Richard E. Byrd

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard E. Byrd, an American naval officer, spent 13 minutes circling a patch of Arctic sky on the 9th of May 1926. Then he turned for home. By his own account, he had just reached the North Pole. The round trip took 15 hours and 57 minutes, and it turned him into a national hero almost overnight. Doubts followed within the same year, and they have never fully gone away. Byrd went on to fly across oceans, command expeditions on the ice, and become one of the most decorated officers the United States Navy has ever had. What carried him to that moment over the Arctic? And what does the surviving evidence say about whether he really got there?

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• 2. Making of an Aviator

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  Richard Evelyn Byrd Jr. was born on the 25th of October 1888 in Winchester, Virginia, into one of the state's First Families. His ancestors included the planter John Rolfe and his wife Pocahontas. They also included William Byrd II of Westover Plantation, who established the city of Richmond. His brother Harry F. Byrd became governor and a U.S. senator, and shaped the Virginia Democratic Party from the 1920s into the 1960s.

  Two years at the Virginia Military Institute came first, followed by a transfer to the University of Virginia. Money troubles then pushed Byrd to start over at the United States Naval Academy, where he became a midshipman on the 28th of May 1908. He graduated on the 8th of June 1912 and was commissioned an ensign. Weeks later he joined the battleship USS Wyoming. In the Caribbean he twice leapt fully clothed into the water to save a sailor who had gone overboard. That earned him a letter of commendation and, later, a Silver Lifesaving Medal.

  The gunboat USS Dolphin doubled as the yacht of the Secretary of the Navy, so Byrd met senior officials there, among them Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt. His commanding officer was William D. Leahy, a future Fleet Admiral. On the 20th of January 1915, Byrd married Marie Ames, and the couple had four children. By late 1924 the family lived at 9 Brimmer Street, a large brownstone on Boston's Beacon Hill that Marie's wealthy father had bought.

  His last sea posting, the presidential yacht USS Mayflower, ended his early career. An ankle injury aboard led to his medical retirement on three-quarters pay on the 15th of March 1916, which frustrated him badly. By December he was inspecting and instructing the Rhode Island Naval Militia in Providence, and a Rhode Island general praised his improvements to its efficiency.

  When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, Byrd oversaw the militia's mobilization and was recalled to active duty. After a desk job organizing Navy training camps, he went to the naval aviation school at Pensacola, Florida, in the autumn. He qualified as naval aviator number 608 in June 1918. From July until the armistice in November, he commanded naval air forces at Naval Air Station Halifax in Nova Scotia.

  Peacetime brought a series of near misses. In 1919 Byrd volunteered for the Navy's first aerial crossing of the Atlantic. Men who had served overseas were barred, and his tour in Newfoundland counted. His skill in aerial navigation still earned him the job of planning the flight path. Of the three flying boats that set out from Newfoundland, only Albert Read's NC-4 finished, on the 18th of May 1919.

  In 1921 Byrd volunteered to fly the Atlantic alone and nonstop, six years before Charles Lindbergh did. Acting Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt Jr. refused, judging the risks too great. Byrd was posted to the airship ZR-2, formerly the British R-38, and missed his train to it on the 24th of August 1921. The airship broke apart in midair and killed 44 of the 49 men aboard. Byrd lost several friends, helped with recovery and the investigation, and resolved to put safety first on every later expedition.

  The Navy's postwar cuts returned him to the rank of lieutenant at the end of 1921. In the summer of 1923, he and fellow volunteer veterans helped found a Naval Reserve air station at Squantum Point near Boston, using a leftover seaplane hangar. It was commissioned on the 15th of August 1923, and it is regarded as the first air base in the Naval Reserve program.

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• 3. Flight to the Pole

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  From June to October 1925, Byrd led the aviation unit of Donald B. MacMillan's expedition to North Greenland. The expedition largely failed, because it never reached the pole. Even so, the aircraft performed well, and Byrd gained a name as a pioneer of flying in exploration. The trip also introduced him to two men who would shape his career. One was Navy Chief Aviation Pilot Floyd Bennett. The other was the Norwegian pilot Bernt Balchen, whose Arctic flying knowledge would prove invaluable.

  For the pole attempt, Byrd and Bennett used a Fokker F.VIIa/3m tri-motor monoplane. They named it Josephine Ford after the daughter of Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company, who helped finance the expedition. John D. Rockefeller also provided funding. The plane took off from Spitsbergen, in Svalbard, and came back to the same airfield. Byrd and Bennett reported reaching the pole, a distance of 1,535 miles, or 1,335 nautical miles.

  The welcome at home was enormous. New York City threw Byrd a parade. On the 21st of December 1926, Congress passed a special act that promoted him to commander and awarded both him and Bennett the Medal of Honor. Bennett became a warrant officer with the rank of machinist. The Josephine Ford toured the country in celebration. On the 5th of March 1927, President Calvin Coolidge presented them with Tiffany Cross versions of the medal at the White House.

  The Navy Distinguished Service Medal came earlier, by a letter dated the 6th of August 1926. Its wording praised Byrd for showing that a heavier-than-air craft could fly to the North Pole and back. That same wording would soon be tested by a very different kind of evidence.

