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EXPLORING
KENTUCKY- August 2001 by Katherine Tandy Brown Thawed, Rebuilt
and Ready to Fly
I remember reading a fascinating National Geographic article in 1992 about the excavation of a WWII P-38 Lightning that had been buried for 50 years beneath Greenland’s icy surface. The first of its kind in history, the recovery project had been a $638,000 engineering marvel. Naturally, I assumed the fighter plane was now on display at the Smithsonian or perhaps at the Air Force Museum in Dayton. Turns out, however, that “Glacier Girl” is being restored in an airport in a small East Kentucky town smack in the shadow of Cumberland Gap. Back when that war broke out, plane-crazy Roy Shoffner was a Middlesboro 13-year-old. Of the airplane models he built then and dreamed of flying, the P-38 was his favorite. “Because of its distinguishable silhouette,” he now says, “it was a love affair for everyone who saw it.” A jet pilot during the Korean War, Shoffner became an entrepreneur, starting the Duraline Corporation, a manufacturer of plastic water pipe that cornered the market when the telephone industry switched to fiber-optic cable. The self-made millionaire also built and ran fast food restaurants, supermarkets and other commercial properties in his hometown. Expected to become “the industrial Pittsburgh of the South” due to its abundance of timber and mineral deposits, Middlesboro was established by an English company in 1889, named Middlesborough and developed for a projected population of 200,000. Though the minerals didn’t pan out, the post office dropped the “ugh” from its name, and only 12,251 folks now live there, the community is not short of claims to fame. Its county (Bell) has both a national (Cumberland Gap) and state (Pine Mountain) park. The only known U.S. city built within a meteor crater, Middlesboro is home to the oldest continuously played golf course in the U.S., the state’s largest pin oak and, thanks to Shoffner, The Lost Squadron Museum. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt implemented a “Europe First” policy, giving defense priority to an Allied invasion of Nazi-held France from England. During Operation Bolero, an extensive buildup of U.S. war planes in Great Britain, American bombers and fighters flew overseas via the treacherous North Atlantic route in stages, refueling at Greenland, Iceland and Labrador. On July 15, 1942, a squadron of two B-17 Flying Fortresses and six P-38 Lightning fighters flying that route hit bad weather and were forced to land on the Greenland ice cap. The Lost Squadron, as they became known, survived for ten days until all 25 men returned unharmed in the largest forced landing and rescue in U. S. history. Left as they landed, the aircraft were gradually covered with snow, sinking deep into a glacier. In 1981, two Atlanta flying buffs, Pat Epps and Richard Taylor, determined the location of the buried planes, formed a company named the Greenland Expedition Society (GES) and launched a number of unsuccessful attempts at recovery of the WWII treasures, though in 1988 they did touch one of the B-17’s with a probe. Still longing to fly a P-38, Shoffner heard of the efforts of GES and came on board in 1992, investing in, and joining the thirteenth Greenland expedition. Its project manager, Bob Cardin, was a retired Army lieutenant colonel who had flown Hueys in Viet Nam, been an instructor, pilot and advisor to the New Hampshire National Guard and served as airfield commander at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Learning from mistakes made on GES’s previous forays, the Rhode Island native ran a tight ship. His challenges included bringing in 6,000 pounds of food and 38,000 pounds of equipment, housing and protecting the crew (which included plucky 86-year-old Norman Vaughan, lead dog handler on Admiral Byrd’s 1928 expedition to the North Pole) in Greenland’s harsh climate, maintaining a route for supplies and finding a way to extract one plane from over 200 feet below the ice. In 61 days, using a closed hot water drill dubbed “Gopher,” the team melted a shaft down to the aircraft, carved out a cave around it, and disassembled the entire plane, raising it piece by piece, with its 7,000-pound center section emerging last. All of the parts were then shipped via helicopter, ship and truck to the Middlesboro Airport, where restoration began in 1993.
