George I Mishap Newspaper Articles
 December 30, 1946  |
NEWSPAPER ARTICLES
Buried at the Bottom of the World
Page 40 through 47
Air and Space - Smithsonian
[Updated: 25MAY2007]
Buried at the Bottom of the World
When people die serving their country, to what lengths must a government go to recover the bodies?
By Carl Hoffman
The year was 1946 and James “Robbie” Robbins was living large. He was 19 years old, tall and dark-haired, and already a World War II veteran with 1,500 hours in Martin PBM Mariner seaplanes. During the war he had patrolled the Atlantic Ocean, from the Caribbean to Greenland; now his territory was the North Atlantic. Though one war had ended, another—the cold war—was beginning, and the U.S. military was fanning out to all corners of the globe to prepare for wherever the next conflict might erupt.
Robbins flew as part of Project Nanook to establish Thule Air Base, scouting Greenland's North Star Bay one day, and the next flying a mail run back to Goose Bay, Labrador, and flirting with the nurses at the base there.
Late in the year, he went with the Navy to the opposite pole for Operation Highjump, at the time the largest expedition to the Antarctic ever conducted. Under the command of famed polar explorer Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, 13 ships, 23 aircraft, and 4,700 men were sent to photograph, map, and perhaps even claim the Antarctic continent for the United States. And there was Robbie Robbins, a radar man suddenly ordered to Panama to join the seaplane tender USS Pine Island (AV-12), loaded with three PBMs and bound for the last continent. It was the start of a tragic adventure that would leave three men dead and six others stranded in the coldest, most inhospitable place on Earth for 13 days.
Now, six decades later, Robbins and relatives of the crewmen who died are trying to get the Navy to recover the bodies that were left behind.
As Robbins remembers it, on December 30, 1946, the USS Pine Island (AV-12) hove to in the lee of a giant iceberg not far from Thurston Island, about 40 miles from the Antarctic mainland and some 1,500 miles south of Punte Arenas, Chile, and went to work. The expedition had only the two months of the austral summer before weather would make photography and mapping impossible. With a hard blue sky and the weather cold and crisp, George One, as the first of the USS Pine Island (AV-12)'s three PBM-5 Mariners was code-named, was dropped in the water, fueled, and towed clear. It took off on a 10-hour mission, following the coast westward and photographing the shore. By the time Robbins' commander, Ralph “Frenchie” LeBlanc, had gathered his crew for the airplane's second flight, the weather had deteriorated slightly. But weather in that part of the world was always iffy. The crew believed that the weather inland was clear; they figured they had a window and they'd better take it. The USS Pine Island (AV-12)'s captain, Henry Caldwell, anxious to get a sense of the place, wanted to ride along.
By the time crew members were readying George One for the second flight, the waves were thrashing, yanking the airplane against the lines that tethered it to the assisting boats and roughly jostling the guys inside. Robbins and Caldwell managed to attach four jet-assisted takeoff bottles to the seaplane, but the mooring lines were literally shredding the craft's aluminum skin. LeBlanc, another World War II veteran with thousands of hours in PBMs, was unperturbed by the conditions. The USS Pine Island (AV-12) laid a fuel slick to calm the waters and George One cast off and started its run. After what seemed like five miles, the longest run Robbins had ever experienced, LeBlanc fired the JATO bottles and George
One took wing—into a blinding snowstorm.
Robbins says he wasn't worried, though. He had once received a commendation for a nine-hour flight through fog and clouds in Greenland, and he felt confident in his skills as a radar operator. As Captain Caldwell strapped into the seat in the forward gun turret—now just an observer's seat—Robbins checked his radarscope. Icebergs below registered strong returns.
As they approached the coast, Robbins reported to the flight deck: “Mountain range 20 miles ahead and scattered icebergs.” The radar return was clear and strong; the terrain matched the charts. But the weather ahead wasn't clearing. LeBlanc and copilot William Kearns decided to abort the flight and began a long, slow 180-degree turn.
Robbins, standing between the pilots on the airplane's flight deck, felt a slight bump. He heard LeBlanc and Kearns pour on full power.
And then, nothing. He felt like he was floating. He felt a shaking. His shoulder. He looked up; he was kneeling in snow 20 yards from the cockpit, and the flight engineer, Bill Warr, was standing over him. “We're all screwed up, Robbie,” Warr said. “I think we're the only ones alive.”
Robbins looked around, dazed. Snow was blowing and whipping. To his right he saw the navigator, Ensign Max Lopez. In front of them was radioman Wendell Hendersin. Both men were dead. Much of the airplane was burning, the flames crackling and popping in the wind and snow. Robbins stood up—he seemed okay—and he and Warr made their way toward the burning remains of the flight deck. Kearns was crawling in the snow, his shoulder dislocated, his arm fractured.
Suddenly, a voice: “Get me out of here!” Kearns leapt up and ran into the flames, where he tried to unbuckle LeBlanc, who was hanging upside down in his seat, but couldn't get him out. Warr and Robbins rushed in, pushed Kearns aside, and dragged the burning LeBlanc from the wreckage.
