What a wonderful story! This book, written by David A. Kearns, is one that I would never have known about had it not been for a close friend recommending it. He is an Internet Marketing consultant who has been approached to be involved in the George 1 Recovery Project in one way or another. I really do not know the specifics of his association with the effort, but thank goodness that he is part of it!
This book tells the true story of a 1947 PBM Mariner flight crew who, in the middle of a coastal photographing and mapping mission, encountered a white-out storm in mid flight. Attempting to turn around and exit the weather event, the crew scraped a large snow drift, creating just enough friction (or perhaps a static charge) to ignite over 2,000 gallons of aviation gasoline, sending crew and plane hurtling toward the icy landscape below. Thus began their encounter with the land near the South Pole.
The crew survived for nearly two weeks on essentially nothing more than peanut butter and apricots, only to find that when help did arrive, their rescuers could not access their position. So began a ten mile hike, after surviving for two weeks on meager rations, through a crevasse field, and down a sheer and razor sharp ice cliff. The very fact that anybody survived at all is a true testament to the men’s will to live. But the fact that five men survived such an ordeal with severe wounds, incurred in their mid-air explosion and the subsequent tumble through open air space ending in a less than gentle impact on an Antarctic mountainside, is truly a miracle!
I would recommend this book to anyone with even the slightest interest in adventure and/or tales of survival. I’m pretty familiar with the story of a soccer team that found themselves stranded in the Andes, and in my mind this story blows that one out of the water. Sure, that soccer team went through hell and back, but the brave aviators in Where Hell Freezes Over did what they did back in 1947, and never resorted to cannibalism (hooray)!
JMK
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