U.S. forces recover the aircraft wreckage from Vatnajökull

The U.S. military recovery of the aircraft from Vatnajökull turns a concealed wreck into a contested, physical cargo: the plane is cut apart on the glacier and flown toward Keflavík while its preserved dead reveal that the crash carried a more complicated history than the operation’s briefing suggested.

Work on the Glacier

The recovery proceeds under winter conditions that help conceal it as much as they hinder it. At around –15°C, soldiers use pickaxes to break the hard surface while others cut the Junkers Ju 52 apart with powerful blowtorches. The sections are to be placed on pallets and hauled west to waiting trucks for transport to Keflavík Airport. Ratoff watches the blue flare and sparks from the communications tent, judging the work on schedule despite a forecast storm. Darkness and the season’s lack of local traffic also help shield the activity.

The excavation exposes more than aircraft. Soldiers digging beside the fuselage find a leg in a black army boot and grey trousers, then uncover the rest of a corpse. The man wears a German officer’s uniform and an Iron Cross; his hands are crossed over his chest and a cap is frozen over his face. One leg has been torn away at the hip. Ratoff reads the body’s placement as evidence that some passengers survived the crash and moved the dead, but the winter cold makes survival unlikely to have lasted long: even the specially equipped, trained recovery team feels it through its Arctic gear.

As work continues, the plane’s front section bends and breaks in half under its own weight, crashing onto the ice while the tail remains partly embedded. Ratoff orders the severed section prepared for removal and forbids entry without his permission. Inside, in the first passenger cabin in more than half a century, he finds two more bodies lying close together. One wears a German army uniform; the other, unexpectedly, is a two-star American general, with a locked aluminium briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The ice has left their skin bluish-white but without visible decay. Their different wounds and clothing suggest distinct circumstances of death, though Ratoff cannot establish exactly what happened to them.

The tail section holds three further bodies huddled together, bringing the total found to six, including the man outside the plane; Ratoff’s briefing had specified seven. Among the dead is another American, apparently a young fighter pilot in a World War II leather jacket, with an American flag on its sleeve and his name sewn onto his uniform. He lies among German officers aboard a German aircraft painted in American camouflage. The bodies thus make the wreck itself a source of unanswered questions, not simply cargo to be removed. Later, Kristín and Steve glimpse a grey body bag in a tent, its open zip revealing a capped, pallid corpse, another sign that the recovery site contains human remains as well as the aircraft.

Interdiction and Airlift

The recovery operation also became a confrontation with the Icelandic rescue team. After stopping the rescuers, the American soldiers took their radios, flares, and mobile phones, searched people and vehicles, and held their position beside the snowmobiles. The team was left unable to proceed or communicate, while the soldiers’ rifles made the cost of resistance plain.

Júlíus slipped away from the standoff by crawling under a vehicle and then moving between snowmobiles into the darkness. He was driven both by anger at the soldiers’ intrusion into Icelandic territory and by fear for Kristín, who was relying on him to witness the military operation. He ran roughly three kilometres toward the glow over the camp. From a rise, he saw two Pave Hawk helicopters, the two halves of the plane under tarpaulins, and soldiers moving through the site. He also saw Kristín taken into a tent and a man roughly frogmarched in after her. Before he could reach them, three armed soldiers found him; they had tracked his approach on radar and directed him toward the camp at gunpoint.

As the recovery reached its final stage, one helicopter lifted the fuselage section with Ratoff aboard. The steel cables tightened, and the wreck shifted inch by inch from the ice, swinging in the floodlights as the helicopter turned west and disappeared into darkness. When an officer returned to the tent, Júlíus was gone. Júlíus cut through the canvas of the tent where he had seen Kristín taken and found a man facedown with a fatal-looking wound to the back of his head and a young woman lying unconscious nearby. He could only assume that they were Kristín and Steve; the scene offered no time for confirmation before the extraction continued.

The lift was precarious. On 31 January, the helicopter carrying the aircraft nearly failed to raise its load, and for a moment the half-section seemed about to fall back onto the glacier. Ratoff watched from the hold as the Pave Hawk climbed slowly, paused under the Junkers’ weight, and finally freed the fuselage from the ice. At five thousand feet, the front section hung beneath three thick steel cables; the tail, which still contained the bodies, was to be carried by the second helicopter. Both sections had been removed with their contents untouched, and their openings were sealed with heavy-duty plastic sheeting. Ratoff considered the mission largely successful despite the disruption caused by Kristín and the rescue team.

The helicopters reached Keflavík Airport ten minutes apart. Each half of the aircraft was lowered onto a special pallet and rolled into a C-17, whose hold carried no other cargo. Loading the Junkers took less than half an hour. The Delta Force operators and their equipment were to return separately, while the C-17 was scheduled to carry the wreck across the Atlantic; with the Icelandic stage of the operation ending, the removal turned the glacier’s hidden remains into a shipment bound for elsewhere.

The Transfer Beyond Iceland

At Keflavík, the aircraft became the C-17’s sole cargo. The transport plane’s hold was half the size of a football pitch, yet the two sections of the Junkers looked small inside it; the loading took less than half an hour. The air force called the C-17 the Keiko plane, after the killer whale that had recently been flown to Iceland from Newport, Oregon. For this mission the aircraft had refuelled in mid-air, a measure intended to save time and spare discomfort to its unusual passenger, the wreck itself.

The plan extended well beyond the glacier: after the C-17 carried the aircraft across the Atlantic, the flight would continue halfway around the world. The Delta Force operators, their equipment and vehicles were not travelling with Ratoff; they were due to return to the base over the following fifteen hours, and the C-17 would make another journey to collect them. The recovery thus ended its Icelandic phase not with the wreck restored to public view, but with its divided, sealed sections inside a dedicated military transport, moving toward a destination outside Iceland.

What the Remains Could Establish

The bodies preserved traces of events the recovery team could observe but not fully reconstruct. The officer found beside the fuselage had his hands crossed over his chest, an Iron Cross at his neck and a cap frozen to his face; his missing leg had been torn away at the hip, leaving exposed bone. Ratoff took the body’s deliberate-looking placement as evidence that someone had survived the crash long enough to tend to the dead. Yet he could only estimate how brief that survival was: the passengers lacked the Arctic clothing, gas lamps and cold-weather training that helped the recovery team endure the glacier.

Inside the fuselage, the contrasts among the dead further resisted a simple account. One body had a gaping head wound consistent with death during the landing, while another looked largely uninjured but had apparently died from internal injuries; he wore two overcoats and a fur hat, which had not saved him from the cold. In the tail, crude splints on two bodies suggested attempts to treat injuries, while three men huddled together in what Ratoff read as an effort to share warmth. These details support signs of care and desperate endurance, but they do not explain the passengers’ identities, the missing seventh person in Ratoff’s briefing, or why an American general and a young American pilot were among the dead aboard the German aircraft. The ice had preserved the evidence without making its history transparent.