The Lost Squadron: How a P-38 Ended Up Under 268 Feet of Greenland Ice

Twenty-four years ago today, on October 26, 2002, a pilot named Steve Hinton ran up the engines of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning at a small airport in Middlesboro, Kentucky, checked the landing gear, tightened a few fittings and took off. About 25,000 people had come to watch, roughly double the population of the town. The airplane had last flown on July 15, 1942. For most of the 60 years in between it had been sitting under the Greenland ice sheet, and by the time anyone reached it, there were 268 feet of ice on top of it.

The fighter is called Glacier Girl now. It was one of eight American warplanes, six P-38s and two B-17 bombers, that came down on the ice cap during a ferry flight to Britain early in the Second World War. Every one of the 25 men aboard walked away. The airplanes did not, and the story of how one of them was found, melted out and flown again is one of the strangest salvage jobs in aviation history. It is also, quietly, a lesson in how an ice sheet works.

A bridge of airfields across the North Atlantic

In the summer of 1942 the United States was trying to move an air force to Britain. Factories were turning out airplanes by the hundreds, but shipping them was slow, and German submarines were sinking Allied ships at an alarming rate. Bombers could fly the ocean in stages. Fighters could not; they lacked the range to cross in one hop. The answer was Operation Bolero, part of the build-up of American forces in Britain, which flew warplanes across in short legs: Presque Isle, Maine, to Goose Bay, Labrador, then to a new base in a Greenland fjord, then to Reykjavik, Iceland, and finally to Scotland.

The Greenland stop was Narsarsuaq, code-named Bluie West One. The U.S. Army had started building it in June 1941, and by the end of the war an estimated 10,000 aircraft had landed there on their way to Europe and North Africa. Getting in was not simple. The usual approach was a low-level flight up a long fjord between mountains, and when cloud filled the fjord there was no way in at all. At those latitudes compasses and radios misbehaved too, a problem we touched on in our story about the gyrocompass Einstein helped build.

The P-38 was the fighter chosen for the long legs. Designed at Lockheed by a team under Hall Hibbard and Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, it had two turbocharged Allison V-12 engines on twin tail booms, with the pilot in a short central pod between them. It was the first military airplane to fly faster than 400 mph in level flight, and later in the war it carried America’s two top aces, Richard Bong with 40 victories and Thomas McGuire with 38. In April 1943 P-38s flew the long-range mission that shot down Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Slightly more than 10,000 were built.

Tomcat Green and Tomcat Yellow

On July 7, 1942, in the second flight of Operation Bolero, two formations left Goose Bay. Each was made up of four P-38s from the 94th Fighter Squadron, 1st Fighter Group, shepherded by a B-17 of the 97th Bomb Group that handled navigation. The formations were called Tomcat Green and Tomcat Yellow. Weather separated them over the next few days, but they came together again in Greenland and, on July 15, took off for Reykjavik, minus two P-38s that had dropped out with mechanical trouble.

Storms blocked the way to Iceland, so the eight airplanes turned back. By the time they returned, Bluie West One was under heavy overcast, and an alternate field was out of reach. Low on fuel and unsure of their position, the pilots decided to land on the ice cap itself, on the remote southeast side of Greenland.

Lieutenant Brad McManus, the lowest on fuel, went first. The snow looked flat and firm, so he put his wheels down, hoping to save the airplane so it could be flown out later. For a moment it worked. Then the nose wheel collapsed in the summer slush and the P-38 flipped onto its back. McManus climbed out unhurt. The others landed with their wheels up, sliding in on their bellies. The two B-17s stayed aloft for about another hour, sending SOS signals, before they too bellied in.

The last Lightning down belonged to Lieutenant Harry Smith, 23. He flew low over McManus’s upturned fighter first, looking for signs of life, and wrote afterward in a rhyming journal of his relief when “the lad is climbing out, he’s waving at me.” Then Smith throttled back at 200 feet, cut the fuel, feathered his propellers and slid in. His airplane was 62 days old and had 72 hours on it. In his logbook he called it the “best damn crate I ever damn saw.” Before leaving, he tossed the canopy keys into the cockpit, as if someone might need them, and shot the secret IFF radio transmitter full of holes with his .45 so it could not be used by anyone else.

Nine days on the ice

The 25 men moved into the two B-17s and, all things considered, lived in relative comfort. Supplies were dropped on the third day, and word came that help was on the way. On July 24 a rescue party with a dog sled arrived and led them on a hard march of about 10 miles to the southeast coast, where a Coast Guard cutter was waiting. No one had been killed or seriously injured.

