Today in history: December 5

Ice, fog and an enduring mystery…

This week’s little stories from contemporary historical sources…

Into the ice, 1914

In August 1914, as Europe slid into war, Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton sailed from Plymouth with Endurance and 27 men, aiming to make the first land crossing of Antarctica. By early December, the Endurance lay at the whaling station of Grytviken, South Georgia, the last outpost of civilisation before the Antarctic ice. Shackleton had brought his ship down from Buenos Aires and spent about a month refitting, training the dogs and taking in coal, while whaling captains warned him that the pack ice that season lay unusually far north and would be hard to penetrate.

His original plan had been to try the trans-Antarctic crossing in the first summer (1914–15), but by the time he was ready to sail from South Georgia he had already decided this was unrealistic. In his later account South (1919, based heavily on his diaries), he wrote: “It seemed to me hopeless now to think of making the journey across the continent in the first summer, as the season was far advanced and the ice conditions were likely to prove unfavourable.”

South goes on to capture the moment Endurance cut her last tie to land and headed into what they all hoped would be just another hard polar season – and what would in fact become a 20-month survival epic. Shackleton recalled:

The day of departure arrived. I gave the order to heave anchor at 8.45 a.m. on December 5, 1914, and the clanking of the windlass broke for us the last link with civilization. The morning was dull and overcast, with occasional gusts of snow and sleet, but hearts were light aboard the Endurance. The long days of preparation were over and the adventure lay ahead.

We had hoped that some steamer from the north would bring news of war and perhaps letters from home before our departure. A ship did arrive on the evening of the 4th, but she carried no letters, and nothing useful in the way of information could be gleaned from her. The captain and crew were all stoutly pro-German, and the “news” they had to give took the unsatisfying form of accounts of British and French reverses. We would have been glad to have had the latest tidings from a friendlier source. A year and a half later we were to learn that the Harpoon, the steamer which tends the Grytviken station, had arrived with mail for us not more than two hours after the Endurance had proceeded down the coast.

The bows of the Endurance were turned to the south, and the good ship dipped to the south-westerly swell. Misty rain fell during the forenoon, but the weather cleared later in the day, and we had a good view of the coast of South Georgia as we moved under steam and sail to the south-east. The course was laid to carry us clear of the island and then south of South Thule, Sandwich Group. The wind freshened during the day, and all square sail was set, with the foresail reefed in order to give the look-out a clear view ahead; for we did not wish to risk contact with a “growler,” one of those treacherous fragments of ice that float with surface awash. The ship was very steady in the quarterly sea, but certainly did not look as neat and trim as she had done when leaving the shores of England four months earlier. We had filled up with coal at Grytviken, and this extra fuel was stored on deck, where it impeded movement considerably. The carpenter had built a false deck, extending from the poop-deck to the chart-room. We had also taken aboard a ton of whale-meat for the dogs. The big chunks of meat were hung up in the rigging, out of reach but not out of sight of the dogs, and as the Endurance rolled and pitched, they watched with wolfish eyes for a windfall.

After a good start, the next night “the situation became dangerous”. By December 7–11 the ship was edging through gaps in a belt of ice. This early “tussle with the pack” was only a foretaste. Through late December and into January 1915, the ice closed in; by mid-January the Endurance was firmly beset in the Weddell Sea pack, unable to break free, and drifted helplessly for months before the pressure finally destroyed her on 27 October 1915. The open-boat journey to Elephant Island and Shackleton’s dash to South Georgia to bring rescue are stories for another time.

Into the unknown, 1945

On December 5, 1945, five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers – Flight 19 – took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a routine over-water navigation exercise. They became disoriented, reported compass problems… and vanished over the Atlantic with 14 airmen aboard. A PBM Mariner sent to search for them also disappeared with 13 men, helping to seed later legends of the ‘Bermuda Triangle’.

Radio transcripts from Flight 19 survive, and capture the growing confusion. For example, less than two hours after departure, bomber FT28 reported:

Both my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land, but it’s broken. I’m sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.

A couple of hours on, at 18.06, they said:

I suggest we fly due east until we run out of gas. We have a better chance of being picked up close to shore. If we were near land we should be able to see a light or something. Are you listening? We may just as well turn around and go east again.

