Thawed, Rebuilt and
Ready to Fly
'Glacier Girl' and other historic airplanes on display in Middlesboro
EXPLORING KENTUCKY- August 2001
by Katherine Tandy Brown
 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.
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 Middlesboro 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.
 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.”
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 Middlesboro 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.”
Katherine
Tandy Brown is a staff writer for The Lane Report.
editorial@lanereport.com
Copyright
1996-2001, by Kentucky Business Online. All rights reserved.
Reprinted
with permission of The Lane
Report
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NOTE; We have no direct relationship with Glacier Girl and provide
these pages for your enjoyment only. We can't, therefore, answer any
email questions about her scheduled appearances, etc. As we find
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MORE INFO!
Needless to say, this incredible
event has sparked a lot of interest.
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GLACIER GIRL
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