Balchen at Work

Squat, barrel-chested, Norwegian-born Bernt Balchen was one of the great U.S. peacetime heroes. He began flying more than 20 years ago, piloted Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd across the Atlantic in 1927 and over the South Pole in 1929. Last week Bernt Balchen, now a 42-year-old U.S. Army colonel, was back in a hero's role again--this time in barren, ice-capped Greenland.

A Flying Fortress with 13 men aboard smacked down on its belly 100 miles in land on the treacherous Greenland icecap. Balchen and young (32) Navy Lieut. Aram Parunak, a onetime Ursinus College football hero, teamed to try a rescue.

But the Fortress was weeks away by foot, and no plane had ever landed intentionally on the jagged, crevasse-slashed icecap. Parunak and Balchen, in a PBY flying boat, surveyed for six days, drop ping sleeping bags and food, never daring a landing. The stranded men watched and bit chapped lips. On the seventh day they saw the flying boat swoop low and disappear into the snow. Pilot Parunak had found a "dimple" of water filling an ice valley twelve miles away, had chanced a landing on this temporary lake. He set Balchen's rescue party ashore, then took off again to direct them to the Fortress. The rescue party fought its way on skis through a heavy storm, reached the Fortress after two days, got the crew back to the lake. Pilot Parunak landed again, picked them up. It was just in time. Next day the shifting icecap swallowed up the lake.

As Balchen and Parunak rested from this exploit, an Army patrol plane, with two men aboard, flopped down in a glacier canyon. One man was badly injured; there was no time for a two weeks' overland rescue. Four miles away was a lake. Its milky waters concealed rocks that could spell doom for a landing plane, but Pilot Parunak set his flying boat down, somehow, anyway. While Balchen and his rescue party trudged to the stranded patrol plane, Pilot Parunak sat up all night kicking icebergs away from his PBY. After this rescue, Parunak and Balchen gave themselves a name: "Greenland Cooperative Salvage Co."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.