SAD SAGA OF THE KEE BIRD
“WHAT ARE YOU GUYS DOING IN GREENLAND?” ASKED A RADIO OPERATOR AT LADD FIELD NEAR FAIRBANKS, ALASKA. “We came down to shoot a few polar bears,” replied radio operator Tech. Sgt. Robert Leader, whose Boeing B-29 Superfortress had just belly-landed on a frozen lake about 700 miles from the North Pole.
It was shortly after midnight local time on Sunday, February 23, 1947, and Leader and the rest of the crew were in the middle of what turned out to be a rather long weekend.
The Cold War had begun in earnest less than a year after the end of World War II. Operating from Ladd Field, the 46th Reconnaissance Squadron was tasked with investigating Soviet offensive and defensive capabilities in northern Siberia. The United States was also racing to map the Arctic and perfect methods of navigating in polar regions.
The 46th flew its first mission from Ladd Field in August 1946, and on October 16 a B-29 took off from Ladd and flew over the North Pole for the first time. By the following year, polar overflights had become almost routine. The 46th had its fair share of more exciting routes, such as those that ran along the Arctic coast of Siberia, where crews were instructed to keep their planes just within international airspace and monitor Soviet radar to see how well they could detect U.S. aircraft. On more than one occasion, the Soviets scrambled fighters in response.
On February 20, 1947, at 2:20 in the afternoon, one of those more or less routine flights took off from Ladd Field. The B-29 making the flight (an F-13 variant modified for photoreconnaissance), serial no. 45-21768, had been dubbed the . A kee bird is—at least according to soldiers stationed in Canada