Having repaid GES their investment in the expedition seven years ago, Shoffner is now Glacier Girl’s sole owner. At completion, his total investment will probably be about $3 million. Now well into hundreds of thousands of dollars, corporate sponsorship has taken the form of products and technical advice or assistance. For example, Evans Coolant developed a coolant especially for this plane, then donated both the product and technical support, while BF Goodrich Aerospace in England rebuilt the landing gear and brakes at no cost. Housed in the hangar alongside the nearly-completed P-38, the museum, which attracts as many as 20,000 people yearly, is a goldmine of WWII, in particular P-38, memorabilia that includes photos, uniforms, two scale model dioramas handcrafted by Earl Toole, who was a member of the 1942 rescue party, and a display of “trench art” – ashtrays topped by P-38 models (one made from the prop blade of a Japanese Zero) and “silhouettes” made from 78 rpm records to teach U.S. citizens how to recognize enemy planes. Visitors can watch mechanic Gary Austin, who’s worked on two other P-38’s, as he puts on the finishing touches. One look at the hundreds of rivets in her wings gives even non-mechanical oglers a good idea of how complex the task has been. Project manager Bob Cardin, Austin and 83-year-old former P-38 pilot Mike Wilson, who works volunteer shifts several times a year, are the plane’s prime rebuilders now. Thanks to WWII-era resources obtained from the Smithsonian, they’ve been able to duplicate the 1940s manufacturing process. Of the 10,038 P-38’s produced, only 25 survived the “destroy in place” order at war’s end and only seven are in flyable condition. The seventh, Glacier Girl, is the oldest in the world, has the only complete set of P-38 guns in the world and is the only P-38F. She’d flown only 62 days and had only 74 hours of flight time when she went down on the ice. Restored, she’s “80 percent original and 100 percent authentic,” and will be flying on her original 1941 factory engine with a bit of original 1942 air in her tires. “When we brought it back,” Shoffner explains, “it was crushed so badly under 268 feet of ice that I said, ‘Well, boys, we’ve got six junkers now so we may as well take our time and make this the best one in the world,’ and that’s what we’ve done.” Museum volunteer Ed Stanley chats with a lot of veterans, who, once they find out where the P-38 is, often come back again and again. “I hear a lot of World War II stories,” he says, smiling. “You can learn about who won the war and who lost! But there are still some that don’t want to talk. Some say the heroes didn’t come home, that they’re still over there.” Now in his 80s, Brad McManus was the first Lost Squadron pilot to land his P-38 on that 1942 July day, and each year he stops by to check on Glacier Girl’s progress. A Navy nurse during that era, Pat Welch is a Middlesboro city council member and executive director of the Cumberland Trails United Way. “I remember when the Lost Squadron went down and their rescue,” she says. “Excavating that plane was such a big effort, with the expense, engineering and danger involved.” As a tribute, every WWII P-38 pilot who visits the museum is asked to inscribe his name, rank and serial number on a bullet from the plane. Now on display, those bullets will be loaded in Glacier Girl’s guns for “extra good luck” on her maiden flight. Like a debutante, Glacier Girl is scheduled to “come out” during the Middlesboro Airport’s annual Aviation Weekend, held in conjunction with the town’s Fall Festival the first weekend in October. Last year, she was rolled out onto the runway for the show, which features a static display of vintage planes. Plans this year are to taxi her up and down the runway. “Just hearing those engines should be exciting enough to bring some people in,” says Cardin. The air show is free to the public, he explains, because here “children can learn about airplanes and aviation with the possibility that they may pursue a career in the field and get out of poor Appalachia. If we charged, some people might not be able to come. “I was told,” he continues, “that WWII veterans are dying at the rate of 1,300 a day. In a short time there won’t be any of these men around to tell the stories about why we have the freedoms we have today. Now all we have left is the preservation of the equipment used during that war, which probably more than any other war has guaranteed those freedoms.” If all goes well, Shoffner’s dream of flying a P-38 should come to fruition sometime later in the Fall. His goal is to recreate her original mission, landing not on ice, but in England for the Farnsborough Air Show, then on to the Paris Air Show. After that, Cardin explains, she’ll travel to U.S. air shows and grace the skies over Middlesborough once or twice a week, “so people can come her and actually see a P-38 fly. I think over the next five years,” he says, “this plane will have a huge, positive effect on local tourism.” Karla Lutz Bowling, executive director of the Bell County Chamber of Commerce, expresses the area’s delight that Glacier Girl has landed here. “It’s a multimillion dollar project in a little bitty airport in a little bitty town in a little bitty county in Kentucky,” she says. “We’re honored to have it here.” Since the museum is off the beaten path and you won’t want to miss the breathtaking view of nearby Cumberland Gap from 2,440-foot Pinnacle Overlook, you might want to spend a night or two in the mountains at RidgeRunner Bed & Breakfast right in Middlesboro. Built in the early 1890’s, this 20-room Victorian mansion, with no television or air conditioners, is “a trip back to grandmother’s house,” says its proprietress, Sue Richards. “We emphasize a return to quieter, less stressful times. You can sit on the front porch and rock and hear the birds. When we serve breakfast there, you can see the mist rise over the mountains.” Check out www.thelostsquadron.com for both
museum and educational information. Katherine Tandy
Brown is a staff writer for The Lane Report. |
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Copyright 1996-2001, by Kentucky Business Online. All rights reserved. Editorial
content is copyright 2001, Lane Communications Group The Lane Report is a trademark of Lane Communications Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
Interest in
World War II is running rampant these days. You can watch
the movie “Pearl Harbor,” peruse Tom
Brokaw’s book, Album of Memories, and tune in to a
slew of television specials. Or you can not only see, but
also actually touch, a slice of 1942 combat history
that’s coming back to life right here in Kentucky.
The pressure
of all that ice had taken its toll. “Every single
piece of the plane was broken,” says Cardin, who now
heads the restoration project and runs the museum.
“Every day is a labor of love. You can’t get
anxious. You have to realize this is something
that’s never been done before. You know
there’ll be mistakes made and you try to keep those
to a minimum.”