Over the next few minutes, the rest of the crew showed up. Caldwell was uninjured but disoriented. Fred Williams, another flight engineer, was lying by the fire, his back broken, blood oozing from his mouth and nose. Owen McCarty, the airplane's photographer, crawled from the largely intact aft section with a severe gash on his head.
A lifetime later, Robbins is at a loss to explain how they coped. But they were young and strong, and they had been through a lot already. They went to work.
The airplane was mostly in three main pieces. The wings had come off almost intact. Twenty feet from the wings lay the burning flight deck. Forty feet from that lay most of the fuselage and tail section. The men weren't sure what had happened, but in a 1950 account in Flying magazine, Kearns wrote that they “decided that the plane's light impact on a ridge had ruptured one of the fuel cells. Fumes from the leaking gasoline must have been ignited by an electrical charge or by hot exhaust gases,” causing George One to explode in flight.
The crew slid Williams onto a piece of decking, erected a lean-to, and made him as comfortable as possible without moving him. They tucked LeBlanc into a sleeping bag in the tail section and hunkered down with him. Caldwell, Warr, and Robbins shared a single blanket; they rotated, each one getting some time in the warmth of the center position. Time passed. When the snowfall eased, Caldwell, Warr, and Robbins ventured out. Williams was dead. Who would be the next?
In some ways, they were lucky. George One had been stocked like a pantry before a party, so food was not a concern. After three days, the weather cleared. The sky was cloudless and the sun blazed. The men were perched on the edge of a hill, with the ocean shimmering below. Looking around, they found more sleeping bags, boxes of cigarettes, a Brownie camera with film, and other supplies, including a sled and a nine-man life raft.
Days passed; the sun never set. Robbins snapped photos with the Brownie, and when he ran out of film, tucked the camera in his tent. He painted “Williams, Hendersin, Lopez DEAD” in big yellow letters on the PBM's wings. On the seventh day, according to Kearns' account, the survivors placed the dead men into graves near the wingtip. Caldwell conducted the burial service.
Finally, on the 13th day, a PBM appeared. Everyone shouted, waved, and set off smoke grenades, but the airplane continued on its way. Two hours later it returned; Robbins threw a bucket of avgas on the raft, piled high with flammable material, and struck a match. The thing blew so hard it singed his eyebrows. This time the airplane turned and headed toward the cheering men. There wasn't a more beautiful sight, Robbins says, than that big Mariner, wagging its wings. The pilot dropped a weighted note, which Caldwell read aloud: “If you can make it to the lake, form a circle. If not, form a straight line.” The lake was 10 miles away.
Robbins remembers Caldwell asking “What do you think?”
“What other choice do we have?” said Robbins. The men formed a circle.
Then they bent to the task. They piled sleeping bags on the sled and laid LeBlanc on top. Robbins mounted the compass from George One on the sled's handlebars. With three men pulling the sled and one walking behind to guide it, they struggled toward the shore. They frequently stepped through the crust and sank in snow up to their waists. Not until they hit firm ground did the going get easier. Walking the 10 miles took them 24 hours.
As they neared the shore, a bank of fog rolled in, hiding the rescue craft. The PBM pilot revved the engines, and the men headed toward the sound. Soon two crewmen from the rescue plane, who had come ashore on a raft, joined them. Everyone got into the raft and they paddled out to the PBM, boarded, and flew off to the USS Pine Island (AV-12), where Caldwell was piped aboard with tears in his eyes. Robbins (who had forgotten the Brownie camera with its treasure of undeveloped photos) and the rest of the survivors were soon transferred to the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea and returned to Panama, then to Washington, D.C.
For six of the nine men who crashed on Thurston Island, life went on. Because of complications from his burns, LeBlanc had both legs amputated below the knee and lost the use of one arm. Robbins married his sweetheart and was transferred to San Diego. He retired in 1965 as a chief petty officer. Caldwell, who had been in the Navy 24 years at the time of the crash, eventually made rear admiral.
The Navy sent telegrams to the families of the dead men. Wendell Hendersin's family held a memorial service in Sparta, Wisconsin, but with no body to bury, they placed no headstone to mark a grave. Fred Williams' family in Clarksburg, Tennessee, decided against holding a service. “It was just too painful. Nobody talked about it,” says Williams' niece, Kate Williams Beebe, now 70. “It was like a closed door. Grandma and Granddaddy wanted his body back, but they knew he wouldn't be returning.” Max Lopez's family, which held a memorial service in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1947, remained haunted by his loss. “My father was seven years younger than Uncle Max and idolized his older brother,” says Ted Lopez, 42, who has his uncle's service scrapbook, a collection of clippings about the accident, and the Western Union telegram informing the family of his death. (Lopez is the Air & Space/Smithsonian graphic designer.) “My grandmother held a bit of a grudge and even once called the pilot, blaming him.” According to relatives, Hendersin's mother asked for a grave at Arlington National Cemetery for her son, but her re-quest was turned down by the Navy.
And the older Robbie Robbins grew, the more agitated he became. He would read about U.S. forensic anthropologists combing the forests of Vietnam and bringing the remains of former MIAs home, while Lopez, Hendersin, and Williams were still out there in a frozen tomb.
