Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Victor Young, LCDR, CEC USN (Ret.) conducted on May 10, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger

DOB: Today is the 10th of May, 1999. I'm Dian Belanger. I'm speaking with Victor Young about his experiences during Deep Freeze I at Little America 5 and the trail party to Byrd Station.

Thank you, Vic, for speaking with me.

VY: Okay. Anything you want to know, if I can remember it, you'll get it.

DOB: Please start by telling me something about your background. I'm interested in where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, and in particular I'm interested in anything that might suggest that you'd end up from all of that in a place as exotic as Antarctica.

VY: Well, I was born in North Bergen, New Jersey, and I grew up there. I joined the Navy in 1939 in an adjacent town called Hoboken.

DOB: Were you a high school graduate then?

VY: No. I had gone through three years of high school, and things were a little different then as far as the economy was concerned.

Anyway, I was sent to a ship, what we used to call a beef boat. It hauled all kinds of food stuffs. Had two holds of refrigerated meat and so forth and three holds of dry stores.

From there I was transferred to the Naval Air Station at Jacksonville, Florida. And during the time that I was aboard ship, I had to strike for something—a rate that you want to get involved in. And I was striking for gunner's mate.

I was sent to the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville and stationed at the catapult, which was actuated by a charge of gun powder as opposed to steam as they have today. This was a training station where men were being trained to operate the OS2U2 Kingfisher aircraft. They're a scout aircraft. The battleships and cruisers carried these aircraft, and they were used to scout ahead of the fleet. It's peculiar saying things like this today when we have carrier battle groups and so forth. But in those days, you didn't have radar, and so these OS2U2s were launched from the cruiser or the battleship and went out scouting. It was a float-type plane. It had a float in the middle and two little floats at the end of the wings.

And the last thing that these young cadets would do was come down to this catapult and get shot off of the thing, and they'd make a circle and land in the St. Johns River. And Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 2

then the crane, what we called the Mary Ann, would pick the aircraft up again and set it up on the catapult car.

If it was you and I as cadets, you would drive, and then when we made a circle and landed and were picked up and set back on the car again, then I would drive. In other words, you're going to trust me to take you and I'm going to trust you to take me. But the basic thing was that both of them would come back alive.

And the next day they would come down to the catapult and thank us for launching them and so forth. But when they first came down, they had the small stripe of a cadet. And when they came down the next time, they had the broader stripe of an ensign. In other words, they had made it.

I was there at Jacksonville when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Although I was recommended and everything else to switch from gunner's mate to ordnanceman, aviation ordnanceman, I had one trip with these OS2U2s. You have to go on a check-hop, and the catapult officer said to me, "You're flying a check-hop with me tomorrow morning" at whatever the time was. That meant I would have his parachute out there by the plane at the time he stated, and we would go up with four cadets. And out there in the water there is a little—reminded me of an outhouse sitting out there, it was a target, a bomb target, but they didn't drop bombs. The fact of the matter, we probably didn't have many bombs at that time. But it was a sort of a shotgun-size thing, and it would make a splash.

As the person doing the check-hop, I had a board strapped around my leg, and on that board was four circles. One represented each plane. And when the catapult officer, who was the instructor, gave them the word, "All right. Go ahead and dive on it," each cadet would dive. I would watch them to see where their bomb hit in the water and mark it on the circle.

Well, we were supposed to do that, the four-plane group were supposed to do that, but I guess a storm or something was coming in—rain. Anyway, he sent the flight back, and we were out there by ourself. And he asked me did I ever dive on this thing, and I said no. And I really didn't care whether I did or not. [Chuckles] He said, "Cinch everything up tight"—the belts and so forth. And I'll never forget it. I was looking at the propeller. And the first thing I lifted it a little bit, and all of a sudden it dropped away and all you could see was that water. I said, "I don't think I need any more of this stuff."

I never went through taking the test for aviation ordnanceman. So I was a gunner's mate instead, and when they bombed Pearl Harbor, I think it was that very same day or the next day, I was gone from NAS Jacksonville. I was up to the East River and putting an attack transport into commission. This was another almost exercise in futility.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 3

All the crew coming to this ship were coming from cruisers, battleships. Anybody that had experience had never had experience on this type of ship because there was never any of that type of ship in the Navy. It was something that was developed for the type of war that we were going to be fighting which meant putting people on the beach. So you could say our main armament was our boats. We had some three-inch fifty-caliber guns; we had a battery of those back aft, to which I was assigned. They were built in 1914 or something like that.

And we were trying to get the cosmolene off of them. Cosmolene is a hard grease. You don't want to do this. This is in December at the Brooklyn Navy Yard where you're working with gasoline trying to get this stuff off, all this hard cosmolene. Cold hands, getting cracked, whatever the gasoline did to them. I don't know. I must've inhaled a gallon of it through my hands.

But anyway, we then moved out and went down through the Canal and up to San Diego, where we had some practice putting our Higgins boats on the beach. The Higgins boats didn't have a ramp in the front. They just had a curved bow, and you ran them up on the beach and the men had to jump off the side. The later ones, of course, had a ramp at the bow. I guess we broached a bunch of boats and so forth, but finally we started to understand something about this business. The dates I don't know.

We subsequently took on a load of Marines and headed out to sea. Somebody knew where we were going, but we didn't know where we were going until weeks afterwards. We went to . . . where was that now? We went to Suva, the Fiji Islands. We went to there. First we stopped at some other island . . . Tonga. The Kingdom of Tonga.

We went then to Fiji, and the Marines practiced going down the nets into the boats and going onto the beach. We did that for a while, and then we were steaming again at sea, and we were then told that we were going to someplace called Guadalcanal. We had no idea where Guadalcanal was, but we found out on 7 August 1942. And that's how we got involved in that war.

DOB: So you spent most of the war in the Pacific then?

VY: Yes. We went up the Solomon Island chain, but Guadalcanal was a hard nut because—well, we didn't have much. You must remember all during the time prior to our getting involved in this war, we had, in the way of military things, nothing. I understand that in the Army, men were training with broomsticks to represent rifles and so forth. Well, it was the same way with ships. When we formed this task force to go into Guadalcanal, we had about all of the Navy that was left. And like I say, there wasn't much to it. I saw no battleships or carriers, not in this thing here that we were involved in. I think we only had two carriers left. Some of the escorts were old four-pipe destroyers from World War I. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 4

But anyway, it took six months or more, I guess, before you could say that Guadalcanal was secured—it was secure to the extent that we could use it. We could use the airfield, you know. Seabees came right in there and started working on the airfield, but there were still Japanese out in the boonies that had to be hunted down.

DOB: You were not one of the Seabees at that time?

