Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with David E
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with David E. Baker, CAPT, USN (Ret.) conducted on October 9, 1998, by Dian O. Belanger DOB: I'm Dian Belanger and I'm speaking with David Baker about his experiences in Operation Deep Freeze. Thanks for talking with me, David. I'd like very much to start by asking you just to tell me a little bit about your background: where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, anything that will perhaps hint at how you ended up in the Antarctic. DB: It's something that I've shared with a lot of people before, Dian. As a young boy I lived in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, the son of a minister who occasionally used in his sermons some of the adventures of Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, and Byrd. At the age of eight I discovered the diaries of those great explorers and by the time I was ten I had read all of Byrd's books—Alone, Skyward, Little America—Scott's diary, and some of Shackleton. I was fascinated by these adventurers, and from the time that I turned eight or nine or ten, it's something that I wanted to do—go to Antarctica. I'd like to add something. When we lived in Wellesley Hills, Admiral Byrd's snow cruiser actually came through town on its way to the South Boston Navy Yard to be put aboard his ship to take to the Bay of Whales. I remember staying up late one night because it was due through Wellesley Hills on Washington Street sometime around seven-thirty or eight-thirty in the evening. Because the snow cruiser was so large they had to raise the wires along the road, and it was delayed. By the time that it got to Wellesley Hills where I was waiting on the sidewalk to see it go by, I had long since drifted off. So I never did get a chance to see it. That was 1937 or '38; I would have been five or six years old. When I went to Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, I got to know an English teacher named Robert Bates. Bob had been the deputy leader of the 1938 K-2 expedition and subsequently the '54 K-2 expedition. One of America's great alpinists and president of the American Alpine Club, Bob was the faculty advisor to the Exeter Mountaineering Club (EMC). My love of the White Mountains, combined with my interest in things polar and a love of winter more perhaps than of the summer, took me into winter climbing in the White Mountains. Bob Bates was an advisor to the Army Quartermaster Corps in cold-weather equipment and used the Exeter Mountaineering Club as a test resource for some of the cold-weather clothing and equipment that was being developed. This was in the late 1940s. The EMC also gave me the opportunity to learn about rock climbing and a little bit about mountain rescue. David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 2 In 1949 I organized my own mini-expedition. We climbed Mt. Katahdin in northern Maine in March, the first climbers to be on that mountain that year. When we reached the summit it was thirty below zero. In the summer of 1949 I climbed Mt. Rainier. And then subsequently when I went off to Yale, I put together again another mini-expedition in the eastern Alaska range, so I also had that experience. When I graduated from Yale, I went to the Navy's Officer Candidate School (OCS) in January of 1955. While I was at OCS—that's in Newport, Rhode Island—the Navy issued something called an AllNav. That's a message that goes to every ship at sea, every naval station and squadron. What it said is, "Wanted: Volunteers for Operation Deep Freeze." I thought, my gosh, my dream has come true. So I asked about this, and they said, "You'd be best advised to wait till you're commissioned"—which was going to happen in May—"before you make any application." So I did that. My great friend and mentor Bob Bates intervened in my behalf in the sense that he put me in touch with a fellow named Bill Field in Washington who was active in the pre-IGY planning. I'm not sure what his position was in the science field, but he was closely aligned with planning for the IGY. I met Bill in Washington, D.C. en route to a duty station in Jacksonville, Florida. He picked up the phone and called Capt. Dick Black. Captain Black had been with Byrd prior to World War II, and he was the Base Operations Officer for Operation Deep Freeze. I went over to the Old Post Office Building, which was where the task force headquarters was located and was introduced to Captain Black who was a wonderful, very non-Navy-looking fellow. His hair was a little bit longer than Navy captains should normally have, and he had a wonderful bushy moustache and a ruddy face. In OCS they told us you should never talk to a Navy captain until you're a little more senior than an ensign. So he was the first Navy captain I had really ever talked to. He sat me down, made me feel comfortable, and said, "Tell me about yourself." I noticed that he had something on his desk but I couldn't see it because his in-out basket was between me and the top of his desk. I thought he might be doodling, but what he was doing was checking things off on a list. So I started by telling him of my Mt. Katahdin experience, my cold-weather experience on Mt. Washington, and the fact that I'd had a couple of terms of forestry school at Yale and knew about surveying and cartography and so forth. I also told him about my climbing in Alaska. David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 3 When I finished, he said, "Well, is that all?" And I said, "Yes, sir, that's about all I can think of." And he said, "Let me show you something." He handed me a piece of paper, and it was a list of, as I recall, seventeen things. It appeared that everything on the list had been checked off except two lines. I was so nervous at the time I really didn't look at what the two lines were because he was talking to me. He said, "That list was going to be an attachment to a letter that we were about to send to the Army asking if they had any young officers with those qualifications." He said, "You have fifteen of the seventeen, and we don't have to send this letter to the Army." I said, "Sir, what are the two that I don't have?" And he said, "Well, you're not a parachutist, but that's not a problem, we can train you in that. And you're not a dogsled driver, but we can train you in that, too." I said, "Well, sir, what's the job that you're going to send me to Antarctica for and winter-over for?" He said, "You're going to be a parachuting dogsled driver." [Laughter] DB: What he was saying is one, he didn't want to go to the Army to ask for their help. The other was that the other qualifications that I had—the mountaineering, the cold-weather work, probably some of the leadership aspects of planning a winter climb on Mt. Katahdin and organizing, as a college student, my own climb in Alaska—I think he felt those were things that were probably more important. Like Norman Vaughan, who went to Admiral Byrd—and I could relate to that today—and said, "I'll do anything," and went on to become a dogsled driver, those are things that can be trained, I think, in a relatively short time. It takes years to become a really good dogsled driver, but I think you can master the fundamentals with the right kind of leadership and training in a relatively short time. So that's exactly what happened. After completing Air Ground Officer School in Florida, I reported to MCB Special in Davisville, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1955. In the late summer, I ended up going to Wonalancet, New Hampshire, to the Chinook Kennels, the same kennels that Admiral Byrd had gotten his dogs from for his previous expeditions. Jack Tuck, a contemporary of mine who graduated from Dartmouth, and a fellow named Tom McEvoy, an Air Force Tech Sergeant who had had experience working with dogs in the Arctic, and a wonderful Air Force Master Sergeant named Dutch Dolleman, who had been with Byrd in '38, David Baker Interview, October 9, 1998 4 were already there. Tom and Dutch were to be our trainers and also participate in the selection of the dogs that would—two teams and some spares—go to the ice in the fall of 1955. DOB: Let me back you up a little bit. They really were looking for somebody to deal with dogs and that's how you got involved? DB: Well, yes. The background of that, Dian, was that Admiral Byrd was a traditionalist in polar exploration. He felt even though we would certainly have helicopters and ski-equipped aircraft (helicopters had not been available prior to World War II, but certainly ski-equipped aircraft had been), the dog still had a place in polar exploration.