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Remembering Bluie West One (3)

That left 12 planes, of which 3 were lost. At the controls of Sooner, John Nichols became lost in the fog and unable to raise the Bluie airfields on the radio. He ditched in Eriksfjord and got his crew to an island from which they were rescued by Inuit fishermen. Alabama Exterminator gave up on BW-1 and tried to divert to Bluie West Eight, eventually crash landing in a meadow near Kangerlussuaq. Ralf Simpson of My Gal Sal missed both fields and made a belly landing on the Greenland icecap with his 12-man crew, leading to a heroic rescue operation by ski, snowshoe, and PBY Catalina flying boat. (Sal herself was brought off the ice in 1995 and restored as the centerpiece of the Ultimate Sacrifice Memorial near Cincinnatti.) Incredibly, no life was lost in the three crashes.

So just half of the first echelon staged safely through Bluie West One--nine planes--with the first one reaching Scotland on July 1. Spaatz wasn't pleased: he complained to Washington that the radio operators at BW-1 didn't know the bombers were coming, that the promised ski-equipped rescue plane didn't exist, that there was "radio fade" between Goose and BW-1 and also between BW-1 and Reyjkavik. Overall, navigation was so tough that he though it might be a good idea to paint the rocks along the fjords leading up to the Greenland airfields.

Misadventure took care of that problem with respect to BW-1. On July 6, the supply ship Montrose hit a cliff while steaming up Eriksfjord. Sixteen nautical miles southwest of the airfield, its rusting hull became a checkpoint for pilots hoping to reach Bluie West One.

Okay, here's the coast of Greenland, and there are the clouds at 600 feet. Is this the entrance to Eriksfjord? Remember that once you've entered the fjord, you can't back up! (Photo by Hamish Laird)

The most famous flight up the fjord was made in the late summer of 1942 by Ernest Gann, a civilian piloting a DC-3 overloaded with steel girders for Narsarsuaq. In Fate Is the Hunter, Gann recalls watching a movie at Goose Bay, presumably the same one shown to George James. "There are three fjords, as you see," the briefer explained. "You will also notice that all three look exactly alike.... But only one is the right fjord which leads to the field. The others are dead ends and you are advised to stay out of them unless you have learned how to back up an airplane."

That would depend on the weather. I sailed up Eriksfjord with the overcast at 6,000 feet; I'd happily have flown a Piper Cub to BW-1 that day, past those gray and brown and mossy green cliffs--never mind a DC-3 with its trusty Twin Wasp engines! Of course the clouds in south Greenland are often lower than 6,000 feet, or even 600, in which case the Montrose would indeed be a welcome sight. "It is about thirty miles up the correct fjord on the north side," Gann's briefer went on. "If you do not see that freighter you are in the wrong fjord.... You will not actually see the field until you have made the last turn around that cliff; then it will appear all of a sudden so you'd better have your wheels down a little early. It's a single runway with quite an incline.... You have to land whether you like it or not." (By this time, BW-1 actually did have a second runway, north-south beside the fjord, but it was too short and too cramped for regular use.)

Gann navigated by taking star sights from toilet of the DC-3. He spotted the island soon after sunrise, then had to wait a full hour before reaching it: Greenland is that big and that tall, piled with two miles of ice at its middle--and the air is that clear. A layer of stratus lay over the shore, and the DC-3 was soon in it. Gann let down to 800 feet, then 700, before he could see the ocean. Soon he was down to 100 feet, then 50, low enough to be in danger of clipping one of the mansion-sized icebergs floating offshore. He saw the entrance to a fjord, but was it the right one? At 120 mph, he flew into what amounted to a tunnel, "squeezed between rock, water, and cloud."

It was Eriksfjord, of course, for otherwise we wouldn't have this wonderful tale to read in our Barcaloungers. He saw the Montrose: "No woman was ever ravished with such affectionate eyes as this pitiable hulk," he wrote. One more astonishment awaited him: that Bluie West One was incomparably beautiful in its setting. The DC-3 landed safely, and with an awful rattle on the PSP, and they were fed a dinner in the McKinley Dredging Co. mess, where his co-pilot fell asleep sitting upright at table.