U.S. forces prepare to airlift the glacier aircraft wreckage

The attempted airlift of the glacier aircraft wreckage turns a covert salvage operation into a struggle to control both the wreck and the people who witness its removal. Ratoff’s plan is to cut the plane into sections and fly them to Keflavík Airport, but the bodies preserved in the ice make the wreck more than cargo—and the secrecy surrounding it demands increasingly coercive measures.

Preparation and Discovery

At around –15°C, with a storm expected to pass quickly, the work initially proceeds on schedule. Some soldiers use pickaxes to break the hard surface around the plane; others cut through its metal with oxyacetylene blowtorches. The sections are intended for pallets and a journey west to Keflavík Airport. Winter darkness and the area’s lack of traffic help shield the operation, even as the cold and changeable weather complicate work on the glacier.

The plan changes in significance when soldiers digging near the fuselage uncover a leg in a black army boot. Ratoff orders them to expose the body: it is dressed as a high-ranking German officer, with an Iron Cross at its neck, its hands crossed over its breast and its face hidden beneath a cap frozen to the skin. One leg is missing, torn away at the hip. The body’s placement beside the plane suggests that at least some passengers survived the crash long enough to move or tend to those killed on impact. Ratoff orders the corpse taken to a tent, considering how quickly the survivors must have succumbed to the cold.

The aircraft itself yields further evidence as the recovery continues. When its front section breaks open under its own weight, Ratoff orders the severed portion prepared for removal and forbids anyone to enter without his permission. Inside, he finds two more bodies, including a man in a two-star U.S. general’s uniform with a locked aluminium briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. In the tail, three additional corpses lie huddled together; one is dressed as a U.S. fighter pilot, with a small American flag on his sleeve and a name embroidered on his uniform. The six bodies found so far, including the one outside, do not match the seven passengers in Ratoff’s briefing. Their presence—and the unexplained mix of German officers and Americans aboard a German plane—makes the proposed airlift a means of removing evidence as well as wreckage.

The Airlift and the Attempt to Contain Its Witnesses

With the wreck exposed and its contents already troubling Ratoff’s account of the flight, the operation resumed at full speed. Snow was cleared from one side of the Junkers, and soldiers fixed heavy slings around the front half while the other side remained buried in deep drifts. Ratoff expected two helicopters. The plan was to put the bodies back inside the cabin, seal its opening, and lift the wreckage and its contents off the glacier in a single operation. Tarpaulins might disguise the load, although Ratoff was not concerned if rumours spread: secrecy mattered less to him than controlling what could be removed and who could observe it.

The helicopters arrived at night, guided to a landing site marked by two rings of torches and four flares. Their arrival transformed the glacier into a floodlit worksite: roughly thirty tents stood in a semicircle around the plane, while vehicles, generators, floodlights, satellite dishes, and personnel filled the ice. The wreck had been cut in half, and plastic sheeting covered the open cabin. Beneath the cockpit, the swastika remained visible; flaking camouflage exposed gunmetal grey beneath. The crews had been summoned without an explanation, ordered to carry heavy equipment to a C-17 transport plane waiting at Keflavík Airport, and told to ask no questions.

Ratoff gave the pilots only the bare outline of the task: they were to carry an old plane from the glacier to Keflavík, with one half assigned to each helicopter. He called it a souvenir and advised the crews to remain in their tent to preserve their plausible deniability. When a pilot questioned why they could not watch, Ratoff made the limits of their choice explicit: he ordered soldiers to shoot anyone who tried to leave. The men who had come to fly the helicopters were now confined by their own side, left baffled about the wreck and the purpose of their mission. The airlift’s secrecy therefore depended not only on concealing the aircraft from outsiders but on preventing even its assigned crews from seeing too much.

By Sunday, 31 January, Kristín and Steve were brought to the camp as it began to dismantle itself. From their guarded tent they could see the two Pave Hawks and the plane lying cut in half in a shallow hollow, with thick slings being fastened around each section. Tents were coming down; the vehicles and equipment that had made the glacier a temporary base were being cleared away. The scene made the intended sequence plain: the wreck would be removed, and the snow would soon erase the tracks of the people who had taken it.

The guards’ attention shifted to the commotion outside, giving Kristín and Steve a chance to examine a grey body bag partly hidden under a tarpaulin. Kristín drew the canvas aside with her foot and saw a peaked cap bearing an eagle and swastika, then the pale face of a middle-aged man. The discovery brought the bodies back into the foreground just as the operation was preparing to move the wreck: whatever the airlift removed, the dead remained evidence of what the glacier had preserved.

The Extraction Under Pressure

The airlift was prepared as a swift removal, but the camp’s apparent order concealed a race against discovery. As the slings were fixed to the wreck, radar showed a cluster of slow-moving contacts descending toward the glacier; the rescue team was on its way. Ratoff nevertheless continued with the plan, relying on darkness, distance, and the camp’s rapid dismantling to get the aircraft off the ice before outsiders could interfere.

The helicopters’ arrival made the secret operation spectacularly visible. Four flares hung over the landing site, and the Pave Hawks settled among the tents in clouds of blown snow. Their crews had been told only to collect heavy equipment and fly it to the C-17 waiting at Keflavík Airport. They had not been told that the cargo was a German aircraft bearing a swastika, much less what lay inside it. The airlift thus depended on a contradiction: the wreck had to be exposed to the crews who would carry it away, yet those same men were denied the right to see or ask what they were handling. By the time Kristín and Steve reached the camp, the operation was visibly close to departure, but the discovery beneath the tarpaulin showed that the effort to clear the glacier had not made its history disappear.

What the Ice Preserved

The bodies offered clues, but not a complete account of the crash. The first corpse, found beside the fuselage, wore the uniform of a high-ranking German officer, though Ratoff could not identify its insignia. Its hands had been crossed over its breast, and a cap was frozen over its face; the missing leg and exposed bone made the violence of its injuries unmistakable. Its deliberate-looking position suggested that survivors had moved or tended to the dead, but the scene could not establish who had placed it there or why.

Inside the cabin, preservation made the dead seem arrested rather than decomposed. Their exposed skin was bluish-white, taut and firm, and the ice had kept it intact. One man had a gaping head wound consistent with death during the landing; another looked uninjured, leaving Ratoff to infer that his fatal injuries were internal. Heavy clothing—a pair of overcoats and a fur hat—had not protected him from the cold. In the tail, crude splints on two bodies’ legs suggested attempts to treat injuries after the crash, while three men huddled together as if trying to share warmth in their final hours.

These details complicated any simple picture of the wreck as a sealed historical scene: bodies had been moved, injuries tended, and survivors had apparently endured for some time, yet the evidence did not reveal the missing passenger or explain why German officers and Americans had travelled together. Ratoff’s order to put the bodies back inside before sealing the cabin made the recovery itself part of the concealment. The ice had preserved physical traces of the past; the planned airlift threatened to carry those traces away before they could be understood.