VY: Not at that time, no. I didn't even know there was a Seabee then. I didn't even know there was a WAVE. I found that out in a tent over in Guadalcanal. Two lads that just came out were talking about WAVES in the Navy, and I went up to them and I said, "What are you guys talking about?" And they said, "Well, don't you know what WAVES are?" I says, "No. What's a WAVE?" [Laughs] And of course the same way with the Seabees at this point.

It was about 1943 when a new type of landing craft came out there. They had different ones. They had the LST, the LCI, and the LCT. But the crews were all green, and they brought a whole flock of those LCIs in to Noumea, New Caledonia. The division of transports that I was on was in Noumea at the time. To provide some sort of a nucleus crew for these landing craft, they took three men from each of the attack transports that were there. There was a bosun mate, he came from the McCauley, and the signalman came from the Adams, I think it was, and I came from the Hayes. And we all went to the LCI-64.

If you don't think that craft was a mess, you don't know. That was my home then. Instead of laying offshore, now I'm going to go right in there, and that's when I became knowledgeable about the Seabees.

This craft only had a couple of—twenty millimeter, one up on the bow, one behind the conning station, and one on the stern. They didn't have any other guns on it, and the bosun mate said to me, "Hey, Guns, there's no fire power on this thing." And we knew we had to have better protection. We would want to put up as much lead as you can out there. So he says, "You ought to see about doing something about this." I said, "Well, we only have a small crew, you know, and it's going to take more than one guy to handle a fifty-caliber machine gun."

DOB: The Seabees were not intended to do—

VY: No, this wasn't—Seabees weren't even in the equation yet.

DOB: Oh, okay.

VY: They came into the equation—when I went over to Guadalcanal and I scrounged up three or four air-cooled fifty-caliber machine guns and boxes of ammunition and brought that back, but the cradles that the gun sits in weren't right. They had to be fixed so that the Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 5

gun would balance in there. Well, I took them over to the ship repair place, and they didn't do much—they didn't help it any. And I don't know who told me or how I got word, but up on that hill they said there's some outfit called Seabees. They're a bunch of old guys and they know how to do anything. So I took one of these cradles with me and I went on up the hill.

See, the LCIs, you live sort of like nomads, you know. We tied up to a coconut tree over on Hutchison Creek. You wear shorts and short-sleeve shirts. On the bigger ship you have to keep your shirts down.

Anyway, I went up there on the hill and found this camp, and I asked somebody there about it and he sent me to a blacksmith. So I went down to the blacksmith, he had a forge and everything. I explained to him what I needed and what had to be done. And I gave him the one I had, and he says, "Who was working on this thing?" But he didn't really say that. He said basically who was working on this thing, and I told him, "You know, ship repair people."

Well, to make a long story short, he put that thing in the forge, and it was like working with putty the way the man did that. He shaped that cradle so the gun balanced in there. I said, "I have a couple of more I'd like to have done." "Bring them up." So I brought them up and he fixed them all up, and those fifty-calibers just sat in there beautifully. And I didn't know what to do for the guy. Like I say, he was an old fellow.

DOB: Old being how old?

VY: Well, I guess he must've been thirty-five or so.

[Laughter]

VY: Yes, right. Right. Besides the machine guns, I had brought over a rifle for each one in the crew if we ever had to get on the beach, and I had a Thompson submachine gun for myself. And I took one of these rifles and shortened up the grip for the stock. I made it like a hunting rifle, and I took a couple of bandoliers of ammunition and brought it up to this guy and you'd think I'd have given him a Cadillac or something.

Well, he wouldn't let me go until he gave me a wrist thing that you could put your watch in, because if your watchband—you know, the leather rotted out in nothing flat, and those guys up there had taken metal from a Japanese plane and made a bracelet-like thing with places to set your watch in. You know, those little pins that go in there. I've got that yet. You put it on the side like this and then rolled it over.

DOB: So you must've been impressed with the Seabees. VY: Oh yes. Yes, and that was my first introduction to them. Then we started moving up the slot to the Russell Islands, then Vella Lavella, then Rendova, then Munda. And I Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 6

think it was on Vella Lavella we had brought in some New Zealand or Australia—I forget, but one of them—soldiers, a load of them. And the idea is you beach, and these first LCIs, they had ramps on either side and you dropped them down like stairs. Only not steps but it's a sloping thing that ran down. The newer ones had a ramp in the bow. But this was the first model.

Anyway, they all ran off there and I heard some pop pop pops out there in the, you know, out ahead of us. But they had boxes and so forth, their supplies, whatever they were, and we were wanting them to get those things off here because we're like sitting ducks on the beach. We can't do any evasive movements in case of air raid.

Well, a bunch of Bettys did come over—bombers—and the Seabees had cut almost like a center line through that jungle which is where they were going to put a strip in, and those Bettys came down right over that strip and dumped. And Seabees were flying in different directions, and machines went flying. I don't know how many men they lost up there.

And you know, we were calling these guys to come get these boxes off when all this happened, and the reason they hadn't come back and gotten the boxes, they were making their tea. They had these Sterno things and they were making their tea over there. We told them to come get these or we were going to heave them over the side.

Before we even retracted off the beach, those Seabees up there that were hit—the ones that were hit, of course, weren't doing it—but the Seabees were back at work again already. Their gear was moving again. And I thought to myself, now that's a gung ho outfit.

DOB: Some place to be.

VY: That's right. That's a gung ho outfit.

DOB: And so after all of your extraordinary experiences in the war, you A) stayed in the Navy, and—

VY: Well, I got out of the active Navy and then went right into the Seabee Reserve, and then I was called out again. So in 1950 I was in Port Hueneme, California, putting MCB-3 into commission. And this was a full battalion, a wartime battalion type. A thousand and twenty-three men or something like that. You had the Alpha company and Bravo company as two separate distinct companies, and of course Charlie, Delta, and so forth are the same.

We were deployed to a rock up in the Aleutians called Amchitka, and we were going to determine what would happen if an atom bomb was to be dropped in New York. What we were doing is building a replica of the basement of a tall building in New York and a Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 7

replica of a portion of a subway. And they were going to install mannequins in there and then see what would happen to them when an atom bomb was detonated on the island.

DOB: All this on Amchitka.

VY: Yes.

DOB: Okay.

VY: The thing on Amchitka, though, see, you're working with tundra, and if you break that—underneath it is like just so much goo. And we had to crush enormous amounts of rock to create any sort of a road because the scientists wanted that one thing out there. That piece of the subway has to be out there and this piece of the building has to be over there, and over there and out there was right out in the tundra. Well fortunately, that's all that place was was a rock. It's all rock. So we had a hundred-and-fifty-ton-per-hour rock crusher, and we crushed much, much rock.

