I heard this story many, many years back when I was flying S-2s in the Canadian military. This was back in the days before GPS, and when IRS had spining gyros and gimbles - no fancy ring laser gryo stuff.
There was a CP-140 Aurora on a northern patrol, way up north, close to the North Pole. Some bright guy suggested it might be neat to fly right over the North Pole. The crew commander agrees this is right fine idea, so one of the navigators gives the pilots vectors to try to get right over the NP. First pass, and the head nav stated that they had missed by a tiny bit. Second pass, same story. Third pass, and they nailed it, and all the gimbles line up and they toppled all three IRS. All the nav systems and heading references gone. Every direction is south, but some of the souths are a better choice than the others.
They climb, hoping to get on top of the cloud to spy the sun. The cloud goes up higher than they can climb. No radio navaids in range. Crew crapping bricks. Finally one of the navs, running the radar in ground mapping mode thinks he recognizes some of the Artic Islands, and they roll those dice and start heading towards what they hope is Canada. Finally they get far enough south that the ADF picks up an NDB in northern Canada and all ends well. The beer tasted especially good that night.