One day a retired Navy chief petty officer in Allentown, Pennsylvania, named George Fabik got a computer. Fabik, then 79, had spent his whole career in the Navy. He loved the service and was loyal to it, and, like Robbins, he believed that no one who died serving his country should be left behind. Fabik was surfing the Internet on his new computer when he stumbled upon a Web site on Navy patrol squadrons that mentioned two Navy airplane crashes, both resulting in unrecovered remains: a Lockheed P2V Neptune that had crashed on the Greenland icecap in 1962 and George One. Kenneth Terry, head of the U.S. Navy Casualty Office, had been researching both cases and his memos were posted on the site. In one, Terry wrote that the chances for a successful recovery of the George One remains “would be extremely good if teams from the Department of Defense's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command central identification laboratory were employed.” Terry noted that JPAC's lab maintains 18 recovery teams worldwide, including one specializing in cold-weather recoveries.
Too far and too expensive, the Navy decided for both cases, estimating the P2V Neptune recovery at $2 million to $4 million, according to Terry. And anyway, there was a bureaucratic problem: Neither the P2V nor George One was an accident of war; the crew fatalities were not, technically, missing or killed in action and thus did not fall under the jurisdiction of JPAC. But in August 1995 some exploring geologists stumbled onto the Greenland site and found the remains of at least two crew members on the surface of the snow. The Washington Times and Fox News picked up the story, and an embarrassed Navy hired a British contractor to help JPAC recover the remains, which it did without difficulty in September 2004. The cost: $239,000.
But what about George One? Fabik was both horrified and embarrassed that the Navy was equivocating at all, and he turned his attention to the forgotten airplane and its dead crewmen. Cost and convenience should have nothing to do with the issue, he figured. If the Navy could recover American bodies in Greenland, well, it ought to be able to get the ones in Antarctica.
He got in touch with Robbins, and the sisters of Hendersin and Williams. He got in touch with Ted Lopez, and he started firing off letters to the Navy.
The Navy has recognized the sacrifice of Lopez, Hendersin, and Williams. Seven days after they died, their crewmates buried them in a service presided over by their ship's commanding officer, as would have been happened had they died during a World War II deployment requiring burial at sea. At the U.S. scientific base at Antarctica's McMurdo Station is a plaque—designed by veterans of Operation Highjump—honoring the three men as the first Americans to lose their lives in Antarctica; the National Science Foundation, which operates McMurdo, arranged for it to be placed there after the Highjump veterans' 50th reunion in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1996. The three names are engraved on a wall at the Navy memorial at the Presidio in San Francisco National Cemetery; the wall honors those killed in the Pacific theater. In 1960, at the request of the Navy, the Department of the Interior gave the name “Mount Lopez” to the unmarked and unnamed mountain that was the site of the fatal crash (Lopez was the highest-ranking serviceman killed). Still, the recovery in Greenland and letters from Fabik and Robbins spurred representatives from the Navy, the National Science Foundation, the Army, and the U.S. Geological Survey to meet outside Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2004. The first order of business: After nearly 60 years, could George One be located?
Jerry Mullins, the Geological Survey's manager of polar programs, found photos of the crash site in the National Archives and used them to narrow the search area to 0.5 square kilometer—124 acres. Satellite maps showed an area without crevasses, close to the ocean.
As it happened, a University of Kansas radar specialist named Prassad Ghogenini was in the midst of a project, under the aegis of the NSF and NASA, that used Chilean navy P-3 Orions to map ice thickness. The NSF asked a P-3 crew to investigate during one of its flights. The airplane's radars registered strong returns over George One's coordinates, suggesting metal. Ghogenini estimated the objects were buried under 150 feet of snow and ice.
In December 2004, Vice Admiral G.E. Hoewing, the Navy's chief of personnel, sent Robbins a letter. “Planning and coordination is currently underway for a recovery attempt from the George One crash site,” Hoewing wrote. “If a plan is found achievable and approved, and funding is allocated, the initial phase…could be conducted late next year.” In a personal note, Hoewing wrote: “Chief, we will do our best to recover your shipmates.”
About this time, Bob Cardin, who had led the 1992 recovery of the World War II-era Lockheed P-38 Lightning Glacier Girl from beneath 265 feet of ice in Greenland, got a call from a Navy lieutenant commander whose name he can't remember. “I told 'em what kind of equipment they'd need, but they had no money,” Cardin says. He never heard from the Navy again.
Unlike Glacier Girl, which was restored and flown in 2002 (see “Glacier Girl,” Feb./Mar. 2004), George One is in pieces. And Antarctica is not Greenland. Greenland has U.S. military bases and commercial airports; any place on the massive island is a few hours' flight from anywhere else. Antarctica, on the other hand, remains the loneliest, most isolated place on Earth. Aircraft can fly in and out only two months of the year. Even then, as the doomed 1946 flight demonstrated, pilots can be flying in clear and windless weather one moment, only to find themselves in whiteout conditions a moment later. The only American fuel in Antarctica is controlled by the NSF, and its base at McMurdo Station is 1,250 miles from Thurston Island; Palmer Station, which the NSF also operates, is 1,005 miles away. The British base, Rothera, is closer, but it's still 799 miles off. The closest fuel cache on the continent—at a base known as Patriot Hills, 629 miles from Thurston Island—is owned by a private firm, Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions.
