The Life of Richard E.Byrd Lisle A. Rose
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The Life of Richard E. Byrd Lisle A. Rose UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS COLUMBIA AND LONDON Copyright © 2008 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 54321 1211100908 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rose, Lisle A., 1936– Explorer : the life of Richard E. Byrd / Lisle A. Rose. p. cm. Summary: “Rose presents the first complete biography of this popular yet controversial explorer, including his first adventure in Greenland in 1925, his flights to the North and South Poles and across the Atlantic, his soul-shattering ordeal in Antartica at Advance Base in 1934, and the decline of his later years”—Provided by pubisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8262-1782-0 (alk. paper) 1. Byrd, Richard Evelyn, 1888–1957. 2. Explorers—United States— Biography. I. Title. G585.B8R68 2008 919.8Ј904—dc22 [B] 2007035754 ø This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Adobe Garamond, Stone Sans, and Rockwell The University of Missouri Press offers its grateful acknowledgment to an anonymous donor whose generous grant in support of the publication of outstanding manuscripts has assisted us with this volume. For Lt. Lyle Philip (“Phil”) Tonne, USN, and Col. Quenten Wilkes, USAF: Absent friends Contents List of Maps ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 “Danger Was All That Thrilled Him” 7 Chapter 2 Reaching for the Skies 30 Chapter 3 Breakthrough 60 Chapter 4 Triumph 101 Chapter 5 Hero 144 Chapter 6 Celebrity 169 Chapter 7 The Secret Land 181 Chapter 8 Southward 215 Chapter 9 Zenith 249 Chapter 10 Politico 284 Chapter 11 Jeopardy 313 Chapter 12 Breakdown 343 Chapter 13 Stumbling 384 Chapter 14 Recovery 405 Chapter 15 “Ever a Fighter So” 431 Notes 463 Selected Bibliography 515 Index 521 vii Maps North Polar Region xiii Route Flown by Byrd, May 9, 1926 xiv Antarctic Continent xv Aerial Flights during the First Byrd Antarctic Expedition xvi Official Map of the Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition xvii Summer Field Explorations of 1934 xviii Flight Tracks of Air Operations, Operation Highjump xix ix Acknowledgments Any book is a collaboration among many people, and Explorer is no exception. The manuscript has been read and greatly strengthened by Raimond Goerler, John Behrendt, and my wife, Harriet Dashiell Schwar. Professor Behrendt in particular saved me from a number of embarrassing errors of fact and interpretation regard- ing Antarctic science. Navy navigator John Rose read the chapter on the North Polar flight and provided several maps. Professor Goerler, Laura Kissel, and the staff of the Byrd Polar Archives at The Ohio State University in Columbus have been unfailingly helpful and pleasant through the more than half-dozen years I have worked on the project, pointing me to important materials I might have oth- erwise missed, and discussing various aspects of Richard Byrd’s life and times. Their professionalism is impressive, their unflagging enthusiasm and support deeply appreciated. The good people of Winchester, Virginia, particularly Senator Harry F. Byrd, Professor Warren Hofstra of Shenandoah University, the Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society, and the staff of the Handley Regional Library, were un- failingly hospitable and helpful during my brief stays there. Senator Byrd devoted a morning to discussing his famous uncle with me, while Professor Hofstra rather ignited this entire project when he kindly invited me to speak at the centenary of Richard Byrd’s birth so many years ago. Liz Safly and her colleagues in the manuscript division of the Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri, provided me with key materials on Admiral Byrd’s steadily deteriorating relations with President Truman and the unhappy re- sults, while the staffs of the National Archives and Records Service Center in Suit- land, Maryland, and the Library of Congress facilitated my research into the pa- pers of Byrd’s polar colleagues. Bolling Byrd Clarke answered a number of key questions I had as the manu- script developed. Wendell Summers, Elgin Long, William Molett, and Thomas J. Poulter Jr. readily granted permission to quote from critically important unpub- xi xii Acknowledgments lished materials, while Bryan Shoemaker, Colin Bull, Merlyn D. Paine, Dian Ol- son Belanger, and Sheldon Mark provided encouragement along the way. Mr. Summers also provided a fascinating character portrait of the Admiral of the Antarctic. Jon and Kathy Campbell provided great kindness—and several impor- tant sources—at a dark moment. Finally, I owe special gratitude to Beverly Jarrett, Jane Lago, Clair Willcox, An- nette Wenda, and the rest of the staff at the University of Missouri Press who have once again, much to my joy, taken on a major project. No writer anywhere can find a finer group of professionals with whom to