13
JANUARY 2012
WALKING THE CORRIDORS of Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, Lou looks more excited than nervous, a prizefighter heading toward the ring. Alongside him is John Long, who retired from the Coast Guard in 2011 but remains deeply involved in Duck Hunt research. Long is an ideal cornerman: steady, reserved, a font of knowledge about Duck sightings. The size of a longshoreman, the former master chief petty officer flew to Washington from his home in northern Michigan to lend his support and expertise. They walk shoulder to shoulder into the boardroom.
The seats around the table are filled with many of the same men and women from the October meeting at the DPMO offices, along with a half-dozen new faces from the Coast Guard and other agencies. Leading the DPMO delegation again is Lieutenant Colonel James McDonough, a friendly but no-nonsense soldier.
Coast Guard Commander Jim Blow kicks things off with a positive spin: “It’s really good to get all the players in one room to see what we as a group can do to pull the pieces together to get on site and effect a location and a recovery.”
Blow hands off to Lou, who’s loaded for duck this time. He distributes a nineteen-page memo that’s thick with data suggesting that he knows where on the ice to dig for the plane, along with day-by-day plans for the mission. Lou guides the room through a PowerPoint presentation, confidently fielding questions and explaining a thicket of technical information. He describes primary and secondary locations where modern radar and sonar findings overlap with historical sightings, including Bernt Balchen’s detailed, if geographically imprecise, hand-drawn “Treasure Map” from 1943.
McDonough wonders how much of the Koge Bay glacier Lou intends to search. “What dimensions are we talking about?” he asks.
Lou: “One and three-quarters of a mile by three-quarters of a mile, tops.”
Next McDonough jabs Lou about whether anomalies labeled “Points of Interest” on a radar readout are definitely metal objects. Or, he wonders, are they natural variations within a glacier made by a rock, a crevasse, or even water?
Lou counters: “Metal comes back differently than rock.”
Lou explains that, despite his confidence in the available data, he hopes to confirm the findings with additional high-tech devices, one that hangs beneath a helicopter and another that drags behind a snowmobile. “We have the technology to find it,” Lou says. “We have a very limited area in which to look. We will find it.”
McDonough asks: “So, you think you can find the aircraft in three days on the ice?”
Lou’s on a roll. He snaps back: “Weather permitting, yes.”
The give-and-take moves to what Lou might do with the plane after carving it from the ice. “We’re not wreck hunters,” he says. This is a point of pride with him, and he puffs his chest a bit. “We’re not interested in recovering the plane to sell it.”
Lou says he respects the Coast Guard’s policy that the service retains possession of all downed planes and shipwrecks. His only desire would be for the Duck to be restored and displayed for posterity. This, of course, is exactly what retired captain Tom King wanted in the first place, to keep it off eBay and away from private warbird collectors and souvenir vultures.
McDonough says DPMO would have no objection to that plan. “The plane is not the priority,” he says. “Our primary interest is in the remains. What I’m wondering is, will the bodies be encased in ice?”
Lou: “If snow has gotten into the Duck, yes, they’re probably encased in ice.”
McDonough: “Could you bring it up without disturbing the remains?”
Lou: “That’s possible.”
He explains how Glacier Girl was brought to the surface twenty years earlier, and tells McDonough that this would be easier because the Duck should be located at less than one-fifth the depth. A friendly discussion follows about the best ways to recover, preserve, and transport human remains. The difference in tone from the October meeting is stark.
I start to believe that Lou is winning. I imagine McDonough raising Lou’s arm in triumph and presenting him with an oversize check while cameras flash. But then the bell rings for the next round.
McDonough asks: “Lou, do you have an underwriter at the moment?”
For the first time, Lou pauses to catch his breath. “No,” he says flatly. “That’s what we’re working on.” What he means is, That’s why we’re here.
McDonough bores into the budget that Lou included in his briefing package, asking about how large a team he would bring, whether he’d have a medical officer for emergencies, how he’d get supplies to the campsite, even whether he’d feed his team with military meals-ready-to-eat, MREs, or commercially purchased freeze-dried foods. Lou tries not to show it, but the meeting has gone more than two hours, and the unrelenting questions have a desiccating effect on him. His answers come more slowly.
McDonough circles back to the question of money and drops the hammer. “To be honest with you,” he says, “a lot of us were under the assumption that you had found private funding to get out onto the ice.”
Lou tries to regroup. He explains that he’s been seeking support from corporate and media sponsors and private individuals, though none are firmly on board. This is the source of McDonough’s misunderstanding: During the weeks leading up to the meeting, Lou sent group e-mails with glowing reports of sponsorship discussions he’s had with wealthy World War II history buffs and others. McDonough interpreted the e-mails to mean that Lou had landed a big fish.
