Six members of the B-17 crew that went down in Greenland in 1942. Back row, left to right: Navigator William O’Hara, who lost both his legs in the ordeal; pilot Armand Monteverde, who survived on the ice for 129 days; co-pilot Harry Spencer, who was rescued with O’Hara by a seaplane. Front row, left to right: Assistant engineer Alexander Tucciarone, who escaped on the Duck; radioman Loren Howarth, who died in the crash of the Duck; and Engineer Paul Spina, one of the three, with Monteverde, who stayed behind. (
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Frozen in Time
An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II
by Mitchell Zuckoff
Harper
On Thanksgiving Day 1942, a secret US Army base in Greenland received a distress signal from deep inside the island’s frozen ice caps: “Situation grave. A very sick man. Hurry.”
The patient was Bill O’Hara, a flight navigator who had crashed three weeks before. Dry gangrene, caused by the extreme cold, had taken over his feet, blackening them into mummified lumps.
As he lay helpless in an ice hole, his friends stared in horror as his tissue tore away from his bone — O’Hara’s feet would later fall off into his boots.
Greenland is hell, frozen over. With almost 80% of its land buried under ice and temperatures that dip to 40 degrees below zero, it boasts only 58,000 residents. Blizzards there can blind eyes and scour glass; human skin left out in the elements experiences “instant frostbite.”
This monstrous place is home to a little-known World War II survival tale unearthed by author Mitchell Zuckoff, who’s earned his literary reputation uncovering forgotten adventure stories. (His last book, a bestseller, was “Lost in Shangri-La,” about men and women who crashed in Dutch New Guinea during World War II.)
His latest harrowing tale follows a group of airmen who crashed in the frozen wastes and how they fought to stay alive. They survived for more than four months in a land that one explorer described as “a mother that devours her own children.”
Greenland — though the size of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New England combined — and its rough terrain has been largely a non-contender on the world stage.
According to legend, it earned its misnomer in the year 982 when Viking Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland and discovered the vast icy landscape. He named it “Greenland,” hoping that a “good name” would encourage his fellow Vikings to relocate. They did, and the community founded by Erik lasted for four centuries.
By the 1700s, Greenland came into Danish hands through the work of a Danish-Norwegian missionary, who spread the gospel of Christianity to the natives. Still, the island remained an isolated, forgotten place.
That all changed on April 9, 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded Denmark. “Greenland, ignored for most of human history, suddenly mattered,” writes Zuckoff.
Americans were uneasy about a bomber’s ability to make the six-hour flight from New York. Greenland was also nature’s only reliable source of cryolite, a mineral used to produce aluminum, key to making warplanes.
When the US entered the war in December 1941, lonely Greenland became an important transport hub. Supplies and fuel were airlifted to Britain through the “Snowball Route” — from Maine to Newfoundland to Greenland to Iceland to Scotland.
By fall 1942, around 900 planes would make the flight over Greenland, and one of them was a C-53 twin-engine plane named the Skytrooper.
The plane, returning from a routine cargo mission, crashed down on an ice cap in the “edge of nowhere” on the island’s southeast coast. All five men aboard survived the crash with no major injuries.
Unfortunately, that was where the luck ended. Their cargo bag was empty, and the plane had only two days’ ration. There were no sleeping bags or heaving clothing as the temperature hovered between 15 degrees and minus 10.
The radio transmissions went silent days after their first crash call. They would never be heard from again; all five died.
But more than 50 war planes joined the effort to find their fallen brethren, among them a B-17 bomber and its crew of nine.
Four days after Skytrooper’s crash, the bomber would fall, too, this time at the end of fjord in Køge Bay after a wing hit the ice. The 15-ton bomber slid 200 yards and split in two “like a salami with a chunk sliced down the middle.”
Again — and even more miraculously — all crew members, nine in total, survived the crash with only minor injuries (the worst being a broken arm) among them.
The crew realized quickly that they needed to insulate themselves from the deadly cold. They gathered seat cushions, window covers, parachutes and a tarp to cover the rupture and sat together like “frozen sardines” in the catwalk of the plane’s tail.
They had only rations enough for four days — though the pilot and leader, Californian Capt. Armand Monteverde, believed he could stretch it out to 10. Beyond that, they would undoubtedly starve.
They had no sleeping bags or stoves, and the leather shoes that some of them wore (including poor flight navigator O’Hara, who had on dress shoes) would freeze solid overnight.
“I don’t even know if I have any feet or not,” O’Hara said when they turned an unnatural green/blue.
