I ran across "Frozen in Time" somewhat accidentally, and am very glad I read it.
The book is a true account of lost planes in Greenland during WWII and the associated rescue missions, both successful and not.
The heroism of the rescuers, and the groundbreaking attempts to land on glaciers in small planes, are really worth reading. Attempting to hike kilometers to the coast to meet with ships in the short window before the coastline freezes up and the ships either gone, or marooned themselves, the ever-present danger of crevasses, stealing folks forever into the dark, the creaking of the relative safety of the fuselage as the ice upon which it sits begins to be drawn into a crevasse, the toes of the frostbite/gangrene victim dropping off ....
The "other side" is the ability of the downed airmen to survive for months in the shell of the aircraft, or some of the rescue crews to survive in the snow caves built on the fly.
The heartbreak of the "near miss" recoveries highlights the difficulties and the truly amazing successes that were had at the time.
The whole idea of "plane down" go look, now your plane is down, rescue on the way, that plane is down...with renewed heroism and the "no man left behind" mentality that is difficult to conceive of in present times.
The present-day connection is the wish to recover the planes, or more specifically the bodies of the Coast Guard rescue crew that remains locked in ice. The big "trick" is to calculate how much the wreckage has moved, along with glacier movements, in the 60+ years since they were trapped. Modern technologies are used to identify anomalies under the ice and cores drilled to identify success. Even now, 60 years or more later, there is still danger lurking, still a very short weather window when one can even attempt on-site access and recovery. Puts even more into the spotlight what was accomplished and what was attempted in the more primitive technology of WWII.
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