Each corpse, or body part, was numbered according to who had found the victim and where they were found. Mitchell instituted an efficient system, dividing the crash site into a grid. His biggest dilemmas were how they would cope with the sudden winds that hurled bits of metallic debris like missiles across the site, how they would avoid falling into the numerous fissures in the ice and how they would be able to recover 257 corpses, bag them up and return them to the New Zealand mortuary to be identified before the ice runway at the McMurdo base camp melted. “The bodies didn’t bother me a great deal because it goes with the territory,” he said. The team leader’s main concern was not the sight of corpses scattered across the glacier, but his team’s safety. I personally felt a little bit out of my depth. Leighton recalls: “There was a lot of mutilation with a lot of the bodies. We just knew it would be dangerous.”Įven for the experienced policemen, the scale and the freezing temperatures were something they had never encountered. Leighton says in the film: “We had no idea what Antarctica would throw at us. Stuart Leighton was just 22 at the time, and Mitchell says that, in retrospect, he was probably too young to be part of the mission. While Mitchell comes across as a level-headed leader, many of his team were overwhelmed by the scenes of death and destruction they encountered. I suppose I was crazy.” His mission, and the tales of his team, are recounted in a riveting new documentary film Erebus: Into the Unknown, released this week, which splices their memories with dramatic recreations of the fortnight they spent on the glacier. “It was an opportunity to put into practice all that we had learnt. “I was quite keen to go,” he says, speaking from his flat in Kent, having retired to Britain a few years ago. Mitchell had just a few hours to gather a small team of policeman together, collect some cold weather kit from a Polar expedition base, and fly to Antarctica on a Hercules. The plane was an Air New Zealand DC10 and the great majority of the passengers were Kiwis. The fact that the plane had crashed 2,500 miles away in one of the most inhospitable areas on the planet was not relevant. In New Zealand, search, rescue and recovery of bodies is a police job.
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