Notwithstanding that, we did lose a tractor. A guy backed up too far, and he just sunk. A little bit of the stack on his tractor was sticking out. The company commander said, "No sense in messing with that thing. Just put the rock right over it. It makes good fill." [Laughs] And you know, we worked on that project for six or eight months—I forget just how many—about six or eight months, and all of a sudden it was called off.

At this time when this was going on, I was the company chief of Alpha company. Alpha company is the company that has the equipment operators and mechanics. But in the configuration of this battalion, Alpha company had only the operators and Bravo company was the mechanics. Now I don't know if you can visualize the problems that that can cause.

DOB: I can.

VY: Well, six or eight months into this job it was canceled. I don't know how much rock we put in there. Anyway, it was canceled, and at this point we never knew why. But I subsequently learned that there was an island that you could see on a clear day. Way over there you could just see the—like you see an island out there just a—

DOB: A silhouette kind of.

VY: Yes. And that island over there was Semisopochnoi, belonged to Russia, and I understand that anything we would've done here with the atom bomb would've been available to them over there. And therefore they canceled the thing.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 8

We lost this tractor, but it wasn't a total loss because there was a big pile of dirt down there where the rickety old pier was where we came in, and I sent a couple of men down there one time with a backhoe, a front-end loader I mean, and said, "Dig into that thing. See what that is." It turned out to be a crane. It was an Insly crane, and the cup type of grease fittings was on it. You put the grease in the cup and then you screw it on, and the more you screwed it, the more it would push the grease in. Do you know what I'm talking about?

DOB: Yes.

VY: They were bright brass. The -dirt had just kept that thing like it was in a garage. [Laughs] So we came back with no losses in our equipment, but a different type.

[Laughter]

VY: We took it back home with us. Brought it back to Hueneme and there we underwent the change to what is the battalion now. Instead of a having the 1023 or something, we went to the—578, I think, is what the usual Seabee battalion personnel is now—or was then. It probably is now, too. Then Alpha company had the mechanics and the operators. And we were set up in a military-type organization. We had an Alpha company, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Headquarters, five companies. You had a staff, S1, 2, 3, and 4, and I was still the Alpha company chief.

We were sent to the Philippines—a nice change in climate—to build the Cubi Point Naval Air Station. This was terrain that was jungle, nothing was there, except there was a cemetery there, and Mount Blanc was at one end of it. The equipment was sent out on the Union. I remember that because I rode it out there. The USNS Union—a U.S. Naval Ship. It's run by civil service personnel. The company commander and I and a couple of drivers went along on this ship. And then when we got to Subic Bay, they had a Rhino ferry there, which is a ferry constructed of pontoons. Seabees were great for pontoons. They did everything with pontoons. We put a couple of outboard motors on the stern. And you can carry lots of gear on there and lots of equipment. And that's how we ferried it over to this island from Subic.

This was a big job. Eventually every Seabee battalion was involved in it. Admiral Radford wanted that particular station there because from there you could hit every spot in Southeast Asia. And he was the first one to land on it. The strip was still dirt yet, but there's something as aviators—there's something to be the first one to land. Anyway, he was the one that landed down there, the first one. It was during that job that I was sent back to Port Hueneme for additional, higher school.

DOB: What kind of school?

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 9

VY: Construction. See, all our work was horizontal. Alpha company does all the horizontal work. It involved surveying, computing quantities of cuts and fills, things involved in building roads and airfields and things like this.

DOB: Surface.

VY: Yes. Anyway, I think it was a six-week course or something. I finished that and I was ready to go back out to the battalion again, and as I was going out of the Ad. building, a yeoman stopped me. "Hey, Chief. Commander so-and-so wants you up topside." "I've only got so much time. I've got an airplane we've got to catch." Anyway, I went up there and this commander says, "Chief, I've got a question for you." I said, "Okay, what's the question?" And he put this paper out there and he says, "Do you accept this?" And it was a promotion to warrant officer. I said, "Yes, I'll accept this," and he told the yeoman, "Cancel those orders. He's not going back."

When I first got to Hueneme, I had brought my wife and kids out after I had been there a while, and there wasn't much housing at all. There was a half a Quonset hut or whatever was available, and we were in what they call crackerboxes. And when I came back to the school, I noticed on this one street in Hueneme they were building houses, and I inquired about them and I bought a house. Ninety-six hundred dollars.

DOB: This was when?

VY: This was in '52. The same house now is selling for a hundred and thirty. But anyway, we practically watched that house come out of the ground. We moved into it, and I think we were in the house for about two months or so, and my orders came in. San Francisco Naval Shipyard, transportation officer. So we rented the house for a while until we didn't want to do that anymore and we sold it. But I went up to San Francisco Naval Shipyard; we had quarters up there.

I was at the shipyard there for a little more than a year, and then I was transferred to the Naval Magazine, Port Chicago, California. The magazine has nothing to do with reading material. It's ammunition. It's where the ships going into Mare Island would come in there, offload all their ammunition, and then go into the yard. When it's all fixed, it'd come out of the yard, stop there and load up all the ammunition, and go to sea. That was that place there. So I was at that place . . . I was the construction contract administrator. We had jobs going on—things being done by contractors, like a forty-one sixty power line, or demolition of some old buildings down here, water pipe—pipeline, and the railroad was always something—the ballasting of the railroad. DOB: How long were you there?

VY: I was there about a little more than a year. It must've been a little more than a year. I had collateral duty of the Navy housing. That's where we lived, in Navy housing, which was in Concord about six miles away. They didn't put the housing down near the Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 10

magazine. It was up there, because at one time during the war they had a hell of an explosion out there. Wiped out Port Chicago. When I was there we found a piece of a locomotive out there in the water. Anyway, my collateral duty was the housing. See, I was in public works, and public works has the housing.

DOB: Sounds like you're getting a lot of varied experience.

VY: Yes. And when I was over at the shipyard, we had the gantry cranes and the railroads, and our shop 03 was the maintenance shop. They would paint these here gantry cranes. To me they charged an awful lot of money. We had a captain for the public works officer, and during a staff meeting one time I said, "I think the cost of painting those gantry cranes is kind of high."

[End Side A, Tape 1]

[Begin Side B, Tape 1]

DOB: All right.

VY: All right. Let's see if I can speed this thing up. It was while I was there—forget about the housing and the cranes—All Hands magazine. It's a magazine that used to come out. I don't know if it does anymore. But when you got that, things that it was written about has been in place, you know.

Anyway, I was leafing through this and I see this Antarctic thing. "Looking for volunteers to go to the Antarctic." Well, I'd always been interested in the Antarctic as the last continent and had read about everything that Admiral Byrd had ever written. And I saw that and it had a telephone number, and I got on the phone and called them. I'd forgotten about ever dreaming of being able to do it because this thing's been going on before you get the—anyway, I called.