As for transportation options, there aren't many. The U.S. government operates two kinds of aircraft in Antarctica: ski-equipped C-130s belonging to the 109th Air Guard, out of Schenectady, New York, and privately owned deHavilland Twin Otters—operated by Kenn Borek Air, based in Calgary, Canada—which migrate south every Antarctic summer. With auxiliary fuel tanks, a Twin Otter's maximum range is 780 miles. Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions operates Otters and a Basler BT-67, a DC-3 modified with PT-6 turboprop engines.
Despite the challenges, the NSF operates in Antarctica throughout the year, using assets of the Navy, the Air National Guard, and private contractors. Scientists comb the continent, tourists fly in and out, explorers hike and ski its length and breadth. Recovering the men of George One, says Eric Chiang, the NSF's director of polar research and support, “is possible, and it could probably be done safely. It's just a matter of where one wants to put resources.”
Chiang believes the weather around Thurston Island is too mercurial to fly a C-130 in. The job would require Twin Otters, which would need to lay a succession of fuel caches to reach the site. “You're talking about $30 a kilo out of Patriot Hills in an Otter,” says Mike Sharp, owner and operations manager for Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions, “so that's $145,000 in and $145,000 out, for just one flight. You need a lot of fuel, a lot of people, hot water drills, a big camp, so it's a big, expensive operation.” And, he says, if there's been any glacial shifting over the years, there's no guarantee the bodies will be intact. “If it were my tax dollars,” says Sharp, an Englishman, “I'd say don't do it.”
But the waters around Thurston Island can be relatively ice-free, and U.S. Coast Guard icebreakers make yearly runs opening channels for freighters supplying U.S. stations, then ferry scientists up and down the coast. The crash site was 10 miles inland in 1946, but as the island's ice shelf has receded, the site has slipped more than two-thirds of the way toward the sea. Theoretically, an icebreaker could sail close to shore, then deploy helicopters to haul equipment to the site. But again, the Navy would have to pay for the icebreakers, and they cost $23,000 a day. That's what Ken Terry proposed: a two-year plan to survey the site, take core samples, then return to recover the remains, estimating a total cost of $1.5 million to $2.1 million.
The Navy studied the options and decided against a recovery attempt. In July 2005, Admiral H. Denby Starling II, commander of the naval air force at U.S. Atlantic Fleet, informed Fabik of his decision. “We are fairly certain,” Starling wrote, “that the radar reflection from the P-3 is George One, buried under 150 feet of ice. While technologies are available to dig to this depth, the mounting and execution of a mission of this type carries significant risk and would require technical expertise not available on my staff. Consequently, I recommended against my organization executing this mission.”
“We just decided it was a physical impossibility,” explains Commander Mike Maus, deputy chief of public affairs at Atlantic Fleet. “There's a greater risk going after it than [there is] getting it. If it's reasonable to do, we'll do it. But if it's not feasible, you're better off just leaving it where it is.” The Navy estimated the operation would cost $32 million. Ken Terry calls the estimate “ridiculous.”
And so, 60 years after Max Lopez, Wendell Hendersin, and Fred Williams died in service to the United States, it seems to come down to this: How much is a body worth? Must the Navy try to satisfy every family's deep cultural and emotional need to bid farewell to the remains of a loved one? Or can the service with a long tradition of burial at sea decide that recovery is just too costly? Lieutenant Colonel Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman at JPAC, says, “We have 80,000 still MIA from World War II and we have a budget. Do you spend all your money on one site and forgo hundreds of others?”
Fabik and Robbins, now 80, feel betrayed by Admiral Hoewing and the Navy they served for so many years. “He told me he was going to do it and then he retired,” Robbins says. And the relatives of the dead men aren't giving up. Betty Jean Spencer, Hendersin's 80-year-old sister, recalls that during the 2004 presidential campaign, what were thought to be the remains of Democratic candidate Howard Dean's younger brother were recovered from Laos; why not her brother? Says Kate Beebe, Fred Williams' niece: “Somebody should try to get them. We go everywhere in the world looking for oil, but we can't retrieve those bodies? I think this should be one of the Navy's priorities, to bring back the remains.”
Beebe, Spencer, Fabik, and Robbins are writing letters to the White House, their senators, the Navy. “I'm not going to stop until those men are home,” says Fabik.
All of this is unsettling to Ken Terry, of the Navy's casualty office. “We know where the wreckage is,” he says. “Recovering those men would be feasible. It's expensive, but it's the right thing to do. When that plane crashed, it was 10 miles from the coast. Now it's three, so the wreckage and the remains are slowly sliding to the coast and soon will fall off. I leave you with that.”
