The Ice-Cube Rescue

"Ice Skate" was a mile-square ice floe, 10 ft. thick. It drifted on the cap of the globe, beyond the Arctic Circle, whose mysteries are as dark as those faced by Columbus, Magellan, and De Soto. There, 20 Air Forcemen and scientists participating in the International Geophysical Year took over a simple camp: 20 Quonset huts, mess hall, science laboratory, 5,000-ft. runway and an electric homing beacon for supply planes. And there they resolutely logged their fresh jigsaw pieces of knowledge about water masses, current patterns, ice drift, season changes and marine life.

The tools of their trade: instruments and other equipment devised by modern man at his technological best--backed up, hundreds of miles away, by the U.S. Air Force's well-organized supply lines and standby rescue teams. Other invaluable tools: physical courage and determination. Nothing less than courage would serve the 20 lonely men drifting in the cold Arctic Sea through 20-hour summer days and 24-hour winter nights.

Obstacles in the Dark. Their troubles came with the warmth of spring and summer. Ice Skate was cracking. The airstrip had already crumbled away from the rest of the floe. Again and again they built new strips as their drifting cake crumbled and chipped apart. Heavy windstorms swept over, first from one direction, then from another, moving the ice mass slowly to and fro with a sheer force that caused new cracks and pressure ridges.

A veteran of Air Force survival work, Captain James F. Smith, military commander of the team, kept a close watch on the melting mass, issued a series of radio reports to Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Oct. 21: Next 48 hours consider relatively critical. Darkness our major obstacle.

Oct. 23: Pressure ridges on all sides,

Nov. 2: Forty percent of floe to east and west has separated. Unable to reach runway for inspection. Overcast, dark, light snow. Crack threatens to separate homer [beacon] from camp . . . Two cracks separating northern 40% of runway . . . Recommend imminent abandoning.

Down on a Band-Aid. The rescue alert flashed within minutes. Air Forcemen, by now well oriented to the peculiarities of polar geography, knew that they could make a rescue just as fast from Strategic Air Command bases in Newfoundland and Greenland as from Alaskan Command points. From SAC's Thule Air Base in Greenland, cover planes flew across the earth's top to circle Ice Skate and keep in touch lest the camp homer beacon fail. At Harmon A.F.B. in Newfoundland, SAC put on standby two crack C-123J crews who were familiar with ice landings. This time, instead of landing on a 10,000-ft.-to-20,000-ft airstrip, a single rescue plane had to make a dark-of-night touchdown on a Band-Aid-sized, 2,200-ft. strip while an escorting C-54 circled the area.

Wind, Snow & Tears. At length, as the weather cleared early last week, the rescue crews took off and headed for the floating island. There the men, lugging: what gear they could, tramped through the blackness, stumbling through piles of ice, skirting cracks and ridges. At the runway, they lit gasoline-and paper-filled cans and magnesium flares and waited in the breathless cold as the C-123J cautiously turned for the airstrip. Says George Cvijonovich, scientific leader of the group: "It was really a mixture of astonishment and aesthetics, because the landing was aesthetic at the same time that it was astonishing. The plane was like a beautiful big bird. With those flares, and the lights of the plane white, like two eyes, it was really a living thing."

Seventeen minutes after the plane crunched to a stop on the ice cube, the men were safely in the air, bound for Newfoundland and home. The expert SAC crews who had participated in the rescue got a reward of Distinguished Flying Crosses and Air Medals, and the 20-man Ice Skate team came away with precious logbooks and a deserving niche in the saga of exploration. And behind them, still floating, was the disintegrating chip that remained of Ice Skate--a symbol of the mysterious mountains that crumble year after year before the determination of courageous men.

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