This man answered the phone and I told him I was interested in this Antarctic thing. And he asked me where I was and asked me who I was and what my rank was, and then he says, "Don't you know who this is?" And I said, "No, I don't know who this is. Who is this?" "This is Commander Whitney." I said, "Oh no." Well, we were old shipmates. We were up at Amchitka together, and we were together when we commissioned MCB-3, we wound up together out there at the Cubi Point Naval Air Station. We knew each other. And he says, "You called just at the right time. I was thinking a fellow I have now for this job I'm not happy with, and he doesn't seem to be really too interested now. So if you're interested, I can really use you." "Well," I said, "I'm interested." "Well," he said, "in that case, you'll get a set of orders probably tonight for immediate detachment because you're going to have to get back here quick. You've got places you've got to go and things you've got to do." Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 11

DOB: When was this?

VY: Well, this would be, I guess, in 1954.

DOB: Fifty-four?

VY: Didn't we go down there in '55?

DOB: Fifty-five, yes. But I thought most of the organizing was done in the summer of '55.

VY: Is that when it was?

DOB: I thought so.

VY: Okay. Maybe that's when it was. Hey look. I'm eighty-two years old. I can't remember all those things. Anyway, sure enough, orders came in that night, and we were underway I guess it was ten days later over to Davisville, Rhode Island, found a house for—Commander Whitney had alerted the housing people there who knew about various rentals and so forth, so when we got there, he had a list of possibilities. So we went out and rented a house and got the family settled.

DOB: What did they think about your going to Antarctica?

VY: Whenever I deployed, it was part of the job, you know? I was subsequently called out to MCB-10 during Vietnam. I got a call Friday afternoon and I was told to be in Pearl Harbor on Monday morning.

DOB: Well, I interrupted you. Let's go back to Davisville.

VY: That was a different story.

DOB: Let's go back to Davisville, and tell me what you did there to get prepared for going to the ice.

VY: Okay. As soon as I went to work, I went to Peoria, Illinois, to the Caterpillar plant along with, I guess, let me see. I would say probably a dozen men that's going to be involved in this—men that's going to be at both McMurdo and Little America. It was a basic D-8 Cat with some bells and whistles that had a cabin that was closed in and heated. And the tracks—the usual D-8 track probably would be twenty-two, twenty-four inches wide, this was sixty-four inches wide—each one. That's where it got this low ground pressure tractor designation. Okay. But as far as the engine and so forth, it was pretty basic. It looked like the tracks and so forth would be all right, but it wasn't. What else did I have to go there for? Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 12

DOB: What wasn't right about it?

VY: It wasn't obvious until you start using it. You see, usually you have a track carrier roller, the top roller that the track rolls over. In this case they didn't have a roller up there, they had a pad up there, a wooden block sheathed with galvanized metal, and the chain came across that as it turned. And as it came across that, the metal going across metal created a friction, and this of course built heat, and so the snow carried up through it melted and then proceeded to freeze.

Well, as this went on, you started to get a piece of ice up there that keeps building and puts pressure on the chain and on the track. Now it's either the track is going to go or this block, which is welded onto the frame of the tractor, is going to go. Do you know which one went? The little block that was welded onto the tractor.

Well, this meant now that you had to always be watching for this buildup, and the operator always had an ice ax in his cab. He, of course, doesn't see this buildup—it's underneath him—but somebody out there, either is supervising this thing or doing something with it, to where they can see it. And if he can't see it, then he's got to think, whoa, wait, I might have buildup underneath there. So he'd get out and chop all that ice out of there. But we knew it before we even got involved in the tractor train operations to any great extent.

I don't know what else I had to go and do there, but—

DOB: Who decided how much of this heavy equipment to bring and what kinds?

VY: That had been decided prior to my arrival there. There was going to be ten tractors and thirty sleds, I think was what was contemplated.

DOB: Was that enough?

VY: Well, for the total tonnage of material to be hauled up there, it would've been enough. A little problem became apparent. It was proposed that each tractor would tow three sleds. Well, each tractor can't tow three sleds because of the type of conditions you're in. The drawbar pull on paper said it can draw that much weight, but you're working in snow. You don't have the traction. So it became quite obvious as soon as we got down there that you're not going to haul three sleds, you're going to haul two sleds. And you better be careful how you're doing that.

But we're way ahead. You know how this battalion was formed up—part of the battalion was going to go to McMurdo and part was going to Little America? And each one had advance parties. Okay. In the advance party to Little America, I was on that and I wanted to be sure that the people who were going on the trail party was on that Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 13

because—that's one thing that I was doing back there is a lot of head work. I was doing organizing.

DOB: Back in Davisville.

VY: Back in Davisville.

DOB: So you already knew that you would be on the tractor trail.

VY: Oh, as soon as I reported in, Commander Whitney said, "This is your mission." And he even said, "You've got a task unit number and everything else." Okay. So the thing is, all we had was charts from—I don't know from when. But anyway, Little America was going to be at the Bay of Whales, and we have to get from there, which is on an ice shelf, onto the Rockefeller Plateau and get to a point 80 [degrees] South, 120 [degrees] West. This looks like—on the chart it looks like Prestrud Inlet is the way we can get up there. Little did we know.

You see, each one of these tractors weighed thirty-eight tons. That's with the attachments on them, you know, the winch and the blade. You just don't go charging around the Antarctic with thirty-eight tons of iron, because it don't work that way. When we went down from New Zealand, from Christchurch to the ice, Admiral Byrd rode down with us on the Glacier.

DOB: You were on the Glacier?

VY: Yes. I caught the Glacier in Norfolk and rode her all the way down. Stood watches up there with another warrant officer getting clued in on being the O.D. on the way.

DOB: Since we did that little digression, tell me what it was like standing watch on the Glacier getting into glacial waters and ice waters.

VY: Well, you could feel the change in temperatures, of course, and the first thing when we got closer, you picked up this brash ice. That's pieces of ice, and it's all broken. They didn't reduce the speed at all. I thought we would reduce the speed, but Captain Maher says no, it was not necessary. He had no orders to reduce speed, so we just plowed right through it. And the noise it made alongside the ship as it went scratching by there. I don't know if you ever heard of a fellow by the name of Bernie Kalb. He's an NBC or CBS talking head—

DOB: I've been trying to talk with him.

VY: What?

DOB: I've been trying to interview him. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 14

VY: You have?

DOB: Yes.

VY: Well, we put him through the polliwog to shellback route, and the last thing he had to go through is a long chute you crawl through that's made out of canvas with garbage in it, and as you're going along, guys are hitting you with wet socks or something, I don't know. He came out of that, he was sputtering. He was so mad he could chew nails. He wanted to complain to the Secretary of the Navy and everything else. Anyway, that was Bernie Kalb.