The last brief message came half an hour later… and then silence.

In the immediate aftermath, the US Navy convened a Board of Investigation at NAS Jacksonville. One of the most vivid sections of its findings records a report from the tanker SS Gaines Mills, which saw what was almost certainly the mid-air explosion of the PBM search plane:

At 0050 G. M. T. observed burst of flames, apparently explosion, leaping flames 100 feet high burning ten minutes. Position 28 degrees, 59 minutes north, 80 degrees 25 minutes west. At present, passing through big pool of oil at 0119 G. M. T. Stopped, circled area using search lights, looking for survivors. None found.

The report ended forlornly: “search operations… by surface and aircraft in the area of the reported explosion failed to reveal any debris of the missing PBM or evidence of its crew.”

The Board originally leaned toward pilot error by the instructor, Lt. Charles Taylor, who likely mistook the Bahamas for the Florida Keys and repeatedly turned his flight back out to sea. Later, to avoid explicitly blaming him with no wreckage recovered, the official conclusion was amended to “cause unknown”.

In the 1960s and 1970s, writers folded Flight 19 into the emerging Bermuda Triangle mythology. But when you read the investigation report and radio transcripts, the story feels less paranormal and more like an intensely human tragedy of navigation training, fading daylight, messy radio procedures and deteriorating weather.

Into the fog, 1952

For a few days from December 5, 1952, a dense, yellowish smog – caused by a temperature inversion, increased winter coal burning and industrial emissions – settled over London. Visibility in some areas dropped to a few metres; buses crawled with conductors walking in front carrying lamps; some theatres and cinemas had smog drifting inside. Within days, deaths from respiratory failure and heart problems soared.

Only a few weeks after the ‘Great Smog’, Dr John A. Scott, medical officer of health to the London County Council issued a report to the Public Health Committee, recording the dry facts:

During the first half of December 1952. the London area experienced periods of fog, one of which was of an intensity rarely reached in recent times. This fog was widespread and persisted for a considerable continuous period, from December 5 through December 8.

Its onset was determined by the meteorological factors of almost complete absence of wind or air movement and low temperature, which produced what is technically described as an ‘inversion’ whereby the normal upward air circulation by convection currents was arrested. Hence at ground level and for many feet above, there was no air movement, and smoke, sulfur oxides, and other air contaminants increased to concentrations much above those normal for the winter season…

Of course, many people experienced these events. Here’s one eyewitness reminiscence from Sir Donald Acheson, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer 1983–91, who at the time was a resident medical officer at the Middlesex Hospital in Central London:

…at its worst it had the effect of completely disorientating me in a part of London I knew well, so that I lost my way on a minor errand from the Middlesex Hospital to Oxford Street, 400 yards away. To get my bearings and to discover where I was, I had to creep on the pavement along the walls of the buildings, to the next corner, to read the name of the street. I do not recall any smell, but I do remember an eerie silence as there was little or no traffic. Visibility was less than three metres, and it was bitterly cold.

As far as the hospital itself was concerned, somehow, although I find this difficult to understand, sufficient ambulances got to us to deliver patients to take up every available bed. The fog itself swirled into the wards, and seemed to consist principally of smuts, so that the wash basins and baths turned darker and darker grey, until it was possible literally to write one’s name on them which I actually did. I don’t recall a smell of SO₂… As I remember the patients themselves, the clinical picture I have in my mind’s eye is of middle-aged and elderly people, principally men, gasping for breath…

Within a few days patients with acute respiratory distress spilled over into all wards, regardless of the specialty or gender. In other words, they were in the surgical wards, and even in the obstetric wards, and as the majority were men, room had to be found in some of the women’s wards. I remember also that the supply of oxygen was stretched to the limit.¹

Initial official estimates suggested about 4,000 “excess deaths” from the smog; later analyses have pushed that figure to 10,000–12,000. Public pressure, scientific investigations like Scott’s and a Ministry of Health committee report fed into debates in Parliament that culminated in the Clean Air Act 1956, which introduced smokeless zones and restrictions on domestic coal burning.

1. From: The Big Smoke: Fifty years after the 1952 London Smog (eds V. Berridge & S. Taylor, Centre for History in Public Health, 2002). Online here.