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Carroll County soldier buried in Antarctic ice since 1946
The Jackson Sun
[Updated: 04MAR2007]
Sunday, March 4, 2007
The Jackson Sun
By PETE WICKHAM
Frederick Williams' body lies where it has been for more than 60 years - beneath 100 feet of ice on Thurston Island at the tip of Antarctica. He and two crewmates are buried under the wing of a shattered Navy seaplane that crashed Dec. 30, 1946, participating in Operation Highjump.
Williams, a native of Carroll County, was one of the first three Americans to die exploring that frozen continent. Technically, he might also be the last American to die in the line of duty in World War II. He died just hours before President Harry Truman officially declared the war over on Dec. 31.
Memories of Williams are a fading blip to nieces and nephews who knew him as a big, smiling fellow home on leave in the summer of '46.
"We were all at Grandma and Grandpa's cabin that summer, and he was around in his sailor suit, and excited for what he thought might be coming," said niece Kate Williams Beebe.
His final, faint words still haunt the sleep of James "Robbie" Robbins, the radar operator on the flight. Robbins was one of six people who survived the crash and a two-week wait before rescuers could get around the weather.
"We couldn't move him because of his injuries, and just tried to make him as warm and comfortable as possible where he was," said Robbins, now 86 and living in California.
Williams was a last-minute replacement on the flight.
"He called for me two or three times, because honestly I think I was the only name he remembered," Robbins said. "I'd go out in the blizzard, make sure he was covered and offer some encouragement, though we knew he wouldn't make it.
"I still hear, 'Robbie? Robbie?' in my sleep sometimes."
The story of how Williams, Maxwell Lopez and W.K. Hendersin died lives on a Web site put together by Gary Pierson, who lives in Washington state and fell in love with the history of polar expeditions, and the tales they told through postage stamps and letters. Sometime this spring, he said, a story on the expedition is scheduled to appear in the Smithsonian's Air and Space magazine, Pierson said.
"Here is a guy who is on that plane only by accident, by the illness of another crew member," said Pierson, who lives in suburban Seattle and maintains south-pole.com. "But when they asked for volunteers, Fred Williams stepped forward."
The fact that his body has never been brought back to the states frustrates a retired Navy chief in Pennsylvania who makes it his duty to remind the brass in Washington until they do the right thing.
"President Bush has told a POW-MIA group that he wants all those who fought and died brought back home, and that's what the Navy damn well should do with these three men," said George Fabik, who lives in Allentown, Pa.
Williams was 20 when he entered the Navy, after graduating from Clarksburg High School. An aviation machinist's mate, he served in the Pacific and was wounded in the battle for the Marshall Islands.
"I was 5 and remember when he went off to war," said Williams Beebe, Williams' niece, who is now 70 and living in San Antonio. "We had moved to Alabama by the time he was wounded, and read about it in newspaper reports. But we were back near the cabin that summer, and I remember him being around a lot."
Unlike thousands of servicemen who couldn't wait to get back to civilian life, Williams had re-enlisted for two more years. He told family he hoped to be accepted for Highjump, still history's largest polar expedition with 4,700 men, 13 ships and 23 planes.
The world was in the uncertain transition from World War II to the Cold War. There was plenty of speculation about Highjump, headed by retired Adm. Richard Byrd.
"We were supposed to test materials and techniques for military survival in polar areas," Robbins said. "The huge fear at that time is that the Russians might come over the pole to attack."
There also was a plan to map out areas of the largely unexplored Antarctic land mass that many believed held vast mineral wealth - including uranium.
"We had 800 metal poles with American flags," said Robbins, who had spent the summer months in Greenland and the Arctic with Operation Nanook, a precursor for the Antarctic trek. "The original plan Byrd had was to claim as much of the land as possible for the United States. But after a large international stink, Congress stopped that part of the mission."
Still, the men of Highjump started out from Norfolk, Va., and San Diego in early December thinking this was, as Robbins said, a "once in a lifetime adventure."
During the war, Robbins loved being a gunner on the unwieldy Martin PBM flying boats, used as bombers.
"You'd fly those things off the postage-stamp (miniature) aircraft carriers, and hoped the catapult guy had timed the swells right and didn't aim you into the sea," he said. "But for a 19-year-old, that was pure thrill ride."
The USS Pine Island (AV-12), with Williams on crew, tended to three PBMs, codenamed George 1, 2 and 3.
The ship left Norfolk, went through the Panama Canal on Dec. 7 (five years after Pearl Harbor), crossed the equator on Dec. 12, and the Antarctic Circle on Christmas Day.
After four days of dicey weather, and having one plane damaged as it was being lowered into the water, conditions cleared enough to launch two flights to Thurston Island on the 29th.
There was debate on whether the weather would hold long enough to run a third flight in an overnight that doesn't exist in a polar "summer," when the sun never sets.
The decision was made to go, in part because of the confidence of pilot Ralph "Frenchie" LeBlanc.
"He was the youngest guy ever certified to fly one of those planes," Robbins said. "I asked, could we make it? He said, 'You bet.' That was good enough for me."
Crew member J.D. Dickens had been dealing with an abscessed tooth, and was told by doctors he should not fly on the overnight run. A quick search for a volunteer produced Williams.
