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

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.

1113200581
Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II

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.

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

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

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

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

by Mitchell Zuckoff

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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


By Mitchell Zuckoff

HarperCollins Publishers

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



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...)

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.

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.”

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