More pressing was that the radio transmitter had been destroyed in the crash, leaving them no way to contact with the outside world.
So they prayed. “They were no atheists in their ice hole,” writes Zuckoff.
A week after the crash, radioman Loren Howarth was able to fix the radio enough to send and receive messages.
The first one sent: “Prep Negat Nine Easy [PN9E] crashed in glacier . . . Have kept alive. Send help soon.”
Three days later, after a series of unrelenting snow storms, help in the form of a C-54 Skymaster arrived — just as they had exhausted their food supply. The sky rained down with supplies — medicines, foods, tea and sugar, sleeping bags and, most importantly, a quart of whiskey.
Though the terrain was far too difficult for any “normal” plane to land, the Coast Guard had a secret weapon — “the Duck.” It was a “flying boat” — only 34-feet long and 14-feet high — and named for its ability to conquer both air and sea.
The Duck touched down two miles from the downed B-17 bomber on Nov. 28 — 19 days after the initial crash.
But the Duck could hold only two extra men — and they needed to be capable of walking the two miles to the landing site. Monteverde chose assistant engineer Al Tucciarone and staff sergeant Lloyd Woody Puryear to head home.
As the Duck carried their compatriots away, the remaining seven men — now joined by two members of rescue team who arrived at the site by “motor sled,” a kind of snowmobile — opened up a can of chicken that they had been saving as a celebration.
Tomorrow, they would head to the Duck landing site and get everyone back to safety.
Little did they know that the worst was yet to come.
Perhaps a bad omen, the first man to go was motor sled rescue member and glaciologist Max Demorest. As he maneuvered his sled toward the downed plane, he fell through an ice bridge, never to be heard from again. Without his expertise and equipment, it would be impossible to get all seven men to the Duck landing site.
The team sent radioman Howarth to the Duck to deliver the bad news. But the weather was getting worse, and the plane needed to get back to base.
Howarth climbed in and was never seen again. Somehow, in the inclement weather, the plane did a nose-dive. All three men died. And the little plane was never recovered.
With the Duck gone and only one snowmobile remaining, the six remaining crew members, and motor sled expert Don Tetley, “faced the awful truth that their two best chances for rescue had gone down with Max Demorest’s motorsled and [the] Duck.”
The heavy storms hit nonstop, making it impossible to leave the bomber’s tail. Rations ran low, as no supply planes could fly.
Once the weather broke, nearly a month after their crash, the crew decided to split in half. O’Hara, with his gangrenous legs, could not wait anymore. Engineer Paul Spina — who had broken his arm in the landing — had lost his fingernails and was fearful of losing his arm.
One team of four would take the motor sled and make the 25-mile trek to the nearest army station. The remaining three, Spina, Monteverde and cryptographer sergeant Clint Best, would stay by the plane.
The motor sled team would indeed be rescued months later in a makeshift igloo on Feb. 5, 1943. (O’Hara survived, but lost both of his legs below the knees.)
But the final three had more horrors in store.
Cabin fever loomed — without consistent light or heat, minds were beginning to unravel.
Best began to shake uncontrollably. Sometimes he’d stare off blankly into space. Then he began to see things that weren’t there.
He screamed about “being surrounded by people saying that he’d abandoned his post and would be court-martialed,” writes Zuckoff. One day, he went out into the elements unprotected to “get their car” and “move it into a garage.” Now the supply drops not only came with food and reading materials — they also had anti-psychotic medication.
After three months on ice, the three men decided they couldn’t take it any longer.
“They talked about tying themselves together and hurling themselves into a crevasse. Or maybe they’d leave their igloo and walk until they dropped from exhaustion. Finally, they decided to go quietly. They’d stop fighting, stay in their hole, and let Greenland freeze them to permanent slumber,” Zuckoff writes.
They were only dissuaded from their plan when they told a pilot overseeing their rescue mission to hold off.
Over a walkie-talkie (supplied to them in one of his airdrops), pilot Pappy Turner went ballistic, calling them “a bunch of weaklings.” After the outburst, they no longer spoke of suicide pacts.
Finally, on March 18, 1943 — 129 days after their crash — the remaining three men were rescued by a dogsled rescue team. What was most striking, however, was the lack of emotion.
“After 129 days of fighting everything the Arctic could throw at us, I guess nothing could excite us,” Spina wrote in a journal.
In the end, Greenland would take 10 men in total — and to this day, and despite several attempts, none of the bodies have been recovered.