Anyway, as we got closer to the mainland, to the ice shelf, the ice got thicker. Then of course you get to the point where you cannot proceed straight ahead. You have to run up on the ice and the ship crushes the ice, then you back off a certain distance, then you go ahead again and run up on the ice again and let the ship crush it. You keep doing this until you cut a path through to where you want to get, and that's what we were doing here.

But the only thing is—I told you about Admiral Byrd. He and I had a talk on the Glacier, and he asked me what I was supposed to do. And I told him about building a station that was going to be named for him and where, and when I explained to him about the tractors and how we were going to get the building materials and so forth up there, the tonnage, he couldn't assimilate it. He just couldn't, because you see, the amount of material that they took down on his voyages was small compared to ours, where just for one place here was probably twenty or fifty times more, you know, and the size of this thing and the weight of it, and you're going to have ten of them and so forth. He wished me all the luck in the world. [Laughs]

DOB: He didn't think you could do it?

VY: Well, he knew what the place was. Of course the worst thing is the crevasses.

DOB: We'll come back to that. I want to get us there in order. But you did finally get to Little America, and then you got—

VY: I got there by way of McMurdo, and that was another thing. All the freight was loaded upside down. In other words, that wasn't the original plan. Plan A was the Glacier would go to Little America, offload their gear, and then proceed over to McMurdo. Well, the Edisto was three days behind us because of storms, and somebody had to get down to McMurdo right now because they wanted to fly the birds down there.

Well, we're off like a big bird to McMurdo, not to Little America, and that meant then that the freight for McMurdo, which they wanted, was the GCA gear. That's Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 15

ground-controlled approach gear. That was down in the hold with Little America stuff on top of it. So all that had to be offloaded, and they finally offloaded a little D-2 Cat and a relatively small sled compared to the big Otaco sleds. I don't know, the sleds probably were twelve feet long or something. Anyway, we got those two units out there and coupled them up and loaded the GCA gear on there and some other stuff.

I took Willie Burleson with me and we headed out for Hut Point. Prior to that, we had the commanding officer of VX-6, the aircraft people, check the thickness of the ice with a chainsaw—a big old chainsaw. It must've been an eight-foot bar on it. He says, "It's thick enough." So anyway, I guess it was New Year's Eve we spent at Hut Point. And then somehow or other Commander Whitney and George Moss got up there, too, and instead of just being Willie and I now, you've got four.

Well, we took this Weasel—wait a minute. An Otter aircraft had crashed and banged up the doctor and other people. But the Seabees are great for scrounging stuff, and somebody scrounged a parachute, and where the wood came from I don't know. But both were on the Weasel. It saved our lives because the Edisto came into Hut Point. We have to get over to Little America. I'm antsy because I want that trail party out there. You don't have too much time, you know, and I had planned this thing so they come with the advance party and they get out there first. Never mind doing anything else.

So anyway, why we were up at Hut Point I don't know, but anyway, we were going to go out to the Edisto with this Weasel, get on the Edisto, and they would take us out where we would rendezvous with the Glacier. Okay?

Now, to show you what fouled-up communications can do, the four of us started out. Well, we got to a place on the bay ice where it looks just like all snow, and all of a sudden we sunk. There's an open lead in the ice that was covered by snow and we dropped in it, and water boiled up through the floorboards, and I guess you know we bailed the hell out of that thing. The only thing that saved us is that the bow and the stern tanks hung up on the side of this lead. The lead, if there would've been another five feet wide, we'd have been down the deep six. But we bailed out of it, but the water had come on up and wrecked the radio, so we really couldn't get in communication with anybody.

In the meantime, the Edisto goes out and rendezvous with the Glacier, and so the Glacier says, "Okay, where are these guys I'm supposed to—" "What guys?" "Well, it's Commander Whitney and party." "I don't know. We don't have them."

Well, they radioed to Hut Point and said, "Where are these four men?" "Oh, they left." So they left and they never heard from them again and they never got to the Edisto, and then somebody put two and two together. And they said, "Those guys must be down Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 16

someplace." And that's when Admiral Dufek stopped everything and sent out the helicopters.

Anyway, I don't know how long we were there, but I can tell you one thing. We were standing on the ice, the Weasel is halfway in the ice, and it is bright sunshine. Beautiful. And then it turned like it will turn, and we had strong winds coming across there, and when these strong winds come across, they pick up the ice crystals. And when those ice crystals hit you, they sting.

Well, the best thing we could do is we put up our hoods, and then we're standing out there and we said, "Why don't we use the darn parachute? Make a tent out of that? We've got a couple pieces of wood up there." So we tied the wood onto the front of the—the Weasel, if it would've went on down, we wouldn't have a tent. [Laughs] But we fastened the parachute, and believe me, just that one piece of silk between us and the wind really did the job.

DOB: How long were you there?

VY: I think it was around thirty-two hours or something like that. I don't know. You know, time meant nothing because it was all daylight.

DOB: Well, I'm glad to know they saved you. Did they save the Weasel?

VY: No. We don't know what happened to the Weasel. McMurdo can take care of that. I don't know what—it probably fell down. The helicopter from the Glacier found us, so they picked us up so we didn't have to go to the Edisto. It picked us up and put us on the Glacier and we went to Little America.

Okay. We started offloading the freight there in Little America, and there's a lead in the bay ice across there. So we had a bauk bridge—it's an Army bridge. It's made out of aluminum and it comes in planks with two stringers on it. Anyway, we had to set that up so that the tractors would get across that all right.

And we started offloading the ships. The ships had to get offloaded and get out of there. They were the cargo ships, you know. And we decided the base would be up on the shelf about five miles from the bay. And it wasn't at the Bay of Whales. There was no Bay of Whales. We were at Kainan Bay.

Anyway, we were hauling the stuff up there as fast as we can, but tractors don't go that fast. And the ships are not getting offloaded fast enough, and by the same token we have to think that now the Seabees are on the ship being taken care of, but when the ship goes, we've got the problem. So it was a matter of you have to keep the cargo moving, but you have to also start somebody building the buildings. At least build one or two or Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 17

something for somebody to get into for shelter. That had to be done simultaneously with the offloading.

Fortunately, we had the summer crew, people who were going to be there just for the summer. They augmented the rest of us, so we could do something like that. We could offload and start building, and I still wanted to get that doggone trail party out.

And then Commander Whitney got ahold of me and he said, "I'll give you a letter later, but you're the operations officer now." Well, someplace I got the letter. I guess I might've got it in July.

