generalspeaking

Tuesday, July 02, 2019

Once Upon A Wartime

"When relations are good, we talk about this [the American Lend-Lease program with the USSR following World War II]."
"[And when American-Russian relations deteriorate], everybody goes silent."
Vyachesiav V. Filippov, Russian historian

"Even today, I get the shivers whenever I hear the word Douglas."
"I cried. I saw that silver bird, lying on the ground, with its wings still spread."
"I had the feeling his hands were still on the instruments. I had the feeling he was nearby, somewhere. He loved flying."
Avelina M. Antsifyerova, 78, daughter of Airplane pilot Maksim D. Tyurikov

An American-made Douglas C-47 in Siberia, Russia, in 2007. The plane landed there in 1947.

Credit Collection of Vyacheslav V. Filippov, via Russian Geographical Society

In 1947 Maksim D. Tyurikov piloted a C-47 passenger plane over Siberia, when he experienced problems and was forced to land the plane on the frozen tundra, and amazingly succeeded without much damage to the plane, let alone to its estimated 25 to 32 passengers and crew. The plane was almost intact though no longer flight-worthy, and the people aboard unharmed. Unfortunately, they were marooned in a frozen, isolated geography with the closest settlement over 160 kilometers' distance away.

Pilot Tyurikov was determined that it was his duty and his alone to notify authorities of what had occurred and direct rescuers to the scene where all those that were aboard could be brought to safety. He set out on a mission to walk over the frozen landscape to reach civilization on a 150 kilometer trip. While attempting to summon help, he died in the effort. Before he left on his ill-fated trip he wrote in pencil on the inner fuselage of his intention to save the passengers.

By The New York Times

Of those aboard, six passengers and two of the crew members died when they too attempted to walk their way out of their impossible frozen dilemma. The remaining passengers huddled together in the plane, managing to survive for 19 days until help arrived. They carefully and collectively shared the emergency rations on board the plane. Those rations were comprised primarily of American-produced tins of Spam.

And while the survivors were taken out to safety, nothing was done with the downed plane. It sat there on the frozen tundra for fully seven decades. It was seen on occasion in its remote location by the occasional reindeer herder. And then, recalling its presence as the very last of the 704 Douglas transport planes produced in the United States and sent to Russia under the Lend-Lease program, the twin-engine C-47 is set to become an exhibit.

It is scheduled to be retrieved and restored to its former condition when it was a working transport plane and a symbol of good relations between the U.S.S.R. and the United States of America. The U.S.-produced Douglas airplanes, all 705 of them that were sent by the U.S. to Russia were well used. Some were shot down or crashed, while others were eventually returned to the U.S. post-war, and others yet remained in use for years in the Soviet Union.

Now the Russian Geographical Society is set to sponsor the retrieval and restoration of that plane left on the Arctic tundra so that it can be a showpiece exhibit in a museum in Krasnoyarsk, a city in Siberia some 2,200 kilometers from its crash site, a token of the American program that had millions of tons of aid -- trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, planes, tanks, fuel and food -- sent to the Soviet Union and other allies by the administration in wartime Washington.