The White Falcon - 08.09.2004, Page 4

Steven Memovich stands in front of two damaged propellers recovered from the crash site.
Memovich returned almost 60 years to the day of the crash.
On Sept. 16, 1944, with World War II still rag-
ing across Europe and the Pacific, ten men climbed
into their B-17 bomber and left Keflavik, Iceland
for their assigned air base in England. The crew,
part of the U.S. Army Air Forces, was fresh out of
training school and on its way to help support the
war effort. They made a routine stop in Keflavik to
refuel the plane. Less than an hour after takeoff, the
plane crashed onto a glacier. All ten men survived.
Now, almost 60 years later, one of the survivors of
that day’s event recently returned to Iceland to visit
the crash site.
Steven Memovich, now almost 80 years old and
living in Vancouver, Washington, was the plane’s
navigator on that ill-fated trip. It was his first long-
distance flight.
For 47 years the plane and the crash site remained
buried on Iceland’s Eyjaljallajokull Glacier. In 1991,
however, the site was discovered by a shepherd
named Arni AlfreSsson. The glacier had begun to
recede, revealing what had been lost all those years
ago. AlfreSsson obtained Memovich’s name from
the U.S. Army Air Forces records and contacted
him.
“Ami has been in contact with us for five or six
years and he kept wanting us to come over and visit
so he could meet us,” said Memovich. “We’ve had
several calls over the years, people wanting to get in
contact with us. I think Ami was the most persistent
and he was the one that had done most of the work
of locating the crash site.”
Memovich said his wife and kids wanted to see
where it happened.
“We just decided, I guess, that if we were ever
going to make the trip, we had to make it now,” said
Memovich.
In May, while he was deciding on making the trip,
Memovich received a letter in the mail from Iceland.
The writer was Sigurdur Gudmundsson. While
AlfreSsson had found the crash site, Gudmundsson
had discovered something more personal to
Memovich out there on the glacier- a bracelet that
had been given to Memovich by his wife, a bracelet
lost in the crash almost 60 years before.
In his letter Gudmundsson said his curiosity and
interest in mountain climbing motivated him to
climb to the crash site.
“We found interesting pieces from the plane and
so did Mr. Alfredsson,” Gudmundsson wrote. “The
bracelet was the one thing I could identify.”
With his bracelet found and returned and
Alfredsson’s persistence, Memovich, his wife, and
their three daughters and one son arrived in Keflavik
on August 24 and traveled to the crash site on August
27.
“Ami got in touch with us and said we needed to be
over here for at least a week because if the weather
was bad we couldn’t go up,” said Memovich.
Alfredsson is part of a search and rescue team and
he arranged for Memovich and his family to go up
to the glacier.
“The search and rescue unit took us
up to the crash site,” said Memovich.
“Ami’s group that he works with in
the search and rescue are wonderful
people.”
The unit took Memovich and his
children up to the crash site using
snowcats and jeeps. Memovich’s
wife, Marilyn, did not go. They spent
the day up at the crash site, looking at
the artifacts left behind and revealed
by the receding glacier. They also
saw the house where the crew made
the telephone call for help after com-
ing down from the glacier. The place
where they spent the night is now a
youth hostel.
“It was a very interesting trip,” said
Memovich. “The more I looked at it,
the more I realized what a miracle it
was for a bomber loaded with avia-
tion gas to crash, 10 people in it, nobody really even
seriously hurt. Ami says where we came down off
the glacier was the only possible way we could get
down.”
Memovich said he had an angel looking over his
shoulder that day. Nothing could have prepared the
crew for the events that took place. In their training
prior to the journey to England, Memovich said if
the weather was bad, they didn’t fly. The weather
in Iceland that day was bad and there was no visibil-
ity. Memovich said he doesn’t remember why they
decided to leave, but they did.
Less than an hour into their trip, they crashed.
“There was no warning,” said Memovich. “We
were flying and we had a severe downdraft that
dropped us about 1,000-1,500 feet. Apparently, the
copilot right after the downdraft looked out his win-
dow and just caught a glimpse. He said, ‘There’s a
mountain there.’ We weren’t even thinking about
it. We thought we were higher, we thought we were
over the coastline.”
Memovich said the plane hit the top of the glacier
and skidded, breaking off one of the wings in the
process.
“The body stayed fairly good,” said Memovich.
“The wing and engine caught fire and we thought
it might explode with all that aviation gas. We all
got out of the wreck. We sheltered ourselves with
a parachute behind'a rock close by and waited to
see what was going to happen. When the fire went
out we went back and got in the belly of the plane
and made it as weatherproof as we could by stuffing
clothes in the cracks. We got out the Gibson Girl,
the emergency radio, and assigned shifts and cranked
that thing 24 hours a day for two days.”
Memovich said the thing that prompted them to get
out of there was on the first night he saw a couple
of lights flickering in the valley below where they
were on the glacier. He shot off a couple of flares
in hopes of getting someone’s attention. Memovich
said a few people living in the area saw the flares but
assumed it was some kind of military operation that
was none of their business. When it became appar-
ent that nobody was coming for them, the crew tied
themselves together with parachute cord and, with
Memovich in the lead, made their way down the gla-
cier to the house where they made a call for help.
They spent the next two weeks in the hospital
recovering from exposure. Memovich said he sent
Marilyn a telegram and said everything was well
and for her not to worry. He wrote nothing about
the crash. He assumed she already knew, but she
didn’t.
“I wasn’t notified at all by the government,” said
Marilyn. “My first word was from the bombadeer’s
wife. She sent me the front page of a letter talking
about something that had happened and I hadn’t
heard a thing about it.”
Sixty years later AlfreSsson and his crew are work-
ing on bringing the plane down from
the glacier even though the plane is
in pieces.
“Nothing is intact,” said Gregg
Memovich, Steven’s son. “It has slid
down the glacier. It got buried in the
glacier and then moved down with it
over the 60 years and then came out
of the bottom of the snowcap area.”
Which is how AlfreSsson came to
find it.
On this trip AlfreSsson gave
Memovich a few souvenirs from the
crash site to take with him, includ-
ing a toothbrush, a can of processed
American cheese with bacon, and a
can of beef and pork.
Memovich, one of only four crew-
members still alive, said he was glad
he came back to Iceland and that he
and his family enjoyed the trip.
Although the return of Memovich’s bracelet
prompted local interest both in his hometown and in
Iceland about his story, Memovich said the bracelet
didn’t make the difference in his decision to come
back.
“The kids wanted to come,” said Memovich. “And
my wife was very interested.”
Memovich has no plans to return to Iceland, but his
kids hope to someday return with their own families.
And although Marilyn did not make it up to the crash
site she said the trip was wonderful.
“I will remember the people,” said Marilyn. “The
people have been absolutely wonderful.”
Page 4
The White Falcon
September 8, 2004