Leaving was harder than they expected. “There’s a bonding that occurs between a young pilot and his own plane,” McManus said many years later, “and when you left you were saying goodbye to it.” The eight airplanes behind them were quickly forgotten in a war that had far bigger losses to count. Bolero itself was counted a success. Planners had expected to lose about 10 percent of the first wave; the real figure was 5.2 percent, and by the end of August 1942 the route had delivered 386 airplanes, including 164 P-38s.

Other crews were not so lucky in the same corner of Greenland. That November an Army C-53 transport crashed on the ice cap, and a Coast Guard J2F Duck amphibian flying in the search for its survivors went down with three men aboard. Neither crew was ever brought home, and the search for the Duck still draws expeditions to southeast Greenland today. Greenland’s ice has a long record of swallowing aircraft, as we saw in the story of the 1968 B-52 crash near Thule.

“Brush off the snow, crank the engines”

The idea of going back came from a pilot who had been there. Carl Rudder, who had flown in the doomed formation, told his story to an Atlanta airline pilot named Roy Degan about 35 years later. Degan was hooked, and in 1978 he approached Pat Epps, who ran an aircraft maintenance business at Atlanta’s DeKalb-Peachtree Airport, about restoring the planes. Epps, together with his friend Richard Taylor, an architect and pilot, eventually took up the hunt and formed the Greenland Expedition Society.

They thought it would be easy. Epps liked to tell museum audiences that the plan had been to “fly up there, brush off the snow, crank the engines, and take off in a P-38,” and then to add, “oh boy, were we wrong.” When the team first went looking around 1980, the airplanes had vanished. The squadron was not where it had landed, and it was not on the surface. It took 13 expeditions over the next 12 years, nearly a million dollars and ground-penetrating radar to find it.

Why the airplanes sank out of sight

The ice cap had done two things to the squadron. First, it had buried it. The patch of southeast Greenland where the planes came down gets prodigious amounts of snow, and above the line where summer melting stops, that snow never goes away. Each winter’s layer is pressed down by the next, slowly turning into firn and then solid glacial ice. Nothing had sunk into the ice; the ice had grown up over the airplanes, at an average of more than five feet a year.

Second, it had moved them. Ice sheets are not still. Under their own weight they flow, very slowly, downhill toward the sea, and that flow carries anything frozen inside along with it. When the searchers finally pinned the planes down, they had traveled roughly two miles from where they had landed. The same flow later carried part of the squadron toward a field of crevasses, which is one reason the remaining fighters are so hard to reach.

The effect is not unique to the Lost Squadron. Wikipedia’s article on the Greenland ice sheet cites Glacier Girl as a classic example of how fast snow piles up above the snow line, alongside a modern one: in 2017 an engine on an Airbus A380 failed over Greenland, and when part of its fan was recovered from the ice two years later, it was already under about four feet of snow and ice. The Cold War engineers who dug Camp Century, the city under the ice, learned the same lesson the hard way, as their tunnels slowly squeezed shut.

In 1988 the radar finally showed all eight airplanes, about two miles from the landing site and buried under some 264 to 268 feet of ice. The next summer a coring device lowered to one of the targets brought up bits of aircraft tubing and olive-drab skin. The squadron had been found. Getting a piece of it out was another matter.

The Gopher

Drilling a shaft nearly 270 feet deep in ice needs heat, not drill bits. Expedition member Don Brooks came up with the concept for melting a four-foot-wide shaft, and Bobbie Bailey, who ran a compressor factory, built an improved version known as the Super Gopher: a 550-pound cone, shaped a little like a missile nose, wrapped in copper tubing through which hot liquid circulated, so that it melted its way straight down. It descended at two to four feet an hour, while a pump lifted the meltwater out. Each shaft took the better part of a month.

In 1990 the team melted down to one of the B-17s, Big Stoop, and found it crushed flat by the weight of ice above. That was sobering, but radar images and old photos suggested that one fighter was in much better shape. It was Harry Smith’s P-38, and because he had feathered his propellers before landing, the blades had not been bent back by the impact.

By then the society was short of money. Roy Shoffner, a businessman from Middlesboro, Kentucky, put up much of the money for a final expedition in 1992, and brought in Bob Cardin, a tough former Air Force man, as project manager. Workers rode a winch down the shaft, a trip of 20 to 25 minutes in a four-foot tube, and used hoses of hot water and steam to carve out a cavern around the airplane, roughly 50 feet wide. They worked for weeks in cold dripping water, while chunks of ice fell from the roof and cracks sometimes ran across it when someone struck a chisel.

The P-38 could not come up whole, so the team took it apart where it lay: propellers, wings, booms, engines, every piece logged and hoisted up the shaft. It took five shafts to make a hole wide enough for the largest piece, the 17-foot-long center section that weighs about three tons. Raising it with a hand-cranked hoist took days. It reached the surface on August 1, 1992. A couple of weeks earlier, on July 15, exactly 50 years after he had flipped his own fighter there, Brad McManus, then 74, had stood on the ice beside the first recovered pieces of his friend’s airplane.

