Freed from a deep freeze

A 1942 warbird awaits permission to fly after excavators freed it from decades in an icy tomb 268 feet down in a glacier in Greenland.

[Times photo: Bill Adair] After a 10-year, $3-million restoration in a Kentucky hangar, Glacier Girl is ready to take its first flight, probably sometime in the next two months.

By BILL ADAIR, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published July 15, 2002

MIDDLESBORO, Ky. -- They called it Operation Bolero.

It was the U.S. government's bold plan to rush thousands of warplanes to Europe at the start of World War II. Instead of sending them on ships that would be targets for German submarines, the United States chose to fly many of them across the North Atlantic.

On one such mission on July 15, 1942 -- 60 years ago today -- a squadron of P-38 fighters and B-17 bombers left a base in Greenland and soon flew into a storm.

They tried calling another base but were told it was socked in by bad weather. The planes were low on fuel. The pilots descended to land on the barren east coast of Greenland.

The first P-38 skidded across the snow-covered glacier and flipped upside down. Others made successful belly landings. Pilot Harry L. Smith Jr. landed the last P-38 without difficulty.

Everyone survived. But in his flight log, Smith revealed his fear about the aborted trip: "Thought we were all through."

Then he added for good measure: "C'mon good ol USA -- and to hell with Hitler."

The pilots were rescued, but the planes were left behind. Smith's P-38 remained on the remote coast for 50 years, with his keys still on the cockpit floor and his tobacco tin stashed nearby, as storms buried the plane beneath 268 feet of snow and ice. It was frozen in time, a warbird in an ice cube.

Now, after an extraordinary search, an unprecedented effort to dig it out and a 10-year restoration in a Kentucky hangar, Smith's P-38 is about to fly again.

Stranded

Brad McManus looked at his fuel gauge and saw his tank was nearly empty. He needed to land quickly.

He was the first to descend toward the white tundra. "It looked like a concrete table," he recalled. "I decided to try it."

The young pilot wasn't scared. "When you're 23 years old, you can do anything. I never thought twice. I never hesitated," McManus, now 84, said in a recent interview.

He lowered his landing gear and touched down. The plane rolled for about 200 feet, hit a patch of snow and flipped on its back. Fortunately for McManus, the snow was so soft that his canopy was not crushed.

Hanging upside down, he unsnapped his safety belt, opened a window and burrowed out through the snow. When the other pilots overhead saw he was alive, they celebrated by tipping their wings and doing rolls.

They landed nearby. Smith, the last to arrive, managed to land without damaging his plane. When he completed his flight log a few days later, he wrote lovingly of his P-38, calling it the "best g--- crate I ever d--- saw."

All 25 pilots and crew members had survived the landing. They quickly set up makeshift camps in the B-17s, which were named Big Stoop and Do-Do. Now the pilots referred to them as Hotel Big Stoop and Hotel Do-Do.

The pilots and crew members used their ingenuity to survive. They converted an oxygen tank into a small heater to keep the plane warm. They filled a helmet with gasoline and oil and used it as a stove.

The bombers had made a belly landing, which jammed some of their propeller blades in the ice. So the crew sawed off the blades on one engine to allow it to turn freely and power a generator. That, in turn, allowed the pilots to send radio messages. But they got no response and began to get worried. They were rationing food and their predicament "became a little serious," McManus said.

After three days, they were spotted by a Navy plane. It took four more days for rescuers to arrive, so in the meantime, U.S. planes dropped crates filled with blankets, K-rations and -- as a joke -- a supply of condoms.

As they departed with their rescuers, the pilots used their .45-caliber handguns to shoot up the planes' top-secret "friend or foe" transmitters. They wanted to make sure that if the Germans found them, the devices could not be used.

The planes were left where they had landed, scattered across more than a mile. The pilots figured the aircraft would never fly again.

Said McManus: "Most of us were pretty realistic that they were there for good."

Super Gopher

As the years passed, ferocious storms buried the planes in snow. Rumors circulated that they had been spotted by a passing pilot as recently as the early 1960s, but no one knew their precise location and, to make matters worse, glacial drift could have moved the planes -- although no one knew by how much. The planes became known as "The Lost Squadron."

By the late 1970s, aviators and explorers began to wonder about recovering them. They figured they could restore and sell them.

The first expedition, in 1977, ended when the explorers' plane crashed. No one was hurt, but the project was canceled. Others failed because of bad weather or because the planes could not be found, according to The Lost Squadron, a 1994 book by David Hayes that chronicles the expeditions.

