Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
When a B-24 went down in subzero weather, one airman was stranded alone.
by Jose Campos
Lieutenant Leon Crane stood hip-deep in snow on a frozen Alaskan mountainside, watching what remained of his B-24 Liberator burn itself out on the slope above him. He shouted for the other men. The temperature was 40 below zero. The cold swallowed his voice.
Crane’s parachute clung to his boots. In addition to the silk, he had two books of matches and a Boy Scout knife. For the next 84 days, it would have to be enough.
The mission had been routine. It was a high-altitude cold-weather test flight out of Ladd Field near Fairbanks, launched on Dec. 21, 1943. It was a standard flight for the Iceberg Inez of the Cold Weather Testing Squadron, with a crew of five men.
At 25,000 feet the No. 1 engine quit. The vacuum selector valve froze. Within seconds the B-24 entered a flat spin from 20,000 feet and the recovery attempt sent it into a 300-mph nosedive. Radio operator Ralph Wenz managed to send out a partial distress call, but their position didn’t get transmitted.
Crane and pilot Harold Hoskin fought the controls together and lost. Crane got out through the bomb bay doors. He saw one other parachute open. He watched it drift over a ridge and vanish. Nobody else came down alive.
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The airman landed deep in the Alaskan interior, near the headwaters of the Charley River, in terrain that was remote even by Alaskan standards.
The explosion destroyed everything aboard, leaving no food, no gear, no survival kit. Crane looked at the burning wreck above him and started moving downhill toward the river, because moving was the only alternative to dying in place.
He gathered spruce boughs, tried for a fire, failed twice, and finally used a letter from his father as kindling to coax a flame.
He wrapped himself in the parachute silk, lay down in the snow, and began his first night in the wilderness.
Crane built an SOS in the snow from spruce branches, and waited. He spent nine days under that tree surviving on nothing but water, conserving whatever strength he had left. He fashioned a spear, a bow and arrow, and a slingshot. None of it worked well enough to take the squirrels that chattered at him from the branches overhead. Sleep came in short intervals.
“The cold woke me up almost every two hours,” Crane later recalled. “I’d unwrap myself, fetch more wood, build up the fire, rewrap myself like a silkworm in a cocoon and doze off again.”
He ate snow and told himself it was a milkshake. After nine days without food and no sign of rescue, he made the first critical call of his survival: nobody was coming. He picked up the parachute and started walking north along the Charley River.
The river was his only navigation tool. He didn’t know exactly where he was, but rivers run somewhere, and somewhere was better than a spruce tree on a frozen mountain. He pushed through hip-deep drifts, one bad step away from a broken leg that would have ended everything. His only sustenance was vegetation he chewed but couldn’t swallow. He grew weaker with every mile. After a brutal week of forward movement he spotted a low shape half-buried in snow. A cabin.
A trapper had built it. Like most Alaskan trappers of the era, he had left it stocked. Crane found canned food, sugar, powdered milk, a rifle, a frying pan, canvas tents, and moose-hide mittens. Within minutes, he had a fire going. He sat with a cup of hot cocoa trying to process the fact that he was still alive.
For the next several weeks he stayed put. He ate carefully, treated frostbitten hands and feet, and repaired his shredded flight suit with strips of parachute fabric. He found a map of Alaska inside the cabin. The nearest settlement was a mining camp called Woodchopper on the Yukon River. He fixed that point in his mind and began planning.
When the food supply ran low he built a sled, loaded the rifle and his remaining provisions, and stepped back into the Alaskan winter. It was on February 12, nearly eight weeks after the crash.
The sled lasted less than a day before Crane abandoned it as too heavy. He redistributed what food he could carry into a pack and kept walking. The river ice broke under him more than once. In one fall he went completely under, soaked through in water cold enough to kill in minutes. He dragged himself out, got a fire going before his hands quit working, dried his clothes, and kept moving. Along the way, he shot small game birds, putting a few hundred calories a day between him and starvation.
He found a second cabin, rested, then pushed on toward the Yukon. The miles came slowly. He trudged 10 on a good day, far less on a bad one. His face burned black from windburn and sun-glare off the snow. His eyes sank into dark hollows. His hair and beard grew matted and wild. He had stopped looking like a person and started looking like something the wilderness had been working on for months, which was exactly right. He had covered roughly 120 miles on foot when, on March 9, he spotted a sled dog trail pressed into the snow. He followed it to a cabin with smoke rising from the chimney.
Leon Crane, one year after the crash (Photo: National Park Service).
A sturdy man poked his head out the door. Crane pulled himself together and delivered the understatement of the war.
“I’m Lieutenant Crane of the United States Army Air Forces,” he said. “I’ve been in a little trouble. Boy, am I glad to see you.”
Albert Ames, a trapper living there with his family, brought him inside. For the first time in nearly three months, Crane stood before a mirror. What looked back at him landed hard.
“I had a two-inch beard, black as coal,” he recalled. “My hair was long and matted, covering my ears and coming down over my forehead almost to my eyes, so that I looked like some strange species of prehistoric man. I was dirty and sunburned and wind-burned, and my eyes stared back at me from the centers of two deep black circles.”
Ames fed him pancakes and moose steak and let him sleep. A few days later he mushed Crane by dog sled to Woodchopper on the Yukon, where a mail plane eventually put down and flew him back to Fairbanks. The surgeon at Ladd Field declared him in good health. Against all logic, he had even gained a little weight.
What kept Leon Crane alive wasn’t a single dramatic act. It was a sustained sequence of correct decisions made by a man with no wilderness training, no rescue grid, and no comms, operating on instinct, discipline, and a refusal to stop moving. He used every resource at his disposal: the parachute, the river, the trappers’ cabins, the rifle. He got lucky, too. Alaska’s trapper cabin culture saved his life as surely as his own will did.
The wreckage of B-24 #42-40910 still lies on the mountain above the Charley River, inside what is now Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. It has been there for more than 80 years.
Jose Campos writes frequently for Soldier of Fortune.