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• 4. The Case Against

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  Bernt Balchen spoke up in 1958, a year after Byrd's death. Balchen knew the airplane's speed, and on that basis he doubted the claim. He also said Bennett had confessed, months after the flight, that the two men never reached the pole. Bennett could not answer. He had developed pneumonia after joining a flight to help downed German aviators at Greenly Island, Canada, and he died on the 25th of April 1928. Before then, Bennett had started a memoir, given many interviews, and written a magazine article. All of them backed Byrd's account.

  The sharpest evidence came in 1996, when Byrd's diary of the flight was released. It held sextant readings that had been erased but could still be read. For a Sun sighting at 7:07:10 GCT, the diary gives an altitude of 19°25'30". The typed report Byrd sent the National Geographic Society on the 22nd of June gives 18°18'18" for the same moment. Dennis Rawlins studied these and other diary figures. He concluded that Byrd navigated accurately, flew about 80 percent of the way, and turned back because of an engine oil leak. In his view, Byrd then falsified the official report.

  A defender of Byrd offered another explanation. The typed report's flight times require ground speeds above the plane's 85-mile-per-hour airspeed in both directions. The defender proposed a westerly-moving anticyclone whose winds boosted the plane on the way out and the way back. That theory depends on trusting the typed dead-reckoning data over the handwritten sextant data.

  Rawlins answered with a point about precision. Every sextant figure in the typed report is stated to the exact second. Navy sextants of 1926 could not measure that finely, and the diary readings for 1925 and for the 1926 flight were given to a half or quarter of a minute of arc. It is also generally believed that the distance Byrd claimed was longer than his plane's fuel allowed.

  If Byrd and Bennett fell short, the first flight over the pole came a few days later. On the 12th of May 1926, the airship Norge flew nonstop from Spitsbergen to Alaska. Its crew included Roald Amundsen, Umberto Nobile, Oscar Wisting, and Lincoln Ellsworth.

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• 5. Atlantic Gamble

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  In 1927, Byrd announced backing from the American Trans-Oceanic Company, which department-store magnate Rodman Wanamaker had founded in 1914 to build aircraft for nonstop Atlantic crossings. Byrd was one of several aviators chasing the Orteig Prize, offered for the first nonstop flight between the United States and France. He again named Floyd Bennett chief pilot. The crew also included Bernt Balchen, Bert Acosta, and Lieutenant George Noville.

  Disaster struck in a practice takeoff. Anthony Fokker was at the controls and Bennett sat beside him when the Fokker Trimotor named America crashed. Bennett was severely hurt and Byrd slightly. While the plane was repaired, Charles Lindbergh completed his historic flight on the 21st of May 1927 and took the prize. Lindbergh had applied in 1925 to be a pilot for Byrd's North Pole expedition, but his bid apparently came too late.

  Byrd pressed on, and Balchen replaced the still-recovering Bennett as chief pilot. The America left Roosevelt Field, on Long Island, New York, on the 29th of June 1927. It carried mail from the US Postal Service to show that aircraft were practical. Over France the next day, clouds blocked a landing in Paris. The crew turned back toward the Normandy coast and crash-landed near the beach at Ver-sur-Mer on the 1st of July, with no deaths. The beach would be known as Gold Beach on the 6th of June 1944. The flight had lasted 39 hours and 56 minutes.

  France welcomed the crew as heroes, and Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré made Byrd an Officer of the Legion of Honor on the 6th of July. A dinner in New York City on the 19th of July followed. Secretary of the Navy Curtis D. Wilbur gave the Distinguished Flying Cross to Byrd and Noville. Acosta and Balchen were left out because the medal then went only to members of the armed services.

  Byrd wrote an article for the August 1927 issue of Popular Science Monthly. He predicted that modified aircraft with one to three crewmen would soon cross the Atlantic nonstop. He added that commercial service on that scale was another 20 years away.

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• 6. Little America

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  The City of New York, a Norwegian sealing ship once named Samson, carried Byrd south in 1928. Some people said that ship had been near the sinking Titanic. A second ship, the Eleanor Bolling, was named for Byrd's mother. The expedition also brought three airplanes. They were a Ford Trimotor called the Floyd Bennett, flown by Dean Smith, a Fairchild FC-2W2 called Stars And Stripes, and a Fokker Super Universal called the Virginia. Stars And Stripes now stands in the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center.

  On the Ross Ice Shelf, the team built a base camp called Little America. From there they ran scientific work by snowshoe, dog sled, snowmobile, and airplane. A 19-year-old Boy Scout named Paul Allman Siple was chosen to join, to stir young people's interest in polar exploration. Siple later earned a doctorate and was probably the only person besides Byrd to take part in all five of Byrd's Antarctic expeditions. Radio contact with the outside world never stopped.

  After the first winter, flying resumed. On the 28th of November 1929, Byrd, pilot Bernt Balchen, co-pilot and radioman Harold June, and photographer Ashley McKinley took off in the Floyd Bennett for the South Pole. The plane struggled to climb to the Antarctic Plateau, so the men dumped empty gas tanks and emergency supplies. They made the round trip in 18 hours and 41 minutes. The Navy Cross citation notes ranges and plateaus nine to ten thousand feet high, with no hope of rescue after a forced landing.

