Hunting Warbirds: The Obsessive Quest for the Lost Aircraft of World War II Hardback - 2001

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE: TODAY’S THE DAY Daugaard Jensen Land, Greenland; May 1995

“Hey! Wake up! Today’s the day. I’m ready.” I opened my eyes and heard Darryl Greenamyer’s boots crunching across the snow on his morning reveille. The tent was hot and bright. Steam rose from my sleeping bag. I crawled from the damp bag, unzipped the tent flaps and poked my head out. Last week it was blowing seventy miles an hour, the wind chill was fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and I couldn’t see five feet out of the tent. Today there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the cold air was still and gin-clear. The white snow and blue sky were dazzling, nearly blinding. Just the day we’d been waiting for. Even for a notorious former test pilot like Darryl Greenamyer, a frozen desert 500 miles south of the North Pole in northern Greenland was a hell of a place to take wing in a forty-five-ton, four-engine bomber that hadn’t moved in forty-eight years. The weather had to be perfect.

I slid a pair of heavy fleece pants over my long johns and pulled on my coveralls. The murmur of voices from the mess tent carried across the snow and I crunched over to join them. The shiny B-29, Darryl’s obsession for three years, stood nearby on its big tires, a winged aluminum cylinder lying on the Arctic plain. A winter’s worth of snow rose around it, littered with a junkyard of oil drums, air compressors, tattered boxes, and batteries. There was not a tree or bush for 800 miles in any direction. To the east, above the surrounding snow-covered hills, glowed the Humboldt Glacier, 10,000 feet thick. The Inuit village of Qaanaaq lay 150 miles to the south, Thule Air Base another hundred miles beyond. To the north was nothing but ice and then the frozen Arctic Ocean stretching to the Pole.

For forty-eight years—since 1947—the Kee Bird had been an inanimate chunk of aluminum. Today, it would have a chance to move again. But the Kee Bird didn’t just have to move, it had to compete with the gods and fly. The very idea seemed both glorious and impossible. Nine months ago on this barren stage, Rick Kriege had shivered helplessly in his sleeping bag and Cecelio Grande prayed on his knees in despair. A few days ago two tents had been shredded into oblivion by the raging wind. But now, through force of will and mechanical ingenuity, in one of the remotest places on earth, Darryl and his band of mechanics had installed four new engines, new propellers, new tires, new flight controls, a new rudder, and new wiring, all without the aid of governments or corporations. No one had ever done anything like that before.

This whole business of recovering airplanes from the far corners of the world was new, and it combined many of the challenges of an expedition to the North Pole or a climb to the top of Everest with the challenge of recovering something huge and fragile and mechanical. Beyond the physical and mental stamina demanded of a polar explorer or a mountain climber, this quest required mechanical savvy, a mountain of tools and heavy equipment, and razor-sharp piloting skills. And unlike climbing a mountain, there was no template for how it should be done. This was new territory, and it was more like something from the time of Shackleton or Peary or the Wright Brothers, when no one knew what they were doing. The rules were invented as they went along.

The mess tent was primitive green Army surplus canvas, floorless, and scarred with long tears from last week’s near-hurricane-force winds. Inside, Darryl was sipping a cup of steaming tea. “You nervous?” I asked.

“No,” he said, cupping the hot mug in grease-stained hands. A week’s worth of gray stubble covered his chin and cheeks. He was small, with twinkly blue eyes, dimples, and a big smile that made him appear elfin, innocent, especially in his baggy brown Carhartt coveralls. A bulky green wool cap covered his head. “I’ve always thought that if something bad was going to happen I’d know it and have time to react. And anyway,” he said, “when your time comes there’s nothing you can do.” It was a typical Darryl answer, but so far he’d been right. He was fifty-nine years old and few men had ever flown as fast or as high as Darryl Greenamyer. Still, he’d never flown a B-29. Ever. And certainly not one whose exact weight was unknown, whose engines hadn’t ever run more than a few minutes, and which would be taking off from a makeshift runway of crusty snow two feet thick.

“Yeah, we’d better clean up that cockpit,” said Matt Jackson. “When you blast off it’ll be wild in there. Hoo, wha! Shit’ll be flying all over the place.” Matt was thirty-six, brash and barrel-chested with a maniacal laugh, an air racer and talented aviation mechanic who’d idolized Darryl ever since he was a kid. “And we’ve got to get out of here,” he said, suddenly serious. “This place sucks.” Any hour a maelstrom of wind and snow might howl into camp, and even a two-week delay could take us to the onset of spring when the lake—Darryl’s runway—would melt. “We’ll heat up engine number two, move to number one, and hopefully they’ll stay warm while we work on three and four.”

