Deeply buried missing planes challenge ‘slow and gradual’ preconceptions.
by Carl Wieland
‘Glacier Girl’, the actual restored P38 Lightning (2008).
(Credit: Gary Chambers, Airliners.Net)
From a secret US Army air base in Greenland, six P–38 Lightning fighter planes and two gigantic B–17 Flying Fortress bombers rose into the early dawn. The date was July 15, 1942, and they were headed for a British airfield to join the war against Hitler.
Heading east over the polar icecap, they ran into a massive blizzard. Flying blind, they heard that their first planned refueling stop, in Iceland, was ‘socked in’, forcing them to return to their home base. As they approached this, however, critically low on fuel, they found that it, too, was closed. Realising that their only hope was to crash-land on the icy wastes of Greenland’s east coast, they desperately searched till they found a break in the cloud cover.
The nose-wheel of the first plane to land hit a crevasse, which caused it to flip. Fortunately, the impact on the canopy of the 8-ton P–38 was cushioned by snow, and the pilot’s injuries were minor. After they saw this, the rest of the squadron came in with their wheels up for belly landings. The planes were only lightly damaged.
All the crewmen were rescued unharmed by dogsled, about nine days later. However, the planes had to be abandoned where they had slithered to a stop.1
Crash landing the P–38s with the landing gear up was the only solution.
In the years to follow, a few people occasionally recalled the legendary Lost Squadron of 1942, but it was only in 1980 that anyone thought of a salvage mission. U.S. airplane dealer Patrick Epps told his friend, architect Richard Taylor, that the planes would be like new. ‘All we’d have to do is shovel the snow off the wings, fill them with gas, crank them up and fly them off into the sunset. Nothing to it.’
P–38 Lightning fighter plane
The P–38 Lightning was one of the deadliest planes to come out of WWII. Powered by twin Allison V–12 engines, it had one 20 mm cannon and four .50 calibre machine guns in its nose. Operational from 1941–49, the nickname given to it by German pilots, on account of its double tail, was Der Gabelschwanz Teufel (the fork-tailed devil). They are a highly prized collector’s item; only five were believed to be flying at the time the Lost Squadron P–38 was salvaged —under c. 75 metres (250 feet) of solid ice! Return to text.
It took the two of them many years, much money and several failed expeditions before the first real clue came. Using a sophisticated form of radar with the help of an Icelandic geophysicist, they located eight large shapes beneath the ice in 1988.
As a small, makeshift steam probe began to melt a hole in the ice, expedition members watched dumbstruck as more and more extensions were added to the hose, some 75 metres (250 feet) before reaching the first airplane!
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