Bishop Coudert grabbed a plate of hot food in the kitchen tent. By the time he got it to the mess tent, 120 feet away, it had frozen solid. William Griggs spilled gasoline on his clothing, it evaporated so fast that when he hurriedly peeled it off, skin came with it. No mere thermometer can convey the reality of subarctic cold the way men’s memories can.
Link to another story “William Griggs, A Most Unusual Soldier”
Captain Neuberger cracked an egg and found it full of ice crystals. Potatoes developed ribbed strips that reminded him of Italian marble. And On several mornings Bishop Coudert found ice crystals in his shaving lotion.
Neuberger described intense cold this way. “Outdoors at almost 100 degrees below the freezing point, your face feels as if it were being branded with a hot iron. Knees encased in woolen underwear quaver involuntarily. Feet tingle painfully and then become numb. One yearns for warmth…”
Clifton Monk’s breath turned to ice inside his blankets at night. And he remembered learning the hard way that, “If you touched anything metal with your bare hands, you couldn’t tear your skin loose.”
Jesse Balthazar had a unique technique for measuring the temperature. He counted the number of eyelets he could lace in his boots before his fingers could no longer hold the laces.
On December 18 Captain Parsons wrote his wife Abbie that the officers in Company F had abandoned their tent and moved into the root cellar, “a log structure 16’ X 24’ which is down in an 8-foot hole with 2 feet of dirt and rock over it.”
Fighting an implacable enemy, the regiment inevitably took casualties. In January 1943 Joseph S. Smith and K. V. Nelson headed “home” to Clearwater creek from a routine mission. About thirty miles out, their truck broke through a layer of ice and stuck fast. They had no choice but to walk.
Several miles along Nelson started falling, and finally he just couldn’t get up. Smith went on as fast as he could. When he stumbled into Clearwater Creek at 2;00 am, four soldiers set out immediately to find Nelson.
At 8:00 am they found his frozen corpse.