The canopy had been crushed and the skin showed the strain of decades of weight. But as Shoffner pointed out, “It’s got all the parts.” The airplane had been only two months old when it was left on the ice. On one of the tail booms the team found the names of two Lockheed workers who had signed it on the assembly line in 1942.

Ten years in a Kentucky hangar

The parts traveled by ship to Savannah, Georgia, and then to Shoffner’s hangar in Middlesboro. The recovery crew had named the airplane over a celebratory bottle of Scotch: Glacier Girl. Cardin estimated the restoration would take 18 months and $600,000. It took about 10 years and some $4 million.

He refused to cut corners. The restorers used about 80 percent of the original parts, and Cardin allowed only a handful of volunteers inside. When the team was missing one of its propeller blades, he traded two spare tires to the Richard I. Bong Heritage Center in Superior, Wisconsin, for a blade from its own P-38. The engines first ran on September 6, 2000. The first flight followed on October 26, 2002, with Hinton at the controls, because insurers would approve no other pilot.

The next summer Glacier Girl went to the 2003 Dayton Air Show, where crowds stood a hundred deep around it for four days and it won the Rolls-Royce Aviation Heritage Trophy. Cardin spent the weekend calling out the depth to anyone who would listen. “Two hundred and sixty-eight feet straight down!”

In June 2007 the airplane set out to finish its original trip, leaving New Jersey for Duxford, England, 65 years after it had been stranded. A coolant leak in the right engine grounded it at Goose Bay, Labrador, the same base the squadron had left in 1942. Later that year Shoffner sold it to Rod Lewis, a Texas energy executive and warbird collector. It was shown at the Lone Star Flight Museum in Houston from December 2023 to January 2024.

The bomber that rose instead of sank

There is a neat counterexample on the other side of Greenland. On June 27, 1942, less than three weeks before the Lost Squadron came down, a B-17E called My Gal Sal made a forced landing on the ice cap during an earlier Bolero crossing. The landing damaged its propellers, so the crew spent a whole day cutting the tips off one of them until an engine could run and power the radio. They camped in the bomber for nine days, then hiked 26 miles to a lake where a rescue plane could land.

My Gal Sal did not disappear. It was spotted from the air in 1964, apparently intact, and in 1965 engineers visited to collect hydraulic fluid, rubber and other materials to study how they had aged in the Arctic cold. That part of the ice was losing more to summer melting than it gained in snow. Over the next 30 years the surface melted away around the bomber, while its shadow kept the ice directly beneath it from melting in the summer sun, until by 1995 the plane sat on an ice pedestal about 30 feet high. One winter night the wind flipped it off its perch and scattered its contents across the ice.

Aircraft salvager Gary Larkins removed the wreck in July 1995, and today, restored, My Gal Sal hangs in the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. Put the two stories side by side and you have a simple picture of an ice sheet’s two halves: high up, where snow piles up, things are buried; lower down, where melting wins, they are exposed. As the climate warms and the snow line climbs, more of Greenland will be the second kind.

Still down there

Seven airplanes of the Lost Squadron remain in the ice. In 2018 a team led by Jim Salazar and Ken McBride flew a drone carrying ground-penetrating radar over the area and on July 4 picked up a target more than 300 feet down. A steam probe sent to the spot came back with hydraulic oil on it. It was the P-38 the searchers call “Echo,” flown by Lieutenant Robert Wilson, and it lies even deeper than Glacier Girl did.

Echo has proved harder to reach than to find. The team planned a recovery for the summer of 2025, but by then the airplane had drifted more than 100 meters with the ice and had to be located again. Bad weather then kept its Antonov An-2 cargo plane from crossing from Iceland, and the attempt was put off until 2026. As far as published reports show, Echo is still in the ice.

The searchers now work out of Kulusuk, a village on Greenland’s southeast coast about 75 nautical miles from the site, and call the area one of the most logistically challenging places on Earth. Salazar has said pilots know it as Piteraq Alley, for its habit of spawning severe snowstorms that can arise in minutes. That, and the ice itself, is what makes the job so slow. Every year the planes sink a little farther beneath new snow and slide a little closer to the sea.

Wartime planners sometimes imagined using ice as a building material, as in Britain’s plan for an aircraft carrier made of ice. Greenland simply did it on its own, slowly, sealing eight warplanes in a vault that grows thicker every winter. One of them came back out, with its original keys still in the cockpit. The other seven are still in there, waiting under several hundred feet of snow and ice.

Further reading