"Poor Fred was getting on-the-job training on the panel he was supposed to be watching while we were flying," Robbins said.
They took off about 1 a.m., and as they neared Thurston Island, foul weather took aim.
Robbins was working with the radar technology of that time, and dealing with still-primitive maps that the expedition was sent, in part, to improve.
As the fog and snow surrounded them, co-pilot William Kearns told LeBlanc it was time to "get the hell out of there."
As he made his turn, Robbins said, "We heard a bump below us. ... Then we exploded."
The plane had brushed the icy exterior of a mountain. It tore a hole in the tanks, and fuel spewed into the hot prop exhaust.
"I was standing between (navigator) Maxwell Lopez and (radioman) W.K. Hendersin ," Robbins said. "They were both blown into the props, and I came out with only some scratches. The only thing I can say was the big guy upstairs had other plans for me."
Robbins and engineer Bill Warr started looking for other crew members. They found LeBlanc still strapped into his seat with flames licking at his body. LeBlanc was badly burned and would lose both legs, but lived until 1994. Five more men, including USS Pine Island (AV-12) skipper Capt. Henry Caldwell (along for the ride), weren't severely hurt.
They found Williams near another pool of burning fuel. But all they could do for him was shelter him from the snow with a piece of metal and a blanket, and wait for the end, which came a few hours later.
"His back was probably broken, and we knew he had internal injuries because of the bleeding," Robbins said, sadness still in his voice. "The only thing I hold onto is I don't think he was ever in much pain."
The remaining crewmen spent nearly two weeks huddled in a piece of fuselage. The world followed the search for the explorers, including Fred's parents, James and Myrtle Williams, back in Carroll County.
"They heard about Frederick's death first on the radio. Then the telegram arrived," Kate Williams Beebe said.
Interviewed by a Memphis newspaper, Myrtle Williams adopted a sentiment that was almost standard in American homes during the war.
"I was so hoping it wouldn't be Fred, but then it would have been some other mother's son," she said.
Williams Beebe said, "There was little talk of Fred after that around us. You could tell it was too painful for them."
After nearly two weeks of bad weather, the surviving crew members were picked up several miles from the location, where another PBM could land. Williams, Lopez and Hendersin were left behind.
The three casualties, and one other sailor killed in a tractor accident during the expedition, were honored with a plaque in Norfolk 10 years ago, but no recovery operation was planned.
Fast-forward to the Internet age. Pierson put up his site, and eventually started hearing from Highjump survivors, including Robbins, and family members such as Williams Beebe. He posted their material on the Web "hoping to get their story told, if nothing else."
Robbins hooked up with Fabik, who was already needling the military about other crash victims.
"I think they're spineless (expletive)," Fabik said of the brass.
He'd been working for years on the case of a crash in Greenland, where a Scandinavian pilot had photographed the skeletal remains of five servicemen killed, and still lying on the ice.
"Finally got it on television, and that embarrassed the military folks enough to do the right thing," he said.
Fabik said the U.S. Geological Survey hired a Chilean Navy tracking plane to fly over Thurston Island.
"They found the exact location where the plane was under the ice. No doubt," Fabik said.
Fabik said he had a Navy captain willing to take on the mission, and Pierson said a film crew was ready to follow the operation.
"But that guy retired, and his successor wanted nothing to do with it. Had it killed. Said he didn't have the training," Fabik said with disgust.
Fabik said the technology is available "that you could get them out through that much ice in about three days, tops."
Fabik is in a waiting game with the liaison between the Secretary of the Navy and the White House.
Williams Beebe said she's "surprised that there are people so adamant about getting Uncle Fred and the other two men back.
"I've just accepted that after so long it probably wouldn't happen," she said. "If we do get his remains back, that's fine. But I just hope people will remember those three young men."
- Pete Wickham, 425-9668
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Abandoned in Antarctica, family wants sailor's remains recovered
Houston News
[Updated: 21JAN2007]
11:56 AM CST on Wednesday, December 27, 2006
By Jason Whitely / 11 News
George Williams
As families gather this week for the holidays one Houston area family is marking a sad chapter in its history.
Sixty years ago this week they lost a loved one in a Navy plane crash.
But his family here in Houston can't give him a proper burial because the Navy refuses to retrieve the remains.
His family isn't giving up in the decades old dispute.
Never before had there been an expedition to Antarctica as big as Operation High Jump. It was 1946, and Fred Williams, who had yet to marry, was among 4,000 men who volunteered for the Navy's newest assignment.
“He was just an adventurous young man and wanted to see the world,” remembered his 65-year-old nephew George Williams.
George was just a kid when Uncle Fred survived the attack at Pearl Harbor, the battle of Saipan, and four violent years of war in the Pacific.
The Antarctic exploration, though, was to be an adventure.
Sixty years ago this week, Williams was filling in as the flight engineer aboard a plane code-named the George One. He wasn't supposed to be on the flight but volunteered for it after a fellow shipmate came down with an abscessed tooth.
The George One took off from the frigid waters around the USS Pine Island (AV-12) to map and photograph the world's only uninhabited continent.
