Griss, the navigator, felt his arms flailing as his seat ejected downward, and he was afraid that he had broken both shoulders. He could not reach for his survival kit on the long way to the ground.
Svitenko, the one stuck in the IN seat without an ejection charge, tried to jump out the hole left when the navigator seat dropped out. His head hit the hatch-frame on the way out, and he never regained consciousness.
With nobody on board, the eight-engine bomber made a slow left turn, heading out over Wholstenholme Fjord but quickly losing altitude. Over the vast plain of thick sea-ice on the western shore of Greenland, the plane’s left wingtip touched the surface and started to dig a trench. The nose slammed down on the ice as the bomber began to cartwheel, and it disintegrated in a bright yellow flash, spreading finely divided debris in a north-south line two and a half miles long. Hopkins was the only one who happened to be looking west when the plane hit the ground, and he witnessed it disintegrate in the darkness, leaving a large field of burning jet fuel.
Haug made an easy landing and tried desperately to open his survival kit. The survival kit was important in that it was always a secret, sealed box, said to contain many interesting things, including the coveted folding rifle, but it could never be opened and examined under normal conditions. It was a sort of prize given only to those who had lived through the extreme event of being shot out of the plane in an ejection seat, and Haug and the other survivors wanted to look inside. His hands were too cold. He finally abandoned it and his parachute and walked 600 yards to the comfort of a heated hangar on the base.
D’Amario yanked the quick-release lever on his harness as soon as he felt his feet touch ground, and it abruptly dumped him out onto his right side. He stood up, felt all over, and could find no injuries. He collected his survival kit and walked the 200 yards to a hangar.
Hopkins could not reach the survival kit handle with his hurting arm, so he just let it go. He started walking after he hit the ground, and soon he ran into Marx. When Marx hit the ground, the snow felt like concrete to him, and he was so cold, his numb hands could not open his survival kit, so he gave up and started walking. Seeing that Hopkins was injured, however, he went back for his kit and finally got it open, but sadly, there was nothing inside that could help Hopkins. They started walking together, and 30 minutes later they were picked up by a rescue helicopter.
After he landed, Snapp spent a frustrating time trying to open his kit as his hands got colder and colder. It seemed that there was a turning point for each of the men, at which the 53 degrees below zero chill factor or even physical injury began to take precedence over the desire to see inside the secret box. Unsuccessful, he dropped it and started walking. Two rescuers found him an hour and a half later and took him to the base hospital.
Griss was the first to eject and the last one to be found. The pain in his shoulder kept him from even trying to open his survival kit. He wrapped himself up in the parachute and lay down in the snow. The rescue team found him 22 hours later, frostbitten but alive.
The United States Air Force, together with the Royal Greenland Trade Department and some dog-sled teams, had found and rescued the surviving members of the crew of HOBO 28 under terrible conditions of cold and dark. It was a job very well done, but now there was a larger problem. Greenland belonged and still belongs to Denmark, and the Air Force was allowed to land, take off, and house airplanes on the ice at Thule, but the written conditions of this agreement stated clearly that no nuclear weapons were to be present. There were now four such devices, spread out over a large blackened area on the ice covering the fjord, about seven and a half miles west of Thule, that had fallen out of the plane as it crashed. To police the area of debris would not be an easy effort.
The first thing the Air Force did was to give the task a name: Project Crested Ice, or, unofficially, “Dr. Freezelove,” based on the name of a Stanley Kubrick film from 1964, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. All the Americans had seen the film. It was unfamiliar to the Greenlanders.
Weather conditions for the cleanup project were extreme, with temperatures as low as 76 degrees below zero and winds up to 89 miles per hour. Sunlight would not peek over the horizon until February 14. The hand-held radiation detectors which worked so well in a laboratory would fail as the batteries froze. Radiation contamination from nuclear weapons torn to pieces and burned was spread out over three square miles on the ice shelf over the fjord. The goal was to pick up every interesting-looking piece at the wreck site so that Eskimos would not collect them and take them home, subjecting themselves and their families to long-term alpha-radiation exposure. Unfortunately, the crash occurred in the middle of an election in Denmark, and the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen was immediately notified that the Danish government wished to send help for the cleanup operation. There was no objection, as it was diplomatically correct to accept the assistance, and the Air Force needed all the hands it could muster to collect every small bit of debris off the ice. Danger to personnel from radiation exposure during the operation was, for all practical purposes, nonexistent and paled in comparison with the threat of frostbite. Any plutonium or uranium smoke originating in the crash had condensed onto the ice in the extreme cold, so it could not be breathed. Nobody’s bare skin touched anything in the frozen environment, so there was no chance of absorbing alpha-emitting material during the mission.
The Danes turned out to be a bit more fussy than the Americans on the subject of disposal. The Americans wanted to dump the bomber and its cargo into the deep fjord, where it would be out of sight, out of mind, and gone forever where it was too cold and too deep for anybody or anything to ever pick it up. The Danes wanted every little piece, every dust particle, and every ton of contaminated ice to be packed up and shipped to the United States. The Air Force, wanting to keep its base in Greenland, agreed to this stipulation.
Camp Hunziger was erected at the crash site, consisting of many igloos, a heliport, several generator shacks, communications buildings, a large prefabricated building, two buildings mounted on skis, a decontamination trailer, living quarters, and a latrine. A straight line of 50 men would start walking over a search area, looking down and picking up anything that was not clean ice. Back at the camp, bomb experts would determine which blackened fragments were from a nuclear device, and these parts were separated out and loaded into steel drums for transport back to Pantex, where the weapons were originally assembled. Ice showing any radioactivity at all was loaded into tanks for shipment back to the Savannah River Project in South Carolina.
About 93 percent of the airplane and its cargo was accounted for. The remaining seven percent had probably fallen through the ice and was considered unrecoverable. Carefully reconstructing the bombs from all the tiny pieces, the specialists at Pantex were able to account for everything except the secondary unit, the cylinder made of uranium and lithium deuteride, from one of the weapons. An underwater search in the fjord was attempted using a Star III mini-sub, but nothing was ever found. After almost eight months of work, the operation was completed on September 13, 1968, when the last tank of contaminated ice was sealed and loaded onto a ship.
The Danish workers did not go anywhere near the crash site. They worked on the vehicles used in the cleanup and at the port where the steel tanks full of contaminated ice were loaded. Nineteen years later, about 200 of the workers were convinced that they had been exposed to radiation, and they took legal action against the United States. The action was successful only in forcing the release of many classified documents concerning the Thule accident and Operation Crested Ice, making this detailed account possible. The Danish government wound up paying 1,700 workers 50,000 kroner, about $8,300, each.