We trudged out to the Kee Bird. Darryl grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder trailing from the nose and swung himself into the cockpit. A rat’s nest of wires clogged the floor. The green Bakelite yokes that controlled the plane were cracked and the glass cockpit windows were made opaque by a spiderweb of hairline fractures. Gauges were missing. Insulation hung from the ceiling. The back of the pilot’s seat cushion was gone, so Darryl stuffed an old pillow behind him, sat down, and latched his wide cotton seatbelt. The only new pieces of equipment in the cockpit were the radio and GPS satellite navigation system.

Al Hanson, an old friend of Darryl’s and a pilot and collector of exotic airplanes, climbed into the copilot’s seat, followed by Thad Dulin, who settled into the flight engineer’s seat on the Kee Bird’s right side, his back to the copilot. A big, round former Texas oilman with a drawl as thick as the crude he’d once hunted, Thad was a lover of World War II–era warplanes and one of the few men under seventy qualified by the Federal Aviation Administration as a B-29 flight engineer.

Facing the panel of gauges and switches and throttles in quad- ruplicate that controlled the bomber’s four 2,200-horsepower piston engines, Thad started flicking switches to engine number two. Battery switch: on. The voltage meters flickered, the age-bleached needles rising slowly to twenty-eight volts. Auxiliary power unit: on. Mixture levers: auto rich. Throttle: cracked open half an inch. Booster pumps: on. Start circuit breakers: on. Booster coil: on.

Darryl stuck his fingers out of the small window to his left and twirled his hand. “Clear,” he shouted.

Thad hit the start and prime switches simultaneously. The starter emitted a metallic, high-pitched whine. The propeller jerked and then slowly began to spin. After it completed two revolutions, Thad hit the magneto, sending a spark to the engine. A cloud of black smoke and a tongue of orange flame exploded from the exhaust like the crack of a cannon. The engine coughed, the prop stopped a moment but then twirled faster. More cannon shots and clouds of black smoke spit from the exhaust pipe. Finally engine number two exploded to life with a roar. The Kee Bird quivered as the prop beat in a resonant bass. Thad watched with satisfaction as the oil pressure and oil temperature rose safely into the green. It wouldn’t be long, he knew. He was still scared, though. He didn’t want to die.

Ten minutes later, engine number one started in a hail of noxious smoke as Darryl’s head peered out the open cockpit window. An hour after that, three and four roared on, all four engines and 8,800 horsepower now thundering in a symphony of pistons. Clouds of snow billowed from behind the props, and the bomber was suddenly no longer an inanimate object but a thawed beast with open eyes and beating heart. The engines drummed and the frozen ground shook under my feet just twenty feet away, the pulse of seventy-two pistons and four sets of sixteen-foot-long propellers more intoxicating than any whining jet engine or turboprop. We scurried to clear the last hoses, fuel drums, cans of lubricant, and batteries away from the nose wheel.

“You’ve got the throttles now, Darryl,” Thad said over the intercom.

Darryl placed his left hand across the four throttle levers. Thad, at the flight engineer’s station, placed his hand over a duplicate set. Clutching the yoke with his right hand, his feet on the rudder pedals, Darryl eased the four levers forward as Thad adjusted the propellers’ pitch, or angle, so they’d bite into the air like screws biting into wood. B-29s had no nose-wheel steering, and aerodynamic control from the rudder wouldn’t kick in until the plane hit sixty-five miles an hour. Until then the pilot used only the engines and the brakes to turn. Darryl hoped he’d be able to steer the plane. Louder and louder the engines thundered and screamed, shaking the ground. The plane strained and shook but didn’t budge, as if it were chained to the ground. Then it moved forward an inch. Darryl throttled up even further. Near maximum power, the Kee Bird suddenly jerked out of its icy hole, then paused an instant as Darryl eased back on the power. He turned the plane to the right and picked up speed. Inside, it felt like being in the grip of a giant paint shaker. Bouncing violently on the rough, windblown snow, Darryl struggled to control the airplane. Al’s body jerked against his seatbelt. Thad could barely keep his hands on the throttle as Darryl made a wide, arcing turn to the right.

“Go, Darryl, go!” Matt screamed, leaping up and down, as the Kee Bird bounded past him across the snow. Four white rooster tails streaming fifty feet behind the engines, a ghost was thundering to life across the Arctic for the first time since February 1947, when 1st Lt. Vern Arnett took off from Ladd Field in Fairbanks, Alaska, on what was supposed to be just another routine mission.

Media reviews

“ENGAGING . . . A GRIPPING STORY.”
–Minneapolis Star Tribune

“An incredible tale of triumph and tragedy . . . Filled with great anecdotes and a cast of real-life characters that rivals those in any novel.”
–Pacific Flyer


From the Trade Paperback edition.