  On the 21st of December 1929, Congress promoted Byrd to rear admiral by special act. At 41, he was the youngest admiral in the history of the United States Navy. None of his Annapolis classmates reached that rank until 1942. Only four officers have become rear admirals without first being captains, and he is one of them.

  The expedition returned to North America on the 18th of June 1930. Unlike the 1926 flight, it won the gold medal of the American Geographical Society. The film With Byrd at the South Pole came out in 1930.

  Funding depended on powerful friends, including Henry Ford, Edsel Ford, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Vincent Astor, and Franklin Roosevelt. Byrd thanked them by naming Antarctic features after them. One region he named Marie Byrd Land for his wife, and a mountain range became the Ames Range for her father, Joseph Ames.

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• 7. Alone at Advance Base

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  During the Southern Hemisphere summer of 1933-34, Byrd spent five months alone at Advance Base, a meteorological station on the ice. A poorly ventilated stove gave him carbon monoxide poisoning, and he barely survived. His odd radio transmissions finally worried the men at the main camp. Two rescue trips failed because of darkness, snow, and mechanical trouble. Then Thomas Poulter, E. J. Demas, and Amory Waite got through and found Byrd in poor health. An airplane took Byrd and Poulter out on the 12th of October, and the others returned by tractor. Byrd told the story in his autobiography Alone.

  In the long summer days, the evenings stayed in twilight. Byrd made a big calendar on the wall of his shelter and crossed off each day.

  Back at camp, a CBS radio station, KFZ, had been set up aboard the Bear of Oakland. Its program, The Adventures of Admiral Byrd, was sent by shortwave to Buenos Aires and relayed to New York. General Foods sponsored the Saturday-night broadcasts at 10:00 pm. They reached number 16 in the Hooper ratings for 1933-34, with an average audience of 19.1 million. On the 31st of March 1934, CBS gave Byrd its medal for distinguished contribution to radio, and he was the sixth person to receive it. The shortwave voice transmissions were named an IEEE Milestone in 2001.

  Mail made the expedition pay. President Roosevelt and the Postmaster General honored the venture with a 1933 commemorative stamp, which helped raise money. A post office at Little America opened on the 6th of October 1933. Mail sent there needed a 3-cent Byrd II stamp and 53 cents in postage. Approximately 150,000 pieces passed through during 1933-34. Charles F. Anderson, a special representative of the Postmaster General, ran it.

  In late 1938, Byrd visited Hamburg at the invitation of Alfred Ritscher, leader of the German Antarctic Expedition 1938/39. In a private session with no press, he showed his Antarctic film and, according to historian Heinz Schön, gave practical advice to the scientists and aircrew.

  The third expedition, in 1939-40, was the first financed and run by the United States government. It covered geology, biology, meteorology, and exploration. The innovative Antarctic Snow Cruiser went along but broke down soon after arriving.

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• 8. Command and Legacy

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  In March 1940, Byrd was recalled to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, and the expedition carried on without him. On the 26th of March 1942 he was recalled to active duty as confidential advisor to Admiral Ernest J. King. From 1942 to 1945 he sat on the South Pacific Island Base Inspection Board, which toured bases and reported lessons for planning future ones. In September 1943 he led a Special Navy Mission aboard USS Concord to survey Pacific islands for air base sites. On the 7th of October 1943, gasoline fumes exploded and killed 24 crewmen. Byrd later wrote to the captain that he felt proud to be an American. He was in Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender on the 2nd of September 1945 and left active duty on the 1st of October.

  Operation Highjump began in 1946, when Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal appointed Byrd to lead Antarctic developments. It was the largest Antarctic expedition to that date. Task Force 68, under Rear Admiral Richard H. Cruzen, involved over 4,000 people, six helicopters, six flying boats, and many ships. The fleet reached the Ross Sea on the 31st of December 1946 and recorded 10 new mountain ranges. In a Chilean newspaper interview printed on the 5th of March 1947, Byrd warned that enemy planes could one day attack the United States over the poles. The Navy's film about the operation, The Secret Land, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

  Operation Deep Freeze I, in 1955-56, set up permanent bases at McMurdo Sound, the Bay of Whales, and the South Pole. It marked the start of a lasting American military presence on the continent. Byrd spent only a week there and began the journey home on the 3rd of February 1956.

  He died in his sleep of a heart ailment on the 11th of March 1957, aged 68, at 7 Brimmer Street in Boston. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His dog Igloo, who traveled with him to both poles, lies in the Pine Ridge Pet Cemetery under a stone reading "He was more than a friend."

  By then he had gathered 22 citations and special commendations. He is the only person with three ticker-tape parades in New York City, in 1926, 1927, and 1930. Ohio State University's polar institute became the Byrd Polar Research Center in 1987 after it acquired his papers from Marie's estate. Richmond's airport grew from the flying field dedicated to him in 1927, and a lunar crater carries his name.

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