But the Navy seaplane never returned.
“Mariner George One is down,” said the announcer in the 1946 newsreel. “No radio signal is coming through. That means a crash.”
It crashed in a blizzard.
Almost two weeks later a rescue plane spotted black smoke in the frozen white world.
“The George One smashed,” continued the newsreel announcer voicing over film of the crash site. “The wreckage scattered. Some of it burned. And a message [painted] on the wing. ‘Lopez. Hendersin. Williams. Dead.'”
Six sailors survived. Fred Williams wasn't one.
“He was my favorite uncle,” George Williams said, his voicing trembling.
Survivors buried Williams and the two others under the wing bearing their names before walking 10 miles to a rescue plane waiting in the closest patch of water it could find.
“What little bit of time I had with him was cherished,” George Williams continued.
Sixty years later, Williams' body is still under that wing in its icy grave.
The Navy never returned for his remains.
With no widow, his nephews, George and Jack Williams, are his only voice wanting the U.S. military to finally bring him home.
The Williams want a proper burial.
But the Navy suggests it will be tough. Plus, it points out more than 32,000 sailors from World War II remain unaccounted for and can not be recovered even though many are still onboard sunken ships like those in Pearl Harbor.
“But yes,” George Williams shot back, “if he was at Pearl Harbor, I could go to Pearl Harbor. I can't go to the Antarctica.”
Two months ago, the Navy deflated what little hope George Williams held on to.
“It's hard to talk about,” he said pausing not to cry.
He received a letter from the U.S. Navy saying retrieving his uncle's body is simply “unfeasible” right now.
“It hurts,” George said.
The Navy says the wreckage and the remains are now believed to be under a hundred feet of snow and ice.
Too tough to dig out, the Navy suggested.
“It ain't that they can't do it,” Jack Williams, Fred's nephew said, “It's that they won't do it.”
“They haven't even tried,” said George frustrated. “They don't know if they can do it or not.”
“Industry can go anywhere and get oil and the federal government can't go anywhere and retrieve bodies,” Jack added.
The Williams brothers estimate recovery will cost $2.5 million. They say experts can reach the remains using a hot water drill.
But with no help from the Navy, the Williams family is now considering trying to raise the funds itself.
It's determined to make the 12,000 mile trek, to the bottom of the world to bring home the uncle they barely knew but never forgot.
Williams and his two fellow sailors were the first Americans to die in Antarctica.
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NASA and U.S. Navy conduct a clandestine search in Antarctica
UFO Information WebSite
[Updated: 20JAN2007]
January 12th, 2005
"On December 30, 1946, a U.S. Navy patrol plane with a crew of nine, mapping the Antarctic coast as part of a military effort called Operation High Jump crashed in a snowstorm after its radar failed to detect a slope not shown on the charts."
"Now the U.S. Navy, piggybacking on scientific explorations of western Antarctica, has begun an effort to locate the plane and recover the remains of the crew members who died."
"The crew members and their plane were part of what remains to this day the largest expedition ever in Antarctica, Operation High Jump, which was led by the reknowned polar explorer, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, and consisted of 13 ships, 23 aircraft and 4,700 men."
"According to a 1946 Navy memorandum, the mission's goal was 'consolidating and extending U.S. sovereignty over Antarctic areas, investigating possible base sites and extending scientific knowledge in general."
"With the Cold War turning more frigid by the month, the venture unnerved the Soviet Union. The Soviet whaling fleet had just begun plying Antarctic waters, and a military publication called Red Fleet warned darkly that the operation was proof 'American military circles are seeking to subject the polar regions to their control.'"
"Argentina and Chile were none too happy, either. Both countries had their own overlapping claims to areas extending from the tip of South America. Their fears of an American incursion were heightened when Chile asked Washington's permission to send an observer along, but was turned down."
In their books, written in the 1970s, Wilhelm Landig and "outcast ufologist" Ernst Zundel claimed that Operation High Jump was literally "the last battle of World War II." In Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions (1978) and Hitler at the South Pole (1979), Zundel claimed that Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler had founded an SS colony in Antarctica called Neuschwabenland (German for New Swabia--J.T.). The base, known as Point 211, eventually became the Antarctic Reich.
Opinion is sharply divided about the final fate of Neuschwabenland. Some argue that the Nazis abandoned their Antarctic sanctuary in the 1960s and moved to sites in the Andes. Another group claims that the Antarctic Reich still exists and has grown into "a civilization under the ice," home to about 3 million people of German and Ukrainian descent. It's supposed to be somewhere in the Muhlig-Hoffman Mountains, adjacent to the ruins of Kadath, a city founded by settlers from the lost continent of Atlantis.
The Redemptionists believe that Adolf Hitler escaped from Berlin in April 1945, traveled to southern Argentina in a U-boat, and from there traveled to Neuschwabenland in a Nazi flying saucer. Hitler supposedly lived in Antarctica until 1952, when he reportedly traveled to the moon and met with aliens from space. These aliens took him to Aldebaran, 68 light-years from Earth. According to the legend, some day Hitler will return with an Aldebarani space armada.
