United States Army

The United States Army is the force that turns the search for a long-buried aircraft on Vatnajökull Glacier into a secret military recovery operation. Across two searches separated by decades, its personnel confront the glacier’s physical dangers while attempting to control access to the wreck and suppress what it reveals: an American general and pilot among the dead, and a cargo whose history implicates Nazi Germany in the plunder of Jewish victims.

Military Presence and the Earlier Search

In the wartime aftermath, Major General Cortlandt Parker, commander of the U.S. occupying force in Iceland, assigned Robert Miller two hundred men for a search after a plane was reported near Vatnajökull. The mission was personal for Miller, whose brother was the missing pilot, but it depended on military resources and operated within the occupying force’s presence in Iceland.

The search was shaped by conditions the unit could not control. A storm prevented air travel, while rivers and glacial outwash plains made the southern route to Höfn impassable. The convoy took the difficult northern road, digging vehicles out of drifts as high as a man’s head before reaching Höfn on the fourth day. Local brothers guided the soldiers toward the glacier, lent them horses, and helped them search; Miller and the brothers became friends.

The soldiers divided the ice into sections and probed the snow with slender three-metre poles. Their methodical effort found only the aircraft’s nose wheel. The glacier had concealed every other fragment and trace, leaving the search unsuccessful and Miller without his brother’s body. The episode establishes both the Army’s capacity to organize a large expedition and the limits imposed by the landscape.

The Covert Recovery on Vatnajökull

In the later operation, soldiers used pickaxes to break the glacier’s hard surface and oxyacetylene blowtorches to cut the aircraft apart. The plan was to load the sections onto pallets, tow them to waiting trucks, and carry them west to Keflavík Airport. Winter darkness and the absence of ordinary traffic helped conceal the work, while a forecast storm was initially expected to pass quickly.

The recovery exposed evidence that made the wreck more than an aircraft to be removed. A body in German officer’s uniform lay beside the fuselage, its hands crossed over its chest and its face covered by a cap frozen to it. Inside, Ratoff found two more bodies, including a man in the uniform of a two-star American general, with a locked aluminum briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. In the tail were three further corpses, one dressed as an American fighter pilot. The bodies’ bluish-white skin had been preserved by the ice; crude splints and the positions of the dead suggested that some passengers had survived the crash and that others had tried to care for them. Six bodies had been located, although the briefing had indicated seven.

As work continued, the aircraft’s front section bent and broke in half under its own weight. Ratoff ordered the severed section prepared for removal and barred anyone from entering without his permission. Four Delta Force officers guarded the cabin while he inspected it. The Army’s recovery effort thus involved not only cutting and hauling the wreck, but also tightly controlling who could see the evidence inside it.

Secrecy, Force, and Public Accounts

The operation’s secrecy extended beyond the wreck site. At an emergency meeting with Icelandic ministers, an American admiral insisted that nothing discussed leave the room. The Americans invoked the defence treaty and their monitoring of Iceland’s borders, including surveillance of a section of Vatnajökull. When the Icelandic prime minister threatened a formal protest, a public investigation, road closures, and a national address, a general warned that an old German bomb lay on the glacier and that the rescue team was in danger. The bomb claim served as an urgent reason to call Icelandic rescuers back.

That explanation sat uneasily beside the assurances given to American transport pilots. When a pilot asked to inspect the aircraft before carrying it, an officer told him there was no bomb in the plane, that the German aircraft was safe, and that no Nazi bomb had been found. The incompatible statements make the operation’s explanations part of its security apparatus: danger is asserted to influence Icelandic authorities, then denied to secure the cooperation of personnel tasked with moving the wreck.

The Army also physically blocked the Reykjavík Air-Ground Rescue Team. Soldiers confiscated the rescuers’ radios, flares, and mobile phones, searched their people and vehicles, and prevented them from advancing. The standoff remained armed and precarious; the rescuers were careful not to provoke soldiers with rifles. Júlíus eventually slipped away from the guarded vehicles under cover of darkness to seek help. In a later account, he told Kristín that the Americans had shot at the team and that the press had published photographs of its bullet-riddled vehicle.

After the rescuers were released, American spokesmen apologized and described the gunfire as an overreaction during winter exercises involving Dutch and Belgian NATO forces. They promised an inquiry and compensation, while denying knowledge of Elías and Jóhann’s fate and of Kristín. The Army’s public accounts of the aircraft were similarly inconsistent: reports variously described a search for lost satellite-tracking equipment, a staged rescue exercise using pieces of an old DC-8, or a hunt for lost gold reserves. The changing stories obscure both the aircraft’s presence and the reason for the military effort.

The Cargo and the Meaning of the Operation

The secret cargo acquires a political and moral history in Carr’s explanation of the Walchensee gold. He recounts that, shortly before the fall of Berlin, more than three hundred small bags containing gold bars were sent toward the Alps from the Reichsbank on Hitler’s personal orders; this was the Third Reich’s last remaining gold reserve. When the secretary asks about its origin, Carr says that most of the gold had been acquired from concentration camps. The discovery makes the possibility that the plane carried Jewish gold a question of responsibility as well as military secrecy.

The Army’s role is therefore defined by a clash between recovery and accountability. Its equipment and personnel make it possible to reach, cut apart, and transport an aircraft the earlier search could not find. But the same operation relies on restricted access, conflicting danger claims, armed obstruction, and denials to keep Icelandic rescuers and the public from learning what the wreck contains. The glacier preserves the evidence through decades of concealment; the Army’s attempt to remove the wreck turns that buried history into a present conflict over who may see it and whose account will prevail.