Jim Blow steps in, trying to help Lou: “When do you think you’ll have something back from the private funders?”
Lou is reeling. He can’t see that Blow is trying to help, and he answers flippantly: “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, I guess.”
McDonough is ready to end it with a knockout. He wants no further misunderstandings or, apparently, further meetings: “I think it’s very admirable what you’ve done,” he says. “I want to compliment you. But funding is always the long pole in the tent. . . . I don’t believe there’s any funding available on our end, certainly not this fiscal year, to support an investigation on the ice.
“In a perfect world, we’d go after everyone we can get,” McDonough adds. “But the reality is, the money isn’t there.”
As an aside, he offers a small ray of hope: if Lou can somehow get to Greenland, and if he can confirm beyond any doubt that he’s found the Duck and its occupants, the Defense Department would be obliged to get involved.
McDonough’s comment is a sideways reference to a congressional mandate. In 2010, under pressure from families of missing servicemen, Congress told the Defense Department to speed the pace of MIA recoveries. Specifically, federal lawmakers amended a law known as the Missing Persons Act, or Title 10. In the amendment, Congress ordered the creation of a “comprehensive, coordinated, integrated, and fully resourced program to account for designated persons who are unaccounted from World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Persian Gulf War.” Congress also required that by fiscal year 2015 the Defense Department spend enough money to bring home at least two hundred MIAs annually, a sharp increase from the current yearly average of eighty-five.
Later, McDonough reiterates the point in an e-mail: “Don’t forget what I said about Title 10. Should you get onto the ice and make a discovery it would be a game changer.”
But as the meeting draws to a close, McDonough focuses on delivering the bad news, knowing that Lou sees silver linings in the darkest clouds. He defines the current situation: “It’s January now. You’re looking at going there in May. If you don’t have an underwriter, you won’t get up there?”
Lou acknowledges: “It’s looking that way.”
Yet Lou still won’t surrender, offering one more shot that falls somewhere between a pitch and a plea: “Where do we go from here? Can anybody go back and look at this? Why stop now?” He tries to build momentum: “There’s a lot of congressional interest in this. Have you seen the letters they’ve sent?”
This smacks of desperation. Everyone at the table knows that the real trick would be finding a member of Congress who’d publicly oppose retrieving World War II heroes. Joan Baker, a forensic anthropologist for DPMO, rolls her eyes when Lou mentions the letters. Wearing the expression of a person who thinks her time is being wasted, Baker answers coolly: “We see a lot of letters in our office. Perhaps some of the congressmen can contribute.”
Lou says softly, “I can find these guys.” Speaking more to himself than to the dwindling crowd, he adds: “It’s just a question of money.”
FEBRUARY–MARCH 2012
The phone rings four times before a woman answers.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Nancy, it’s Mitch. Calling again about John.”
I quickly get to the point: “Nancy, I have a question. If John’s body were found, where would you want him buried?”
“Oh. Let me think a moment,” Nancy Pritchard Morgan Krause says in her lilting voice. “He was Coast Guard, so it would be nice if he were returned to the Coast Guard Academy. But they have to find him first.”
I update her on the financial and other hurdles facing Lou, North South Polar, and the Duck Hunt. I thank her and say good-bye.
I met Nancy seven months earlier, at her retirement home in Annapolis, Maryland. At eighty-eight, she’s a trim, lovely woman with snow-white hair that she keeps short and stylish. Nancy and her second husband, Bill Krause, who’s ninety, are competitive croquet players who enjoy travel, easy banter, a civilized cocktail hour, and each other’s company.
Nancy married Bill after the death of “Tick” Morgan, her brother John’s best friend. Tick died in 2004, shortly before he and Nancy planned to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary with a big family reunion. She turned the reunion into a memorial. “That was closure for my husband,” Nancy says. “We’re still waiting for that with my brother John.”
The day we met, as Bill served drinks, Nancy ran her long, elegant fingers over the cover of the Coast Guard Academy’s 1938 yearbook. Its spine is like a hinge to the page with “Johnny” Pritchard’s entry: two years of football, two years of boxing, yearbook staff, newspaper staff, basketball manager. Then a short profile of her eldest brother that Nancy has read too many times to count: “Before you is a product of the fair state of California—a person whose disposition bears out the reputation of that state for sunshine. His ready smile and overflowing chatter have not only become a tradition at the Academy, but have buffaloed many a member of the fair sex into believing all his promises.”
Nancy smiles as she talks about her “confident, self-assured” big brother, nine years her elder, and about how gentle and caring he was toward her. Nearly seventy years after the fact, she cries when she describes the phone call she received from her mother while at college. “She said, ‘Nancy, John’s been lost.’ That was it.” Nancy left her dormitory, went out into the falling snow, and walked around the block, knowing that she’d never fully recover from the loss.
