Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II

by Mitchell Zuckoff

Overview

Frozen in Time is a gripping true story of survival, bravery, and honor in the vast Arctic wilderness during World War II, from Mitchell Zuckoff, the author of New York Times bestseller Lost in Shangri-La.

On November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on board survived, and the US military launched a daring rescue operation. But after picking up one man, the Grumman Duck amphibious plane flew into a severe storm and vanished.

Frozen in Time tells the story of these crashes and the fate of the survivors, bringing vividly to life their battle to endure 148 days of the brutal Arctic winter, until an expedition headed by famed Arctic explorer Bernt Balchen brought them to safety. Mitchell Zuckoff takes the reader deep into the most hostile environment on earth, through hurricane-force winds, vicious blizzards, and subzero temperatures.

Moving forward to today, he recounts the efforts of the Coast Guard and North South Polar Inc. – led by indefatigable dreamer Lou Sapienza – who worked for years to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight and recover the remains of its crew.

A breathtaking blend of mystery and adventure Mitchell Zuckoff's Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II is also a poignant reminder of the sacrifices of our military personnel and a tribute to the everyday heroism of the US Coast Guard.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062133403
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	04/29/2014
Series:	P.S.
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	36,204
Product dimensions:	7.80(w) x 5.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University and the author of five previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Lost in Shangri-La, which won the Winship/PEN Award for Nonfiction. As a reporter for the Boston Globe, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

Frozen in Time

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By Mitchell Zuckoff

HarperCollins Publishers

Copyright © 2013 Mitchell Zuckoff
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-213343-4

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1
G R E E N L A N D
2 0 0 0 BC TO AD 19 42
GREENLAND MAKES NO sense.
First there's the name, which as most schoolchildren know
should be Iceland, but that was already taken. Almost nothing
green grows in Greenland, where more than eighty percent of the
land is buried under deep ice. Deep, as in, up to ten thousand
feet, or two solid miles. If all of Greenland's ice melted—a worst-
case scenario of climate change—the world's oceans would rise by
twenty feet or more.
Greenland's colorful name is blamed on a colorful Viking
called Erik the Red. Erik went to sea when he was exiled from
nearby Iceland in the year 982, after he killed two men in a
neighborhood dispute. In addition to being an explorer, a fugi-
tive killer, and a lousy neighbor, Erik was the world's first real-
estate shill. He christened his discovery Greenland in the belief
that a “good name” would encourage his countrymen to settle
there with him. The ploy worked, and the community that Erik
founded on the island's southwest coast survived for more than
four centuries.

1 0 F R O Z E N I N T I M E
Unlike the Pilgrims who came to North America, Erik and
his band found no nearby natives to trade with or learn from. So
they relied on themselves and on imports from Europe. But by
the Middle Ages, decades passed between ships. The once-robust
Vikings grew smaller and weaker. Eventually they died out alto-
gether, leaving ruins but little else. Erik the Red is perhaps better
remembered for siring Leif Eriksson, who sailed to North America
some five hundred years before Columbus. Leif called his discov-
ery Vinland, or Wineland. But Icelanders wouldn't be fooled twice
by the same family, and no lasting settlements followed.
A competing but equally odd theory says that the name Green-
land was bestowed by the native Inuit people, formerly called Es-
kimos by outsiders. Their sporadic presence on Greenland traces
back some four thousand years, starting with travelers believed
to have crossed the narrow straits from North America. The Inuit
clustered near the rocky coastline and in the words of one me-
dieval historian, Adam of Bremen, had “lived there long enough
to have acquired a greenish tinge from the seawater beside which
they dwelt.” Under this theory, anyone who looked vaguely green
must have come from Greenland.
If Greenland had to be named for a color, white seems the ob-
vious choice. But blue was viable, as well. Although white at the
surface, glacier ice on much of Greenland comes in translucent
shades of blue, ranging from faint aquamarine and turquoise just
below the surface to indigo in the depths of crevasses. The phe-
nomenon is caused by countless years of snow being compacted
into ice. Snow contains oxygen, which scatters light across the vis-
ible spectrum, making it appear white. Compacting squeezes out
the oxygen, and the compacted ice crystals that remain absorb
long light waves and reflect short waves. The shortest light waves
are violet and blue. And so, the ice at the cold heart of Greenland
is blue.