work. With such impressive backing, it hardly needs to be said that all errors of fact and interpretation that may remain are solely my responsibility. xiii Created by John M. Rose, 2007. xiv Courtesy Byrd Polar Research Center Archives, The Ohio State University, Columbus. xv Created by John M. Rose, 2007. xvi Contemporary map of aerial flights (including the South Pole) during the First Byrd Antarctic Expedition, 1928–1930. Courtesy Byrd Polar Research Center Archives, The Ohio State University, Columbus. xvii Official map of the Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition, 1933–1935, with inset map of the Bay of Whales. Courtesy Byrd Polar Research Center Archives, The Ohio State University, Columbus. xviii The summer field explorations of 1934 included operations for aircraft and the three main surface parties. To Mile 173, the routes for the tractors and Supporting, Plateau, and Geological parties overlapped; to Mile 293, only the Supporting and Geological parties overlapped. From Mile 293, the Geological Party continued south alone. (Some map information derived from “Operations Map,” National Geographic, 1935, by Commander Harold E. Saunders, USN, Rawson and Darley, archived at the Byrd Polar Research Center, Papers of Admiral Richard E. Byrd, 9267.) Courtesy of M. L. Paine xix Flight tracks of air operations, Operation Highjump, December 1946–March 1947. Courtesy Byrd Polar Research Center Archives, The Ohio State University, Columbus. Introduction There are no heroes now. Our cynical, mistrustful age has no use for them, nor for adventuring, which all too often seems contrived and, in the case of amateurs on Everest, foolhardy as well. The world’s last legitimate explorers, NASA’s lunar astronauts, might have been the high priests of the Right Stuff, but they were also Spam in a can. As long as they performed for the space agency, their free spirits were subordinated and sanitized to conform to an image of bloodless competence. They played not many roles but just one: interchangeable cogs in a drama that ex- alted technology above humanity. Not even the Challenger and Columbia disasters could efface the image or change the reality. But in the years between the world wars, when the twentieth century was still young and the Western public grasped at the last fragile tendrils of belief and hope left from the physical and moral wreckage of the western front, great men per- forming valiant deeds in far-off, exotic places could still set popular pulses pound- ing. For many years, Richard Evelyn Byrd stood above all the rest—even Lind- bergh. In the drab Depression years of the midthirties, a newspaper editor gushed, “‘Dickey’ Byrd is going south again! What romance is wrapped in those few words!” What a relief for readers and radio listeners, tired of the deadly squabbles between Europe’s dictators and democrats and ground down by the daily effort to make or find a living in the midst of constant privation, to imaginatively follow the admiral back down to that remote, frozen land at the bottom of the earth where courageous men accomplished great things in the bleak polar wastes. “Romance again! As in the days of Lindbergh,” when a lone eagle had winged his way across a vast, stormy ocean to Paris and into the hearts of the world. Byrd himself, “with several companions,” had followed Lucky Lindy across the Atlantic “and made his- tory by such daring.” But where Lindbergh had retreated into a stubborn privacy, then fled the country following the kidnap-murder of his infant son, Byrd kept himself before the public with a series of adventures that comprised “the whole- 1 2 Explorer some things of modern days which lifts the spirit out of the rut of depression and puts us once again into the realms of romantic life.”1 There has been no one quite like him in American life. Born a little less than a quarter century after the Civil War in a quiet agricultural corner of a defeated southern state, Byrd left Dixie to become in the 1920s and ’30s a Boston gentle- man and the emblem of American industrial enterprise on the far frontiers of glob- al exploration. He became a decisive figure whose achievements helped shape the last hundred years into the American century. Few men live their dreams. Richard Byrd did. And he tasted all the joys, triumphs, disappointments, animosities, and loneliness that the experience inevitably conveys. At the beginning of World War II, journalist and publicist Charlie Murphy, who probably knew Byrd as well as anyone, observed that despite its continued dash and glamour, exploring was not only a “backward profession” but a dying one. Personal, derring-do exploration had become a way of life in the nineteenth century as eager Europeans pushed into darkest Africa, the remotest mountain and desert areas of Asia, and the Far North, seeking river sources, maritime passages, exotic flora and fauna, and hitherto unknown peoples and tribes, all in the name and service of Knowledge.