decision depended in part on when he thought the winds would return. They had no way to anchor the Dumbo, so a powerful storm might toss the plane like a dry leaf.

Everyone left the plane and holed up in the overgrown snow cave, discussing their options and dining on a meal prepared by Balchen himself. Balchen thought aloud about the challenges ahead. The second PBY was damaged and unavailable, so they had neither a backup plane nor a backup plan. Getting the three PN9E survivors off the ice soon meant relying on the Dumbo parked outside the Imperial Hotel.

Balchen worried that installing the new oil line would take too long and endanger the mission. The plane would be exposed to windstorms without being tied down. Or, it might freeze to the ice so solidly that no amount of rocking would free it. Balchen believed that they had one last chance to get airborne without the new oil line. To do so, Barney Dunlop could use both engines for takeoff, and then rely on the undamaged engine for the return flight to Bluie East Two. Balchen calculated that just enough fuel remained if they lightened the load. Having made his decision, Balchen announced that he, Strong, Healey, and Dolleman would remain behind, along with their dogs, camping equipment, supplies, and sled.

The plan was pure Balchen. Taking off from the ice cap was, by itself, a dangerous maneuver in the best conditions, accomplished only four times previously, twice by Pritchard in the Duck and twice by Dunlop in the Dumbo. Now, ignoring the possibility of an explosion or a crash, Balchen wanted Dunlop to take off with a half-blown engine, and then fly the survivors back to the base with barely enough fuel to get there. Meanwhile, Balchen and the trail team would trek to the coast, with little hope of rescue if disaster struck.

The three PN9E survivors were skeptical, but they trusted Balchen. And after five months on the ice, they were ready to try almost anything.

After dinner, Balchen and Dunlop spent the night in the cave with the six regular guests of the Imperial Hotel, while the rest of the crew returned to the plane. Monteverde, Best, and Spina went to sleep praying for good luck and good weather.

T
HE SURVIVORS
’
PRAYERS
were answered almost too well. The day was clear and the air dead calm the morning of April 6, 1943. Balchen wanted at least some headwind to lift the Dumbo, so they ate breakfast and waited. They also waited for Pappy Turner’s B-17 to arrive overhead, so he could follow the Dumbo back to the base. With Turner tracking the plane, rescuers would know where to look if its engines failed.