"Care & Attention"

In human affairs it sometimes happens in efforts to save lives that more lives are lost than those originally at stake. That is what happened last fortnight to Soviet Russia. In the jumbled waste of pack ice east of Greenland four scientists were dangerously drifting on their "'station," a floe which was in constant danger of breaking up (TIME, Feb. 14). For nine months, as they were carried by sea currents southward from the Pole, they had made observations in Arctic meteorology, oceanography, magnetology and marine biology. To help with the rescue, the semirigid dirigible V6 started out from Moscow. To Leningrad and beyond, the flight was uneventful. In the mountainous Kandalaksha region near the White Sea, a heavy snowstorm enveloped the airship. Radio communication stopped. Searching parties found the wreckage after a 24-hour hunt. Thirteen of the crew, including the commander, were dead. Three of six survivors were injured.

On his floe, meanwhile, in the gloom of Arctic winter, Leader Ivan Papanin glimpsed the searchlight beam from an icebreaker 40 miles away. That was the Taimyr, laboring toward them through the pack ice. At 20 miles, the going was so difficult that the Taimyr's commander thought of trying to blast a channel through the pack, but this plan was discarded as impractical. The men on the "station" marked out with flags a safe landing place on the ice near their floe, and the first contact was made by airplane.

Last week the Taimyr struggled within a mile of the Papanin floe. It was joined by another icebreaker, the Murman, which had come up fast while the Taimyr was beating its channel through the pack. Eighty men swarmed out of the two ships, started for the floe on sleds. They were met by the joyful scientists, who carried a portrait of Joseph Stalin. All their equipment was transferred to the Taimyr. After drawing lots to decide which ship should have the honor of carrying which heroes home to glory. Leader Papanin and Radio Operator Krenkel boarded the Murman, Astronomer-Magnetologist Fyodorov and Hydrobiologist Shirshov, the Taimyr. Which ship got the dog Jolly, mentioned in dispatches three weeks ago as a companion of the four men on their floe, last week's dispatches did not disclose.

Radioed Leader Papanin to Professor Otto Yulievich Schmidt, hardy, hairy chairman of the Great Northern Sea Route Administration, who was on a third icebreaker not yet insight: ". . . Wewerenot anxious for a moment about our fate because we knew that our mighty fatherland which sent forth its sons would never desert them. The warm care and attention of the party and government of dear Comrade Stalin, of the whole Soviet people, uninterruptedly maintained in us the conviction to accomplish successfully all our work."

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