The teams tried matching photos shot by McManus in 1942 with current photos and then tried ground-penetrating radar in areas that looked similar, but they were unable to find the planes. The first one was tentatively located in 1983 by a team sponsored by the RJ Reynolds tobacco company. But it wasn't until 1990 that a team led by Atlanta businessmen saw it was Big Stoop.

The B-17 was the best prize they could hope for. It was the legendary "flying fortress" used in the U.S. bombing campaigns. A restored B-17 could be sold for a huge profit.

The Atlanta team built the "Super Gopher," a cone-shaped probe that was filled with hot water. It melted the ice and slowly carved a shaft 256 feet down to the big B-17.

In The Lost Squadron, Hayes writes that once they reached the plane, they quickly saw there was no way they could ever fly it. Under the tremendous weight of the ice, Big Stoop had become "a jumble of crushed and mangled junk."

They pondered the possibility of trying to retrieve one of the P-38s. But Hayes says the Atlanta team, called the Greenland Expedition Society, was deeply in debt and its leaders were worried the P-38 would be in the same mangled condition as Big Stoop.

It appeared the chances of recovering the plane were as remote as the terrain where it was buried.

'A love affair'

Enter Roy Shoffner.

As a boy growing up in Middlesboro, Shoffner was fascinated with planes. At age 10, he decorated his bike with cardboard wings for the annual Montgomery Ward parade. When he was 16, he hung around the airport and washed planes so he could earn flying time.

He was too young to fight in WWII but got drafted for the Korean War. He flew fighters and became an instructor. He has always loved the challenge of mastering a complex airplane and says flying "makes a different person out of you. It's a challenge every time you go up. It makes you more careful."

After he got out of the Air Force, he became one of the most successful businessmen in his tiny Appalachian town. He owned a company that made plastic pipe, plus several stores and KFC franchises.

A banker once told him, "I like to loan money to you. You're doing so many things that surely they can't all fail at once." Shoffner owned restaurants in some relatively poor towns, but his business was strong, proving you can make a lot of money selling Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kentucky.

Shoffner, a husky man with a warm southern accent, had two things the Atlanta team needed: money and a fondness for P-38s.

By the early 1990s, he had $10-million from the sale of his pipe company and was willing to invest some of it on a risky expedition to recover some of the planes.

Today, Shoffner describes his feelings for the unique twin-tailed fighter as "a love affair." The license plate on his white Mercedes says "FLY A P38," which replaced his old one, "P38 MAN."

"It was the fastest, the most heavily armed," he said of the plane. "It's the aircraft that turned the war around. It stopped the Germans from coming into England."

Shoffner bankrolled the effort with the expectation that he and the Atlanta group would end up with at least three planes that could be restored.

Bob Cardin, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who piloted helicopters in Vietnam, was hired to coordinate the 1992 expedition. A serious and intense man, he brought discipline to the 18 people in the loose-knit group. At the site in Greenland, where schedules were flexible, Cardin quickly established a daily routine, insisting that breakfast be served from "0700 to 0800."

Their camp on the glacier was cold and desolate. The closest town was 76 miles across the North Sea, so supplies had to be brought in by planes that had special skis that allowed them to land on the glacier. It was late spring and summer -- the only time of year they could work -- but snow storms hampered their progress.

In The Lost Squadron, Hayes quotes one of the workers' diaries as saying, "In 5 days we've located the planes, moved camp 1/2 mile, erected 6 structures and 5 tents, unloaded, moved and stored 12 tons of equipment, weathered a severe storm and drunk a whole bottle of scotch. What a team!"

'Like finding a '55 Corvette'

Team leader Cardin enjoyed the pristine setting, despite the cold weather.

"It was beautiful. It made you not want to go back to the United States," he said.

They first tried to recover Smith's P-38 because the 1942 photos showed it had the least damage from landing. They were able to pinpoint its location because of discoveries by previous expeditions and precise calculations of the glacier's movement. (It drifts about 100 feet toward the ocean each year.)

They used an improved Super Gopher that burrowed into the ice at 2 feet per hour. Equipment breakdowns slowed their work. It appeared they would be lucky to retrieve just one plane before the end of the summer, when the arctic weather would become too cold.

They knew they had reached the P-38 when they found oil in the fluid being pumped from the shaft. The plane was 268 feet down. When Shoffner and others went down to see it, they were happy to find it in great condition. It was dented and there was significant damage to the cockpit, but it wasn't mangled the way Big Stoop was.

