Cold call callings
This is a tale of extraordinary airmen who flew like bats into a frozen hell
For the second time in two years Mitchell Zuckoff, a professor of journalism at Boston University and a former Boston Globe reporter, has delivered a tale about an astounding rescue from the Second World War. Like 2011’s Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Res
cue Mission of World War II (pure hyperbole, that subtitle, especially in light of this book), Frozen in Time revolves around a plane going down in an unreachable area with peril all around. What the survivors go through this time though makes what happened to the New Guinea crash survivors seem as if they truly were in the happy valley of Shangri-La.
Greenland can be like that. Awful, terrifying, mesmerizing and preposterously cold. “Cold in Greenland is almost a living thing,” Zuckoff writes, “a tormenting force that robs strapping men of strength, denies them rest, and refuses them comfort. In time, it kills like a python, squeezing life from its victims.”
There seems to be no discernible purpose to this land mass other than to kill people dumb enough to want to traverse it. Zuckoff is one of those people, but not until the latter part of the book. Until then the reader is treated to a story that begins in November 1942 with a message: “Situation grave. A very sick man. Hurry.”
This dispatch comes from a downed B-17 bomber with nine men aboard who were out searching for five survivors of a C-53 Cargo plane that had crashed four days before. Soon after, yet another plane goes down, this one a U.S. Coast Guard Grumman Duck. It’s a two-seater with room for three more prone people underneath. It has crashed on its second trip, having already rescued two men from the bomber. It was returning to its ship with the bomber’s radio man on board. No survivors. Which means at the half-way point of the book, six men are struggling for survival at one crash site, three are dead at another, a motorsled rescuer has fallen to his death in one of the numerous hidden crevasses that hungrily lie in wait all over Greenland, and the search for the C-53 and its five crewmembers has been abandoned. (And there is one more plane crash: The day after the bomber goes down, just by coincidence, a Royal Canadian Air Force plane crashes as well. Its three occupants — from Toronto, Winnipeg and Ontario (Ontario? Gotta love American authors) — “would violate almost every instruction in the Arctic survival manual, with surprising results.” Meaning, they survived.)
Zuckoff expertly intersperses the chapters about the rescue attempt with his own story of hooking up with a man named Lou Sapienza who wants to find the Duck, now buried under meters of snow and ice, and bring its three dead occupants home. He’s a blustery, buffoonish sort, and questions why, if he is going to work with a writer, it’s not “the guy who wrote that great book about mountain climbing — what’s his name? ( Into Thin Air’s) Jon Krakauer?” Evidence to the contrary, his heart is big and in the right place, but the U.S. coastguard has its doubts about providing funding and until he can secure a backer with deep pockets, Lou’s money is in short supply. Astonishingly, Zuckoff, by now completely absorbed in Lou’s quest, loans him both the use of his credit card and money from his advance for this book. These chapters are lighter, obviously, than the pages dealing with the downed fliers, but they are still riveting. Zuckoff’s narrative skills makes it easy to get wrapped up in the quest for the Duck and her crew.
So much so, that it would be a disservice to both the reader and Zuckoff to reveal the fate of all those bodies frozen beneath Greenland’s snow and ice; or what happened to the B-17 crash survivors, who dealt with madness, gangrenous limbs — body parts can just fall off? — and the insidious wish to give up and die. Zuckoff may not be Krakauer, but this taut, suspense-filled thriller shows he doesn’t need to be.