G R E E N L A N D 1 1
GREENLAND'S STRANGENESS IS compounded by its great but
politically inconsequential size; its almost complete emptiness;
and its unconscionable weather.
In a world where size generally matters, Greenland's doesn't.
The island is globally overlooked despite being enormous: more
than sixteen hundred miles from north to south, and eight hun-
dred miles at its widest point. Greenland could swallow Texas
and California and still have room for a dessert of New Mexico,
Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and all of New England. It's three
times the size of France, and it occupies more than twice the area
of the planet's second-largest island, New Guinea.
Yet Greenland is the world's loneliest place. With fifty-eight
thousand residents, it has the lowest population density of any
country or dependent territory. Only Antarctica, with no perma-
nent residents, makes Greenland seem crowded. If Manhattan had
the same population density as Greenland, its population would
be two.
One way to picture Greenland is to look at a world map and
find the blank white spot to the northeast of North America. An-
other way is to imagine an immense bowl filled with ice. At the
outer edge of the island, jagged mountains that rise as high as
twelve thousand feet create the bowl's rim. The land between the
coastal mountains, the bowl's concave middle, is filled with ice
that built up over tens of thousands of years, as yearly snowfall
exceeded melting. The more the ice accumulated, the more the
land in the central part of the island became depressed from the
weight. Hence the ice-filled bowl that is Greenland.
A closer look reveals that the bowl's rim has cracks—spaces
between the mountains. Driven by gravity, large bodies of ice
called glaciers flow toward the sea like slow-moving rivers.
When a glacier's leading edge runs out of land, it fulfills its des-
tiny by hurling itself piece by piece into the water. The process,

1 2 F R O Z E N I N T I M E
called calving, is loud and violent and magnificent. Big pieces of
glaciers are reborn as icebergs, some big enough to sink an un-
sinkable ship. In summer 2012, a glacier in northwest Greenland
gave birth to an iceberg the size of Boston. The smallest icebergs
are known to Coast Guardsmen as “growlers” because they make
sounds like snarling animals when trapped air escapes from in-
side.
Most photographs of Greenland's glaciers and their iceberg off-
spring fail to capture their grandeur. They look on film like frothy
meringue in a cookbook. In reality, they are unstoppable giants
that have conquered the world multiple times, and they wouldn't
hesitate to unleash a new ice age if given the chance.
Although the bowl-of-ice analogy
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff. Copyright © 2013 Mitchell Zuckoff. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

A Note to the Reader xi

Prologue: The Duck 1

1 Greenland 12

2 "A Mother That Devours Her Children" 27

3 Flying in Milk 42

4 The Duck Hunter 55

5 A Shallow Turn 67

6 Man Down 94

7 A Light in the Darkness 109

8 The Holy Grail 127

9 Short Snorters 145

10 Frozen Tears 159

11 "Don't Try It" 175

12 "MOs-Quick!" 201

13 Taps 222

14 Glacier Worms 236

15 Shooting Out the Lights 254

16 Snublebluss 266

17 Outwitting the Arctic 287

18 Shitbags 307

19 Dumbo on Ice 323

20 Iceholes 342

21 Crossed Wires 363

22 The Ten-Meter Anomaly 377

23 "Some Plan in This World" 401

24 Down to the Wire 422

Epilogue: After Greenland 449

Cast of Characters 475

Acknowledgments 487

Notes 493

Select Bibliography 541

What People are Saying About This

Adam Hochschild

“You would think that all the World War II stories have been told by now. But Mitchell Zuckoff has a remarkable knack for finding new ones, and he has done it again, with a gripping, moving tale, suspensefully told—whose final act takes place today.”

Editorial Reviews

First-rate.… His dual narrative is a welcome change of pace from so many other World War II books. It is well-researched and superbly written.

Steve Weinberg

When it comes to riveting nonfiction, author Mitchell Zuckoff has a knack for finding fascinating but forgotten stories from World War II…. This is a truly suspenseful and thrilling American story of perseverance with a worthwhile payoff in the final pages.… [A] must-read.

CNN Online

[H]arrowing…. Zuckoff…[has] earned his literary reputation uncovering forgotten adventure stories.

New York Post

[F]ierce…. Mitchell Zuckoff recounts a harrowing tale of survival in Greenland during World War II..

Daily News

You would think that all the World War II stories have been told by now. But Mitchell Zuckoff has a remarkable knack for finding new ones, and he has done it again, with a gripping, moving tale, suspensefully told—whose final act takes place today.

Adam Hochschild

FROZEN IN TIME is a beautifully-written war yarn, but at its heart, it’s a non-fiction mystery—the tale of a group of heroes united in a desire to solve a riddle buried in the Arctic ice.

Hampton Sides

Once again, Mitchell Zuckoff has uncovered a thrilling historical tale and told it masterfully. Seamlessly interweaving the past and the present, Frozen in Time is one of those epic adventure stories that will hold you in its grip from beginning to end.

David Grann

[A]n engaging testimony to perseverance, ingenuity and monumental self-sacrifice.… [Zuckoff is] astoundingly thorough in his research.

BookPage

If Lost in Shangri-La was a prize-winning page-turner, Frozen in Time is even more enthralling… a must-read.

Austin American-Statesman

Zuckoff has produced a wonderful book that combines telling details, thoughtful background and vivid storytelling into a fascinating tale of courage, war and perseverance.

David Williams

This stunningly immersive true-life account of a U.S. military search-and-rescue operation…reads like a stellar adventure novel.

Entertainment Weekly

The gripping story of a WWII-era plane crash, the survivors who braved subzero conditions, and the modern-day quest for answers.

People

Mitchell Zuckoff has a nose for the classic adventure story…. As he details the bomber crew’s odyssey…weeks stretch into months, but the pages fly by as you eagerly read on. Will they ever get home safely? Zuckoff’s mastery keeps readers wondering all the way to the end.