The machine guns appeared to be intact and the propellers were in remarkably good condition. The plane could fly again.

It had been virtually brand new when it landed on the ice, with only 74 hours of flight time. Jeff Cupp, who worked on restoring the plane, said the discovery was "like finding a '55 Corvette with 10 miles on it."

The ice had preserved it, Cardin said. "There was absolutely no corrosion on anything that was aluminum or steel."

They sprayed hot water to open a cave around the plane and dismantled it so the pieces could be lifted up the shaft. They had to use the Super Gopher to widen the shaft so they could remove the 20-foot center fuselage section.

The 50th anniversary of the aborted flight occurred as they were retrieving the plane. Brad McManus, now a real estate developer in the Philadelphia suburbs, made an emotional visit to the site and told the team members about his dramatic landing there five decades earlier. To mark the occasion, the team fired the plane's 20mm cannon at an oil drum.

Sitting on the ice one night, sharing a bottle of Chivas Regal, Cardin and the team members came up with a name for Smith's plane: Glacier Girl.

A jar of 1942 air

The plane, now in 17 major sections, was shipped to the airport in Middlesboro so Shoffner could keep an eye on the restoration. The Atlanta team had dropped out because of a lack of money. Shoffner gave Cardin a simple but ambitious goal for the restoration of the plane: "I don't care how long it takes. I want the best one in the world."

Cardin says they estimated it would take 18 months and cost $600,000. It took 10 years and cost more than $3-million.

The P-38 had to be completely disassembled, down to each nut and bolt. The plane had as many as 600,000 pieces. Mechanics cleaned and examined each piece to determine if it was sturdy enough to use.

"We're preserving history," Cardin said. "This is more of an artifact than it is an airplane."

Robbie Grosvenor, a mechanic on the project for the past nine years, says he came to a realization about the plane. "A military airplane up close ain't pretty. They're made to be functional so any idiot can go up there and take a panel off."

Still, Grosvenor grew to appreciate the workmanship. "Some of the parts were just magnificent," he said.

Cardin estimates that original parts constitute about 80 percent of the restored plane. The remaining 20 percent comes from parts salvaged from other P-38s or from new parts built to 1942 specifications.

His team made an extraordinary effort to keep the plane authentic by relying on an original parts manual. In some cases, even the manual wasn't accurate enough. It said the airspeed gauge went to 500 mph, but the gauge on Glacier Girl went to 700. So Cardin made sure they got one that went to 700.

The original tires still had air inside when the plane was found in the ice, so B.F. Goodrich offered to remove the vintage 1942 air and store it in jars so some of it could be pumped into the new tires.

There's no need for the old air, but Cardin says it adds to the romanticism of the project.

A tourist attraction

As Cardin taxis Glacier Girl around the Middlesboro airport on a foggy July morning, the engines make a pleasant roar. He stops the plane and shuts off the engines.

"Robbie, everything worked good, the temperatures are fine," Cardin says as he climbs from the cockpit.

The plane is virtually finished. All it needs are two or three panels for the engine cowlings, followed by a paint job and final approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. To keep the plane authentic, it will be painted in the olive green and gray it had when Smith made the emergency landing in Greenland.

Cardin hopes to have the first flight in the next two months and then keep the plane in a museum to be built at the Middlesboro airport.

Glacier Girl is already an attraction in a coal-mining town that otherwise wouldn't see many tourists. A makeshift museum of artifacts and a gift shop are set up in the cramped hangar where the plane is being restored.

Many of the visitors are World War II veterans who flew or, in some cases, were saved by P-38s. The pilots are invited to sign bullets that will be carried in the plane during its first flight.

According to Jeff Cupp, the restoration worker who greets visitors at the museum, one World War II veteran recently asked if he could touch the aircraft.

Cupp led him to the plane, where the man clutched one of the landing gears.

"He just cried like a baby," Cupp said. "He sat there for 15 minutes and said it saved his life."

The man told Cupp that his life was complete and that he felt he was now ready to die.

Shoffner, who is eager to see his prized P-38 take off, recently got bad news from his insurance company. The company will only issue a policy if the plane is flown by someone rated to fly P-38s. That means that Shoffner would not be allowed to fly, even though he has 5,000 hours of flying experience.

After 10 years to restore his prized plane, Shoffner, now 73, may not get to live his dream of flying it.

He expects he can eventually sell the plane and recover most of what he's spent. But he wants to display it in the museum for a couple of years first. Shoffner said he feels an obligation to share it: "There's a lot of vets that would still like to put their hands on it."

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