On November 27, 2004, the Navy undertook "the initial flight...to try to locate the wreckage of the George 1," the plane that crashed in 1946. The search flight "was a joint one, conducted aboard a Chilean Navy Orion P-3 aircraft with a Chilean crew and NASA scientists working together."
"'This wasn't just a routine task for us,' said Capt. Christian Aldunate, the senior Chilean pilot on the recovery flight. 'It was a challenge to find clues that could help locate the plane, even though we knew it would be almost impossible to get at it because of the ice and snow that had piled up over so many years.'"
"During an 11-hour flight from and back to Punta Arenas, in the extreme south of Chile, the search plane dipped as low as 500 feet (150 meters) over Thurston Island so scientists could use radar and laser beams to try to locate the remains of the U.S. Navy PBM (Martin) Mariner seaplane."
"'Even today it's not easy, but we can rely on information from satellite photos, GPS systems and wind predictions,' Aldunate said, referring to global positioning networks. 'But from the time they took off until the time they arrived in the area, they had no idea what to expect.'"
"Though little known in the outside world, the three men who died in the (1946) crash--Wendell K. Hendersin, Maxwell Lopez and Frederick Williams--are still celebrated in Antarctica as heroes."
"At McMurdo Station, a U.S. research base on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, there is a plaque to honor the men, the first Americans to die on any of Byrd's many expeditions." (See the Duluth, Minn. News-Tribune for January 2, 2005, "Navy tries to find plane lost in Antarctica 58 years ago," page 7A.)
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New Plaque Honors Expedition Participants
Antarctica Sun Times - ONLINE
[Updated: 21JAN2007]
January 19th, 1997
The Antarctica Sun Times is published by the U.S. Naval Support Force Antarctica, Public Affairs Office, in conjunction with the National Science Foundation and Antarctic Support Associates. Opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Navy, NSF, ASA, DON, or DOD, nor do they alter official instructions. For submissions please contact the Antarctica Sun Times staff at extension 2370. The Antarctica Sun Times staff reserves the right to editorial review of all submissions. The Antarctica Sun Times-Online is published in McMurdo Station, Antarctica
New Plaque Honors Expedition Participants
by JO2 Trevor Poulsen
A bronze plaque honoring four participants in Operation HIGH JUMP was unveiled at a ceremony outside the chalet on Jan. 11.
The dedication took place exactly 50 years from the date the survivors of a plane crash in West Antarctica were rescued. The plane, a PBM-5 Mariner, was one of three twin-engine amphibious aircraft aboard USS Pine Island (AV-12), a Navy seaplane tender.
Code-named George One, the aircraft left Pine Island on Dec. 30, 1946 on an aerial reconnaissance mission over the Walker Mountains. The nine-member crew included Pine Island's commanding officer CAPT Henry Howard Caldwell, three other officers and five enlisted men.
Ater encountering a heavy cloud cover, the pilot decided to head back to the ship. At that point, the fully-fueled keel of George One caught the edge of an unseen mountain and exploded. The crash proved fatal for three crew-members: ENS Maxwell Albert Lopez, RM1 Wendell Keith Hendersin and MM Frederick Warren Williams.
The survivors found shelter and food in the plane's wreckage and waited for their rescue. Pine Island sent out another Mariner to locate them, but the heavy cloud cover brought 13 days of delays. Finally, a clear day came on Jan. 11, 1947 and the six survivors were saved.
The crew members of George One and Pine Island were participants in Operation HIGH JUMP, Task Force 68, Byrd Antarctic Expedition IV. The operation was the largest-ever expedition to Antarctica and included 17 aircraft, six helicopters, 4,700 men and 13 ships (seven from the Atlantic Fleet, five from the Pacific Fleet and a Coast Guard icebreaker).
The task force departed the United States on Dec. 2, 1946 and arrived at the ice edge near Rosevelt Island on Dec. 29. The flag ship arrived in homeport on April 14th, 1947, concluding the expedition.
Operation HIGH JUMP had many missions. One of them was to train personnel and test materiel in Antarctica's extreme cold weather environment. Another was to extend U.S. sovereignty over the largest area possible. A third was to gain a broader understanding of the continent with aerial photography and mineral research.
In all, Antarctica claimed the lives of four Sailors that summer season. The plaque is dedicated to those men, including Seaman First Class Vance Woodall, who was fatally injured while operating a tractor on the continent.
McMurdo Station Manager Al Martin, Commander, Naval Support Force, Antarctica CAPT Hugh Smith and Navy Chaplain LT Mark Smith spoke at the ceremony.
"The placement of the plaque in Antarctica will facilitate the long overdue recognition of the contribution made by Task Force 68," Martin said, reading a letter from Don Leavitt, National Coordinator, Operation High Jump.
"Out of the original 4,700 members of the expedition, I was able to locate about 600 still living," Leavitt said. "And out of those 600, 115 showed up at the reunion."
Participants in Operation HIGH JUMP commissioned the plaque in October in Norfolk, Va. for their 50th anniversary observance of the beginning of the expedition.
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"USS Pine Island (AV 12) George 1 Memorial Summary Page"
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