With her parents and other brothers gone, Nancy is John Pritchard’s closest surviving relative, what the U.S. military calls his PNOK (pronounced “pee-knock”) or primary next of kin. That gives her final say over where his remains would rest, should they be recovered. In 1975, when the Coast Guard first tried to find the Duck, Nancy was skeptical. “I said at the time, ‘Leave him there. Let him rest in peace. That’s where he went down, and I would hate to see anybody else put in danger.’ ”
Now Nancy feels differently. “Congress has said they want all the MIAs, the missing in action, to be brought back to this country, and I agree. If they bring everybody back, then by God, you bring my brother back.”
AT AGE SEVENTY-SEVEN, Edward “Bud” Richardson still sees his stepfather Benjamin Bottoms through the eyes of a small boy.
“The biggest thing I remember about him is that he taught me not to be prejudiced,” Bud says. “Sometimes he’d show up at home with two or three soldiers or sailors, whoever was at the bus stop that night, looking to go into town to have a few drinks or whatever. He’d bring them home for dinner instead.
“I recall him bringing home a black man, and I had never seen anybody other than people who were white. I must’ve looked surprised, and he told me, ‘There are different people in this world, different colors, different eye shapes, but they’re all people. That’s just how God made them.’ That’s the biggest lesson I learned from him, and I remembered it always.”
The rest of what Bud knows about Ben Bottoms is from snippets and snapshots, some drawn from his own memory, some from stories told by his mother. Bud remembers Ben teaching him to swim in the ocean off Gloucester, Massachusetts; riding on his shoulders to buy an ice cream cone; losing his sailor’s cap when they ran home to avoid a storm; unwrapping skis from Santa Claus. Bud always knew that the skis came from the other man in his life with a bushy beard.
Though unrelated by blood, these days he bears a distinct resemblance to his stepfather, with a rounded face and a receding hairline. He remembers his mother, Olga, a pretty woman with coal black hair, refusing to accept that her husband was dead. “She had a belief that maybe he was alive up there, maybe Eskimos rescued him.” Bud says she only relented after a Coast Guard officer assured her that a pilot had seen the wrecked Duck and the bodies of its crew. The part about the bodies was doubtful, but it had the desired effect, putting to rest Olga Bottoms’s dream that Ben had survived.
“As a young boy, I had illusions about going up there to Greenland and bringing his body back,” says Bud, a retired construction manager and stable owner. As he got older, he considered going to the Coast Guard Academy, but that plan washed away when his mother married a navy officer. Bud thinks the marriage was mostly designed to give him a secure home and a father figure.
If his stepfather were found, Bud says, he’d probably be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But Bud wonders if instead Ben Bottoms should rest in his native Georgia. Either way, Bud wants him home. “I feel very good they’re going back to get him,” he says. “It’s just a shame it couldn’t have happened when my mother was alive. He was the love of her life.”
One more memory: when Bud was a boy he learned to play the trumpet, but the one song he could never play was “Taps.”
“I played it once and she totally broke up. I never did play it again. I knew why.”
JERRY HOWARTH WAS born in the same four-room log cabin in Wausaukee, Wisconsin, as his uncle Loren “Lolly” Howarth. Jerry was not yet two years old when the Duck crashed, so all he knew of his uncle were stories from his father, Loren’s younger brother.
“Loren was basically a country boy,” Jerry says. “Everybody worked together on the family farm. Lived off the land. There wasn’t much money to make. They’d hunt and fish. Deer, mostly. Duck, too.
“Everybody said he was awful quiet.”
There’s pride in his voice when Jerry says Loren was the first member of the family to go to college. “He washed dishes and worked in restaurants to make his way.”
As Loren Howarth’s PNOK, Jerry provided the Coast Guard’s John Long with a wristwatch that belonged to one of Loren Howarth’s brothers, from which a DNA sample was taken. “I wish my dad and his brothers and all of them were still here, but it’s a good idea to bring him home where he belongs.”
Marc Storch, a cousin by marriage, is the family historian and the keeper of Loren Howarth’s Legion of Merit, which he inherited from Loren’s widow, Irene.
“When she first showed it to me, she said it was Lolly’s and she smiled,” he says. “She said, ‘He was such a sweet boy.’ Remember, Irene was talking about someone who stopped growing old in 1942. There she is at one hundred and one years old. Lolly never got any further than his twenties. So Irene, eighty years later, is still seeing that boy, that young man.
“It means so much that Lolly could come home and be close to where his family is,” Marc says. “Even though it’s only a physical reuniting, having his remains back here would be important to those who remember him. It would also be important to those who know what he did to help save his crew.
“People should know about that, and what it cost him.”