The Lost Squadron: A True Story

From the d.j.: "On July 15, 1942, a squadron of six P-38 Lightnings and two B-17 Flying Fortress bombers was flying from Greenland to Iceland when they ran head-on into an Arctic blizzard. As conditions deteriorated they decided to turn back, only to then discover that the base there was socked in. Running desperately low on fuel the two bombers and six fighter planes crash-landed on the ice cap in the largest forced landing in history."

"In August of 1981, almost forty years after the aircraft were abandoned, Pat Epps and Richard Taylor and two associates arrived at the site with winter camping gear and two magnetometers. Unable to locate the planes, they concluded that Greenland's winters had buried them in perhaps as much as forty feet of snow. It wasn't until 1988, with the help of subsurface radar, that they managed to locate eight large objects beneath the ice. But the planes lay 260 feet down; and no machine in existence was capable of digging hundreds of feet into solid ice to retrieve a ten-ton airplane with a fifty-two-foot wingspan. How a determined group of people overcame astonishing odds to finally rescue one of the P-38s of the Lost Squadron and bring it home to fly the skies again is a compelling modern adventure story."