Matthew Price

Frozen in Time makes WWII history seem fresh…. [I]t’s non-fiction that reads like a page-turner of a mystery. It’s filled with heroism, tragedy and remarkable persistence, in the past and present.…. Zuckoff is a good writer and rigorous researcher.

Bob Minzesheimer

This is not a genre known for literary style, but Zuckoff’s clear-eyed prose does just what it needs to do…. He even manages to add a contemporary story…and stitch it into the historical narrative so deftly that one feeds the other.

Washington Post

Frozen in Time is an “excellent, affecting” book of “considerable suspense…. [Zuckoff’] is a skilled writer, reporter and researcher, but what gives his latest book its power is his poignant, persuasive depiction of men under arms.

Howard Schneider

…World War II remains the mother lode of war adventure stories…Mitchell Zuckoff has found another one, and what a story it is…This is the stuff of great survivalist drama, and Zuckoff, a good storyteller, makes the most of it. He is alert to the arbitrary twists of fate that keep one man alive but not another and has a good eye for detail that suggests the daily suffering…behind the larger-than-life heroics. This is not a genre known for literary style, but Zuckoff's clear-eyed prose does just what it needs to do—keep up the suspense and make the pages turn…But what gives the book its weight is his genuine interest in, and respect for, the men themselves.

The Washington Post - Joseph Kanon

In this harrowing true-life adventure, journalist Zuckoff (Lost in Shangri-La) follows the crew of an American B-17 bomber that crash-landed in 1942—while searching for another downed plane—on a vast glacier in the Greenland ice cap, one of the most isolated and inhospitable places on earth. With little food or cold-weather gear and an assortment of nasty injuries, the nine airmen found themselves trapped in a field of hidden, ever-shifting crevasses that threatened to swallow up their plane and made hiking even a few yards a mortal danger. Zuckoff juxtaposes their months-long battle against hurricane-blizzards, starvation, frost-bite, gangrene and madness with equally perilous rescue attempts by sled teams and military aviators flying through gales and white-outs. (His tense first-hand account of a 2012 expedition to locate the remains of one of those rescue flights buried in 30-foot-deep ice frames the story.) Zuckoff’s gripping narrative unfolds with immediacy and verve as men in fetid snow caves and sputtering aircraft pit their dogged camaraderie and desperate, white-knuckle improvisations against the fury of an Arctic winter. Photos. (May)

Publishers Weekly

During the early part of America’s entrance into World War II, a C-53 cargo plane crashed onto the icy surface of Greenland with five on board. Four days later, a B-17 bomber with nine on board crashed while searching for the C-53. Twenty-four days after that, a U.S. Coast Guard Grumman Duck went down during the second leg of a mission to save the men of the B-17, killing the crew and a B-17 survivor they had just rescued. Zuckoff weaves these crashes into a gripping story of arctic rescue, tracing the harrowing struggle of the crash survivors to stay alive, the desperate attempts to save them, and the terrible conditions that made both nearly impossible. Blended into the historic account is a modern excavation story as Zuckoff joins an expedition to locate and recover the Duck, now buried somewhere deep under the ice of Greenland. It is an engaging and highly narrative historic adventure, whose pace builds steadily and which offers a respectful regard for the various crews—strong willed, stoic, and fiercely determined men who fall back on their faith and sense of duty to carry them through. Detailed, tension-filled, and gripping, this examination of methods of rescue and survival vividly places readers on the ice with the lost men and alongside those trying to save them.

(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Library Journal

An intrepid journalist joins a real-life Arctic search team seeking details about "three American military planes that crashed in Greenland during World War II." Zuckoff's (Journalism/Boston Univ.; Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II, 2011, etc.) complex narrative involves the fates of three downed missions to Greenland in late 1942, juxtaposed with the events of the modern-day search effort, led by an exploration company in August 2012 and joined by the author. As a result of the many competing strands and characters, some confusion in the details ensues--though maps and a cast of characters are included to help orient readers. The original lost cargo plane, which contained five American servicemen, was part of the wartime Operation BOLERO's so-called Snowball Route from the U.S. to Britain; on November 5, 1942, it crashed on an ice cap near the southeast coast of Greenland. Due to terrible winter storms, the plane's radio messages grew increasingly weak, making it impossible to locate the plane for the subsequent B-17 bomber that took off days later on a rescue mission. Carrying nine crew members, the B-17 hit a whiteout and crashed into a glacier. The broken-off tail section remained intact, allowing the survivors to take shelter, but one man had already fallen through an ice bridge, another grew delusional and another had his feet frozen. In order to rescue this batch, a Grumman "Duck" plane was launched, carrying pilot John Pritchard and radioman Benjamin Bottoms; despite rescuing some of the survivors, the Duck vanished in a storm, remaining unclaimed until Lou Sapienza's expedition of 2012. Much of the blow-by-blow narrative concerns the plight of the crews, as well as the elaborate outfitting for the Duck Hunt. An exhaustively layered but exciting account involving characters of enormous courage and stamina.

Kirkus Reviews