Operation Highjump

A year after the end of the war the US Navy plans a large voyage to Antarctica. Officially it is called the Antarctic Developments Project. It becomes known as Operation Highjump.

The plan calls for 13 ships and about 4,700 men. Rear Admiral Richard H. Cruzen commands the fleet. The best-known man aboard is the famous polar aviator Richard E. Byrd.

What is it all for? On November 12 Byrd says it is primarily a military mission to train naval personnel. Science comes second.

The first ships leave Norfolk on the US East Coast and San Diego on the Pacific. The aircraft carrier Philippine Sea follows on January 2.

The fleet carries everything needed in the ice: two icebreakers, two ships that serve as floating bases for flying boats, two destroyers, tankers, cargo ships and the submarine Sennet. Flying boats are aircraft that take off from and land on water. There are also helicopters, tracked vehicles and sled dogs.

Off Antarctica the fleet splits into three groups. The Central Group with the flagship Mount Olympus heads into the Ross Sea, a large bay of the continent. There it is to build a base.

The other two groups sail along the coast in opposite directions, one to the west and one to the east. Their flying boats are to photograph the rim of the continent from the air.

On December 30 the Central Group assembles at Scott Island. Beyond it the pack ice begins, a wide belt of drifting ice floes.

At 2:24 a.m. the flying boat George 1 takes off from its tender, the Pine Island. Nine men are aboard, among them Captain Henry Caldwell.

Then blowing snow sets in. Sky and ice are both white, and the pilots can no longer tell where the ground begins. The aircraft strikes the ice near Thurston Island and burns. Three men die: Maxwell Lopez, Wendell Hendersin and Frederick Williams.

Six men survive. The weather is so bad that nobody can search for them. For thirteen days they hold out in the fuselage.

On January 11 a second flying boat, George 2, sights the wreck. The survivors make their way to the coast, where a third flying boat picks them up. Pilot Ralph LeBlanc loses both legs.

The Bay of Whales is frozen over. The icebreaker Northwind cuts a harbor into the ice. Next to it the ice shelf begins, a thick slab of ice that reaches from the land out over the sea. On it the base Little America IV takes shape. It is the fourth base of that name.

By early February there are tents, a Quonset hut, three runways of packed snow and a landing strip of steel matting. Up to 300 men live here.

While unloading on the bay ice, seaman Vance Woodall of the cargo ship Yancey is killed in an accident.

He is the fourth and last man to die on the expedition.

On the carrier’s deck stand six twin-engine R4D transport planes. They are built for runways on land. A carrier deck is really too short for them.

So they are fitted with rockets that give an extra push on takeoff. The first two aircraft get off that way, with Byrd in the first. By January 30 all six are at Little America IV. None of them can return to the carrier, because they cannot land on it.

Antarctica is almost completely covered in ice. Pilot David Bunger of the Western Group sees below him something that should not exist here: hills without ice and open lakes.

A few days later he lands his flying boat on one of the lakes. The area has been called the Bunger Oasis ever since. It lies on the coast of Wilkes Land. Neuschwabenland, which becomes important in the legend later, is on the opposite side of the continent.

Two aircraft fly from Little America IV to the South Pole and back.

In all, the expedition’s aircraft bring back about 70,000 aerial photographs. Many cannot be turned into maps at first. That would require individual points on the ground to have been surveyed precisely, and those measurements are missing.

In February the weather worsens and winter comes early. Flying is possible on only five days of the month. Flight operations end on February 22, and the next day the icebreaker Burton Island leaves the base.

The six transport planes stay behind in the ice. By 1958 that part of the ice shelf has broken away. The aircraft have been lost ever since.

On the voyage home Byrd talks to reporter Lee van Atta. The Chilean newspaper El Mercurio prints the interview on March 5.

Byrd says the world is shrinking and great distances no longer protect the United States. The country must expect to be attacked by aircraft that can fly over one or both poles.

The shortest route between the United States and the Soviet Union runs over the North Pole. That would be the obvious warning. But Byrd says: over one or both poles. He does not say what is supposed to come from the South Pole.

The legend draws on two older stories. The first: in January and February 1939 a German expedition aboard the ship Schwabenland surveys a stretch of the Antarctic coast, Dronning Maud Land. It names the area Neuschwabenland and sails away again.

The second: in July and August 1945, weeks after the German surrender, two German submarines turn up in the Argentine port of Mar del Plata, U-530 and U-977. The crew of U-530 has thrown the logbook overboard. The commander does not say exactly where the boat was in the meantime.

In the records neither has anything to do with Highjump. In the legend they belong together.

An author who calls himself Raymond Bernard, and whose real name is Walter Siegmeister, publishes the book The Hollow Earth. It claims there are openings at the poles that lead into the interior of the Earth. As his chief witness he names Byrd.

Byrd can no longer object. He died in 1957.

In the mid-1970s a book by the authors Mattern and Friedrich appears. It links the Byrd interview with alleged German flying discs and a secret base in Neuschwabenland. In it Highjump becomes an attack on that base.

Behind the name Christof Friedrich is the publisher Ernst Zündel, a neo-Nazi. He tells the base in the ice as a story of Germans who were never defeated. Since then the legend has been out in the world, and nobody has been able to call it back.

Under the title The Missing Diary of Admiral Richard E. Byrd an alleged secret diary appears. In it Byrd flies on February 19, 1947, from the Arctic into a warm world inside the Earth.

On that day Byrd was with the fleet in Antarctica, at the other end of the Earth. Nobody has ever shown an original of the diary. Who wrote the text remains open to this day.

Polar scientist Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching check the legend point by point. Their paper appears in Polar Record, a journal of polar research.

Their findings: the Germans were at the coast only briefly in 1939. The two submarines were at sea in July and August, which is winter in the southern hemisphere. At that time the sea off Antarctica is frozen far out, and they could hardly have reached the coast.

The two see Highjump as an exercise for a war in the Arctic. What remains is Byrd’s sentence about both poles.

In 2012 the film satire Iron Sky turns the Neuschwabenland story into a comedy. In many videos on the internet the same story is still told as fact.

The expedition has a film of its own: The Secret Land, shot by Navy cameramen, won the 1949 Academy Award for best documentary feature. Nobody has seen the six abandoned aircraft since 1958.