GREENLAND ICE CAP

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27374, 12 June 1954, Page 3

GREENLAND ICE CAP

MAROONED AIRMEN RESCUED

Rescue Below Zero. By lan Mackersey. Robert Hale. 155 pp.

In the autumn of 1952 six members of the British North Greenland expedition were encamped on the bleak and bitter Greenland Ice Cap, their camp a mere speck in the interminable snows. Eight thousand feet above sea level, 700 miles from the North Pole, they were living on a sea of ice hundreds of miles wide and in places thought to be as much as 10,000 feet thick; Constantly swept by blizzards, and in near darkness for six months of the year—a place of bitter cold and unearthly loneliness. Here the members of the expedition were to live for two years gaining experience in Arctic conditions for the benefit of the services and undertaking geographical and scientific investigations. Moving the expedition in was a vast enterprise carried out with the cooperation of air lifts by Sunderland flying boats, which ferried men, dogs and equipment to Britannia lake, 200 miles south of the base, whence the men and dogs made their way on foot northwards.

Supplies were to be dropped to the expedition once it was encamped by a Hastings aircraft belonging to the R.A.F. After weeks of practising dropping methods, the airlift of supplies was begun on September 15 and the first day’s manoeuvre was uneventful. But the next morning Hastings 492 with Flight-Lieutenant Clancy in charge took off on what was to prove a one-way journey. Difficulties of judging and regaining height on’ a difficult drop that had to be made only 50 feet above the snow brought the plane down into the snow, and only the skill of the pilot prevented complete disaster: three men suffered injury of secondary seriousness. But 12 men found themselves isolated in intense and crippling cold without the clothes or equipment necessary for survival and, though the members of the Greenland expedition did everything that they could for them, their continued presence was a danger to thetnselves and • the expedition. for 18 men could not live in the quarters and on supplies provided for six. , “Rescue below Zero” tells not only, the story of the disaster but the much more enthralling one of the attempts at rescue and the final success of the two dramatic landings and take-offs made on the ice by the U.S. Air Force which removed first the three injured men and finally the remaining nine to safety. Mr Mackersey has made ar engrossing and vivid book out of the material that he has gathered from members of the expedition and from official sources. The weariness and the courage of the stranded men and tn r humour with which they faced therunenviable plight make an adventure story that is more gripping than fiction. For a few days they were front-page news and then, as they themselves would have wished, they were forgotten. But it is only just that their exploit should be commemorated in a book of the excellent quality of Mr Mackersey’s.