But anyway, that meant no sleep. You've got this thing going on down there, and you've got to get some men to get some buildings sited and get a couple of builders up there and start laying in the—I don't know if you know how those buildings went. They had a foundation looks like railroad ties but they're close together, two stringers are placed on them, and then you've got your floor trusses across there. Somebody first has to decide the location—this is where we're going to have it. Level off the area—get a Cat up there and level off the area and stake out where the buildings are going to go. So I got one of the surveyors and gave him a couple of hands to help and get that thing laid out, remembering we want to keep space between the buildings. We don't want buildings butting against one another because one of the worst things we can have is a fire.

Anyway, all that was going on, and the supply officer, Don Mehaffey, who later on was my roommate, says, "Hey, I've got to have someplace to put this cargo." And among the items that had been offloaded was a couple of rollers—smooth-faced rollers. They're big metal things pulled by a tractor. So I said, "Don, I can't do much. I'll roll a place for you. It won't be absolutely flat because I can't grade it. But I'll roll it and that's about the best I can do." He said, "That's all right. That's good."

And just about this time, Captain Thomas—Coast Guard type, ice expert—allows as how that bay ice hasn't got long for this world. Well, I thought to expedite the offloading of the ships was rather important. Instead of hauling all the freight up onto the ice shelf, haul up what we need for those men building the couple of huts up there. But the rest of it, put it on the bay ice in a temporary dump.

So I talked to Don about this. "What do you think about that?" And he says, "Well, that's about the fastest way we're going to get the ships offloaded." And Captain Thomas says "Yes, it's good enough now. I don't know how long it will be that it'll hold out." But anyway, that's what we did. We established a temporary dump on the bay ice and just took up to the top side what's necessary for the building.

DOB: Then you have to go back and get it at some point, yes?

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 18

VY: Yes. And from Captain Thomas, not too long. Then he came—I don't know when, but he got hold of me and he says, "I think you had better start moving it. I don't think this ice has got long to stay." Well, that meant—fortunately the ships were almost empty. We got the rest of that stuff off, but not into the dump. We hauled it all the way up to the top. And then we went on twenty-four hours. Twelve and twelve, twelve and twelve. Get all that stuff off of the ice and back up there where we need it, and I don't think it was two days after that that it was just water.

DOB: There would've been your winter.

VY: All the food was in there and everything. Anyway, now we're up here and building. We don't have to do much hauling now, and we can get the trail party together and get them out there onto the Prestrud Inlet. We had gotten bamboo in Panama and split it into stakes with a red flag on it so they could mark the trail. Well, we got them off anyway with Bursey in charge.

DOB: Why was he in charge?

VY: Because he was with Admiral Byrd at one time. I asked that question, too, and that's one reason why I wanted Moss to go and Big Ed and some other equipment operators, because this guy had no idea about equipment. He knew dogsleds and dogs probably, or skis, but he's a lieutenant commander, and of course he's the guy in charge.

Well, anyway they start off and then I started assembling the sleds and so forth for the fuel run. See, it was quite obvious that I can't make—Little America to where Byrd Station was going to be—it's considered to be 500 miles. If I would take all the fuel necessary to do that, I have no room for building material. So great. I made a trip up there but I didn't do anything. So you see, it was necessary to establish a fuel dump out there about halfway, maybe 250 miles out. And I wanted the trail party out there because it's a slow job moving—anyway, we got them going. They're gone and then I start getting the train together for the fuel run. But it's getting late—it's in February.

You don't have too many men that you can use because it's very important to get the base built. So whatever men I could get, we were working on getting the racks on the sleds and putting the fuel drums in there.

And right in the midst of this, I was called in to Commander Whitney and he says, "Get a search and rescue party together. Evidently the plane has gone down." I said, "What plane?" He says, "Oh, we sent out an Otter to bring some of that trail party back." And to this day I could never understand why in God's name they had to send that bloody Otter out there unless it was just to give the driver something to do. They would've got back the same way they went out there.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 19

Well anyway, everything had to stop. A search and rescue party means that nothing else takes precedence. So I rounded up I don't know how many men, got I guess three Weasels, had to have a communicator, and I wanted the chief, what do you call him? Hospital chief, Ken something.

DOB: Aldrich?

VY: Aldrich. Yes. I e-mail with the guy back and forth and I don't remember his name. Anyway, I got him and—it's in here, I guess, who I took. But anyway, we took off following the trail figuring they might've come down someplace along the trail. We got to the 250-mile mark, no sign of them. But on the way, as we were proceeding along on this trail, I don't really like what I see. Maybe it was because of the light at this point, I see little indentations. But anyway, we got out there through the 250-mile mark and were told to hold there, that a helicopter would be coming up and we were to support this helicopter in any way—whatever they want us to do. The only thing is I did not have OPCON on the helicopter drivers. Otherwise, they'd have been doing some flying. Well anyway, they came up and roosted like a big bird. I don't know how long it was. It was . . . I guess a day or two later got word they found the men.

DOB: From the plane crash.

VY: Yes. Moss and—and they're bringing them in. So I was told come on back. But out at about the 100-mile mark there is a tractor train there and it's full of fuel, bags of fuel. I mean big bags of fuel. "Pick up that train and bring that back with you." Well, I would need the tractors anyway, but why the ones that brought it out there didn't turn around and bring it back, why we . . . . "Well, let's go home. Tell the chopper people let's go on back."

Those guys, they'd get up and they go so far out and we'd be toodling along in the Weasels, and all of a sudden, what's that out there? And as we come close, it's the helicopter. "What's the matter?" "Well, the weather's not good. We can't fly in that kind of weather." Ain't nothing to the weather. The weather is no wind and no snow. But anyway, I don't have OPCON on them. They said it can't fly, that's it, they can't fly.

Well, okay. Throw our tent down, open up our tent and stay here. Next we got, whatever, an hour of sleep and then the helicopter—before you can take off we've got to tap all these blades to get the ice off them. And they fire it up and lift up and down the trail they go. They did that for three or four days, I forget. I've got it in there. I'm chewing my fingernails and I'm ready to kill them. They did that to us for three or four days, and we had to stop. We can't leave them. Throw up the tent again.

By this time we're using our knives and cutting open cans of peaches and spiking it with Old Methusalem. Old Methusalem was the whiskey. It froze! And it tasted awful. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 20

But if you put it in the peaches, it wasn't bad. I've still got that knife at home. But we were out of food. We had fuel, but we didn't have any food.

And anyway, I think probably on the third or fourth try we got rid of them. They were gone. We didn't see them again along the trail. If they were over someplace else that's up to them. But they're not along here so I have nothing to do with them.

