Book Review: Frozen in Time

by philg

If you want to feel better and stop complaining about your own life, Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II is a great book to read. The story concerns a crazy American who bankrupts himself, the author, and the U.S. taxpayer in an attempt to dig a Coast Guard airplane (Grumman Duck) out of a glacier in Greenland. The plane crashed during World War II while rescuing the crew of a B-17 bomber. They in turn had crashed while trying to rescue the crew of a military version of the DC-3 cargo plane.

As someone who has flown piston-powered aircraft in the Arctic (e.g., from Boston to the Arctic Ocean at Kugluktuk in a Cirrus SR-20 and then south to Alaska!) I found the descriptions of similar activities during World War II fascinating. These guys took crazy risks due to their inferior-by-modern-standards navigation equipment and avionics.

If you’re suffering from the maladies of modern life, e.g., being stuck in traffic while commuting and/or handing over 50 percent of your wages to local, state, and federal governments, this book will show you how much worse things could be. The lucky guys in this book were stuck on the ice for months; the unlucky ones died.

The U.S. Air Force comes out looking good in this account. They truly spared no expense and effort in supporting these guys on the ice, e.g., with B-17 flights and supply drops every day with flyable weather.

One thought on “Book Review: Frozen in Time”

  1. I’m curious if this is the same incident that Ernest K. Gann wrote about in “Fate is the Hunter”. It sounds basically the same but there might have been several incidents like this during WWII.

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