The aging process is disarmingly robbing me of many names of the literally hundreds upon hundreds of people whose stories I’ve told during the past 50 years in journalism. It hides, as well, the details of many of the stories themselves. But Grover Cleveland Hodge has retained a permanent corner in my memory bank.

The irony is that I never met Hodge; he was from Biloxi, Mississippi, I was from Newfoundland; but, more to the point, he died in 1943, at the age of 24, multiple years before I was even born.

It was the unusual circumstances of his tragic death—the fact that it was described in his own gut-wrenching words, and the spectacular location of that death, among the exquisitely stunning mountains surrounding Saglek Bay, Labrador—that prompted my decision some 20 years ago to tell his heart-breaking story in a CBC documentary called
The Bonds of Earth.

 

Shivers of memories

Hodge was the chief pilot aboard a B-26 United States Air Force bomber flying from Greenland to Goose Bay that lost its way, ran out of fuel, and crash-landed on December 10, 1942.

None of the seven crew was even scratched in the crash that destroyed their aircraft, but, shockingly, all of them eventually perished, their incredible efforts to survive described in vivid detail in a diary kept religiously by Hodge—a diary found frozen to his body by an Inuit hunter from the nearby community of Hebron, who discovered the wreckage in early April of 1943.

The last entry was dated Feb. 3, nearly three months after the crash, and the words, as written by Hodge, can still provoke cold shivers: “Slept a solid week in bed. Today Weyrauch died after being mentally ill for several days. We are all pretty weak, but should be able to last several days.”

The diary provided the incentive for the documentary, the production of which took me, cameraman Ty Evans and sound technician Arlene Dillon first to Biloxi, where we met and interviewed Hodge’s brother Bill and sister Alma and other loved ones, and eventually to the crash site itself at Saglek Bay; both trips were raw with emotion.

 

Like a romance movie

In Mississippi, Hodge’s relatives (an immediately likeable family) opened their homes and their hearts, as they say, to this crew of Newfoundland documentary makers. All of them, this soft-spoken family of Southerners, were anxious to talk about G.C., as he was nicknamed; this was the first time, in fact, they had been asked to publicly do so.

We were told, for example, about the genesis of Hodge’s lifetime love of flying, a classic rural American anecdote about his parents paying $1.50 for the then preteen to take a brief trip with a barn-storming pilot who happened to be peddling flights near their home.

And using words that could have been lifted from an evocative movie script, Hodge’s siblings and in-laws talked of his love affair with a local girl, Verna Fern, and displayed pictures of the two of them walking on the beach and eating ice cream on a Biloxi street (again, like scenes from a romance film) shortly before Hodge left college and enlisted in the Air Force.

Amazingly, the family had in its possession the watch Hodge was wearing when he died. “It’s still ticking,” his brother Bill noted, holding it ever so gently in his hand, as if it were a spiritual relic. He also showed us an American silver dollar found in Hodge’s pocket when his body was recovered.

“People carried a silver dollar for luck back in those days,” he said, “but it obviously didn’t give G.C. any luck.”

We were also introduced to Hodge’s niece, Pam Rose, a professional singer in Tennessee, who obviously never knew her uncle. Yet, she talked of a bond between them, exemplified by a wonderful, moving song about his death in Labrador, a song we recorded in her studio and used in the documentary.

When I asked Pam what she would say to her Uncle G.C. if she ever met him in the hereafter—the Hodge family are devout Christians, and took extreme solace in the belief they would one day be reunited with Hodge—she replied: “I think I’d ask him to take me flying.” She also described her uncle as a “mentor on the other side.”

 

Visiting Saglek Bay

So it was that several months later, that we made our way to Saglek Bay, via helicopter during the last stage of the lengthy trip, flying through the magnificent, pristine terrain of the Torngat Mountains. We took the same route that Hodge took back in December of 1942. I couldn’t help but think of his last flight, and how proud he was, according to the diary, of the crash landing itself, and the fact that nobody had been hurt.

And having gotten to know Hodge through those memorable days with his relatives, and through numerous readings of his diary, it was quite the unusual experience to land at the crash site. We then walked, as respectfully as possible, as if in a graveyard, on the very piece of land where he had taken his last breath. In fact, it was surreal, standing there in this gorgeous valley, surrounded by majestic mountains, the ocean in the background. There was an ambience of safety, a cocoon of protection, the irony of which was palpable.

When the Hodge family finally had a chance some years ago to travel to Saglek Bay, Hodge’s sister Alma told me they had marveled at the grandeur of the land, but also had sadly reflected on “how much of a barrier those beautiful mountains actually were.”

A radar site had been built at the location in the 1960s, and the B-26, the entangled metal home of these airmen for the last weeks of their lives, the place where they ate their meagre portions of food (chocolates, crackers, canned meat, coffee), had played cards, and prayed for a rescue, had been plowed unceremoniously aside, with no obvious thought of solemnity, to make room for a runway.

Thus, pieces of wreckage lay strewn about, the largest being the wings, with the USAF insignia still distinguishable.

At one point we walked to a small, confined beach a couple of hundred yards away to where, two weeks after the crash, according to Hodge’s diary, the crew had hauled a rubber dingy after deciding three of the men would try and paddle their way to Goose Bay.

As I stood on the same spot where Hodge had stood, I recalled his plaintive description of watching the small boat containing his three buddies disappearing around a head of land in the distance, and his implied acknowledgement that the decision, as desperate as it appeared to be, was possibly the bomber crew’s last chance to be rescued.

The three men were never seen again.

 

No search party

And what Hodge had no way of knowing was that his superiors in Greenland had not even dispatched aircraft in search of the missing airmen—a callous order based on their conclusion that the well-being of other crews could not be put at risk. It was war time; Hodge and his men were expendable. When I interviewed him, Hodge’s brother Bill expressed a lasting bitterness about the harshness of that order.

Shockingly, the crew knew nothing about wilderness survival, and failed to take advantage of dozens of seals and other wildlife they spotted in the area early on. If only they had known this wildlife represented food that could have kept them alive until that day in April when the Inuit hunter happened upon the wreck.

That lack of knowledge of survival techniques also resulted in the crew’s delay in attempting to walk over the mountains to Hebron (a community Hodge knew to be relatively close). By the time Hodge decided to try and reach Hebron, he had been badly weakened by hunger, and was forced to return, despairingly so, to the wreck.

Amazingly, Hodge tried to remain optimistic throughout the ordeal, and even joked in his diary about the kinds of meals with families he and his men had imagined they would enjoy once they were rescued and returned to the United States.

But there’s a sense in the final entries that Hodge was becoming increasingly aware that there would be no reunion with loved ones, that the end was near—a tortuous death from starvation, punctuated, in Hodge’s observance, by a loss of sanity.

 

One more victim

There was at least one other victim in the tragedy, according to Hodge’s family: His fiancée, Verna.

When Verna was notified in 1947 that Hodge’s body was being exhumed from a military graveyard in St. John’s—all four of the bodies had been eventually buried there after the wreck was discovered—and being transported back to Biloxi, she died very suddenly.

Verna, I was told by Hodge’s relatives, had been suffering from cardiac illness, but that, in reality, the young woman died “of a broken heart.” G.C. and Verna are buried just yards apart in a Biloxi cemetery.

At Hodge’s funeral, the poem “High Flight” by former RCAF pilot John Gillespie Magee was included in the service, the words of which he would certainly have embraced:

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;”

Its final stanza reads:

“And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”