We got down to this train and it was snowed in. Have to open it up and get the engines going. And then, instead of being able to toodle on down in the Weasels, you've got to clank clank clank clank down with the tractor. I believe there were either one or two tractors there with sleds. Well, I didn't need the rest of the people and I sent them back. We only needed a couple of men to take the train in. So we finally got back to the base with this train. I think the Weasel broke down ten miles from the base or something.

Anyway, I'm almost at my wits' end now. It's getting to where it's a little dusk and daylight, dusk and daylight. And before I could start out with this train, it was 27 February and that's late. I cannot make 500 miles, dump the fuel, turn around and come back, and have any sort of daylight. I'll be in darkness, and storms get worse.

Well anyway, we started out, and everything was fine until we got out to about 125 miles, and the first tractor had Max Kiel driving it. The train slowed, stopped, and I was at the back of the train. When Max stopped, I went up to his tractor.

[End Side B, Tape 1]

[Begin Side A, Tape 2]

VY: Right behind the rear part of his track was a gaping hole. The drawbar on the tractor was resting on one side of this crevasse, and the blade was resting on the other one. Well, that meant break the train up, get three more tractors out, and put them in not a real wide semicircle that closes, but not one right beside the other. Just a little space between them. One right in the middle and one on either side. And ran the winch lines out to the drawbar on the tractor over the crevasse and had the operators tow the Cats in. Spin one track and then spin the other track and set the thing down until it's sitting on its belly. And then you can't have one pulling while the other is not pulling. You have to do this simultaneously.

So I had them take up all the slack in the wire, and I moved off to the side and told them, "Watch me, and fire up the engine, hit that throttle all the way open, and then go." They all toggled in their winches together, and that Cat came off there with its nose pointing right down the crevasse.

DOB: Was somebody in it?

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 21

VY: No. And walked it right back up. And there was the crevasse. Well, we had to fill that, so we started filling that crevasse.

DOB: Now this was on the trail that Bursey's party had been over.

VY: That's correct. That's correct. We started filling that, and this told me something that I was always afraid of. How many times did they probe suspicious spots? I didn't know that. And to me the time elapsed between the time they left and the time they said they were out at 385 miles, whatever it was, was pretty quick. And then going out there myself 250 miles with the search and rescue party in the Weasels, I started to get a little suspicious.

I had them start filling the crevasse. And I got little Willie and some dynamite and put snowshoes on and broke out the probes. They're pieces of rebar about eight foot tall bent on the top like a shepherd's crook. And Willie had a backpack and the hellbox, the thing that explodes the dynamite. I don't know the correct name for that. It's probably a—anyway, we went ahead with the probes. I would take five steps and probe, and Willie would come by me and go up five steps and he would probe, and I'd go past him and probe.

DOB: Roped together?

VY: No. Actually they can stand the weight of a man, you know. But the thing is when you're pushing this probe down, if you kept on getting resistance, there's snow and ice there. You push it down and all of a sudden it goes through to no resistance—there's air underneath there. That is a snow-bridged crevasse. Okay. We found four of them within, what, a quarter of a mile maybe? You can't tell miles. I don't know how far it was. We blew the first two, and they were big ones.

In the meantime, they were filling this one in that the tractor was hung up on. But right close to it, nobody knew it, there was another one. The tractor had gone over it back and forth a couple of times, and this one time was just once too many and the tractor went down. And of course the weight is on the back with that heavy winch, and these crevasses all V in, and that tractor went down in the crevasse. As the crevasse narrowed, the terrific weight of going down there and the crevasse not giving, it just squashed the cab right down to the floorboards. And it took Max with it. We couldn't get him out.

And so when that happened—I think even prior to that when we first started filling and then Willie and I were going out to check the trail for more, I told Patterson, the radioman—he was also subbing as the cook—to call the base and tell them that we've got a problem with a crevasse here. And he said, "I can't reach the base." I said, "You can't reach the base? We're only like 125 miles out. You've got to be able to reach the base." "No." Well, it turned out to be the oscillator in the transmitter from the jiggling Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 22

of the wanigan. You know, the snow surface is not smooth, it's sastrugi, and the thing goes up and down and side to side.

Anyway, what he did is kept on sending to the base at Little America where I had a schedule at 1700. When they didn't get our signal at Little America, they went all across the band looking and they finally hear Patterson. But we're supposed to be, say, on fifty-two and they get Patterson way over here on three hundred and eighty, just as an illustration. But we're way off the frequency.

And by that time, of course, I initially had said, "Tell them that we want the doctor out here." But by the time we made contact, I said, "Tell them to send the chaplain." So the chaplain came out and we held services right there, and at the same time he brought me word that we were supposed to return to base. Because when I asked them to send the chaplain, I also told them that there are several other crevasses that have to be filled and that the route is out. "We ain't going to make it this way." So they said, "Yes. Come on back."

Well, I was really hurt because I lost Max. I don't like to lose anybody. And I certainly didn't like to lose him. He was a little—he always had a, you know, a laugh, a little pudgy—he was sort of a pudgy guy and he got kidded about that, you know.

But anyway, when I got back I was hauled down to the Glacier. Admiral Dufek had held the ship until I got back. And he asked me what happened and I told him. And he asked me do I want to go home. I said, "No, I don't want to go home. I want somebody down here that's going to be able to do something about getting us a trail." I said, "This Prestrud Inlet is no good. We've got to find another place." And I said, "There must be one someplace." So he said that they would work on it as soon as he got back to Washington.

I subsequently got word that a couple of Army guys that were up in Greenland, a couple of Scandinavians, I think it was, from Sweden or Norway. Anyway, over there someplace, and they were in the Army and had a lot of experience of this type up in Greenland.

DOB: I interviewed Phillip Smith.

VY: Oh, you did see Phil Smith?

DOB: Yes. Last December.

VY: Old Phil was going to be with them. Anyway, they came down and I got ahold of . . . what's it? Major—I might have it in here. I don't know. But Major somebody [Merle Dawson] is in charge of them. I told them that if we can't find someplace to get through, don't let it bother them. I'd rather that there wasn't any way to get through. I Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 23

don't want to lose anybody else. And he said, "Don't worry. If it's safe to go across, you'll know it. If it's not, I'm not going to say that it is." Well I felt much better with those guys out there.

DOB: What gave you confidence in them? But this would be the next summer, right?

VY: Yes.

DOB: Before they went.

VY: Yes. When we couldn't hack it this time, we had to winter in. So we had to go to a different plan. We had a full set of plans for Byrd Station, of course, and so I had selected out the crew to go up there: "Hammer" Hon for the lead builder, and Stroup for the lead electrician, and Beckett for the lead utilities man, and Willie Burleson for the mechanic for the powerhouse generators. You wouldn't want better men than those. I can't say enough for them, because unfortunately Hammer died, and you're probably talking to Stroup—

DOB: Tomorrow.

