HEROES: The Ice-Cube Rescue

"Ice Skate" was a mile-square ice floe, 10 ft. thick. It drifted on the cap of the globe, beyond the Arctic Circle, whose mysteries are as dark as those faced by Columbus, Magellan, and De Soto. There, 20 Air Forcemen and scientists participating in the International Geophysical Year took over a simple camp: 20 Quonset huts, mess hall, science laboratory, 5,000-ft. runway and an electric homing beacon for supply planes. And there they resolutely logged their fresh jigsaw pieces of knowledge about water masses, current patterns, ice drift, season changes and marine life.

The tools of their trade: instruments and other equipment devised by modern man at his technological best—backed up, hundreds of miles away, by the U.S. Air Force's well-organized supply lines and standby rescue teams. Other invaluable tools: physical courage and determination. Nothing less than courage would serve the 20 lonely men drifting in the cold Arctic Sea through 20-hour summer days and 24-hour winter nights.

Obstacles in the Dark. Their troubles came with the warmth of spring and summer. Ice Skate was cracking. The airstrip had already crumbled away from the rest of the floe. Again and again they built new strips as their drifting cake crumbled and chipped apart. Heavy windstorms swept over, first from one direction, then from another, moving the ice mass slowly to and fro with a sheer force that caused new cracks and pressure ridges.

A veteran of Air Force survival work, Captain James F. Smith, military commander of the team, kept a close watch on the melting mass, issued a series of radio reports to Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Oct. 21: Next 48 hours consider relatively critical. Darkness our major obstacle.

Oct. 23: Pressure ridges on all sides,

Nov. 2: Forty percent of floe to east and west has separated. Unable to reach runway for inspection. Overcast, dark, light snow. Crack threatens to separate homer [beacon] from camp . . . Two cracks separating northern 40% of runway . . . Recommend imminent abandoning.

Down on a Band-Aid. The rescue alert flashed within minutes. Air Forcemen, by now well oriented to the peculiarities of polar geography, knew that they could make a rescue just as fast from Strategic Air Command bases in Newfoundland and Greenland as from Alaskan Command points. From SAC's Thule Air Base in Greenland, cover planes flew across the earth's top to circle Ice Skate and keep in touch lest the camp homer beacon fail. At Harmon A.F.B. in Newfoundland, SAC put on standby two crack C-123J crews who were familiar with ice landings. This time, instead of landing on a 10,000-ft.-to-20,000-ft airstrip, a single rescue plane had to make a dark-of-night touchdown on a Band-Aid-sized, 2,200-ft. strip while an escorting C-54 circled the area.