VY: I think the world of those men. They really did a job, because I said, "What we've got to do, we have to know everything that's going to be necessary to build Byrd Station down to the last nail or anything else. Now there's a set of plans here. During the winter night I want you guys to get together, and Hammer, you find out how many"—you know, the buildings were panels, different heights—"how many panels you need of different sizes and whatever else you need in that line. And Stroup, same way with the electrical stuff. And Buckets, the UT stuff."

Those guys worked on that, and when we had to dig out the boxes of material that were snowed in, you know, that was all color coded on the edge of the box. So if it was—I think brown was Byrd Station. Anything brown came out, was taken up to a spot where it was broke out of the pallet, and it was laid out as required. And the sleds were loaded weight-wise so that the material needed first was going to be on the top. And each sled was going to be numbered, and each sled was going to have a manifest. This sled contained this so that when we get up there, we'll lay out the buildings, this is where this building goes. I want the meteorology building to go up first. That's the biggest one so we can get in it.

When we pull a sled up alongside there, off comes the wood for the foundations, and the floor trusses and panels, and when the sled is empty, part of the building is up. When the next sled is empty, the whole building is up maybe. Well, we arrived 80 South, 120 West about 1400 on this day, whatever day that was. At 1600 we were ready to start building.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 24

DOB: That's incredible.

VY: At 2400 the meteorology building was up, and we could rest in the meteorology building.

DOB: I've read that. It's incredible.

VY: And then it went on from there. It worked perfectly. Wherever there was a building to go, just pull the sled alongside of it, and there were the things just coming out of it.

DOB: The reward of good planning.

VY: Yes. And that's the only way you could've done it. I figured—because there were no scales—but I figured that each sled had about fifteen tons of material on it. And the sled itself weighed about five tons. So you had one tractor pulling two sleds, each weighing about twenty tons apiece.

And you don't have enough operators to drive the tractors. Other rates would also drive. I could take eighteen men because the sleeping wanigan (nine bunks) only took care of half the crew. The media people, the photographer, whatever, made a railing around the top of the wanigan and they roosted up there. I had no room for them. If you want to go, that's where you're going to have to go. And I did not have a bunk. I had a—I don't know if you know what a Weasel is, but we built a bunk of wood in there.

DOB: Like a platform of some kind?

VY: Yes, well, I could lay on it and I threw my sleeping bag on there. And in the overhead we cut a hatch out that had a plywood door, and I could stand in the Weasel—throw that door open and I'd be sticking out of the Weasel about this much, and I could look all the way down the train. And it wasn't long before my face was puffed up from the sun. It didn't hurt but when you look in the mirror—but that's the only way I could keep track of the train.

Initially we started off with the tractors in line. You know, I've got a little herd of elephants going down to do something. But the first tractor would make a rut that the second tractor would exacerbate and the third tractor until you had them stuck—shakedown problems. So instead of that, I said, "Now, first one, you go on. The second one lay over a track length so you're not right in his track. The third one lay over a track length so you're not in his track." And that's the way we went on the ice shelf until we got to this place where we had to cross, and Smitty was there.

DOB: Let me back you up just a little bit because that's a good place to stop. When you were making up this train and planning the buildings and all of that, what are the limiting factors? I mean you built something like four buildings, which is not the whole station. What made you say, "Well, we can do this much but not that?" Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 25

VY: Number of tractors. We lost one with Max; the Army men had two with them. One had to stay at the base. I was cut down to six from ten. If we would've had the number of tractors that we thought of having back at Davisville, then the only other limiting factor would have been two sleds to a tractor instead of three, but I don't think that would've bothered. I think we'd have still—if I could've had four more tractors and eight more sleds, I could've brought the whole shebang.

DOB: Okay. And how about things like spare parts? How redundantly can you afford to pack this train, or not afford to do that?

VY: You can take the things that to the best of your experience might cause a problem. The actual things that did cause a problem was things that you wouldn't conceive of happening. A pushrod breaking in the engine, when you don't have pushrods with you, and I'm not sure to this day whether we had any back at Little America. I do know that the oil heaters for up there at Byrd Station were still in Christchurch when we were building the station. So we didn't have a pushrod, but therein lies another story.

We're down and we have to depend upon somebody bringing us out a pushrod by air. Well, the Antarctic don't cooperate with you all the time—whiteouts and so forth. Inclement weather, we'll call it. And they can't fly those birds all the time. And you can't let one tractor stay there while the others proceed. One man goes down, the whole train is down. Okay.

We were in the messing wanigan, and I can't say enough for one fellow in there and that's the cook. That man, Mishler, had to cook two meals at the same time. He had to do we'll say breakfast for one crew, because the schedule I set up was 0700 to 1900—that's seven to seven—we stop for one hour, change crews. The crews that are going off, go off. That's all. Just go off and eat and go to sleep. The crew that's been rousted out and had their meal, they check the tractor, fuel it and everything else. So this way you don't have well, now, I thought he did it. You know? And that's the way we were working. When you go down, you're still in that mode, but you're not moving.

Well, a couple of us were in the messing wanigan, and the stove had four places where four pots could sit. And there was a bar all around the stove like this of stock, metal stock, and this is to keep the pots from rolling off the stove.

DOB: Sure. Like on a ship.

VY: Yes. And I had radioed in for the pushrod, and in the meantime three of the men were out there taking the head off and so forth, ready to fix this thing, and they have no clothes on from their waist up. Bare. That's how the weather was. This rod that ran around the stove looked to be the same size as the broken pushrod. We didn't have a micrometer. "Yes, it looks to be the same thing. Let's cut a hunk out of there," and Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 26

one part of the pushrod's got a little round concave thing on it. Well, there's that much of the rod left yet, so we take this rod and weld it to this here one. It worked. Mishler was having a fit. "You're cutting"—[laughs]—"You can't take this." "Yes, we can. We've got some wire. We'll put some wire around it."

[Laughter]

DOB: It's called improvisation, is it?

VY: That's right. We got that fixed and got underway. I sent a message telling them delay the requirement for the pushrod. We didn't get too far down, and a roller went. You don't carry rollers around with you. These are rollers that the tracks roll on. One of them, like a melon, broke. We stopped again. This time we can't improvise. So they're going to have to bring us out a roller—two rollers.

They brought them out, we got them in place, and I sent back a message, "Okay, we're squared away. We're getting underway again." And I got a message back and it was a biblical message. I don't know just what chapter and verse or anything else it was now anymore, but I'll always remember it. It said that "He got on his ass and went away," or something like this. I don't know just how it went, but they're telling me, "You get off your butt and get moving."

[Laughter]

VY: But anyway, when we got to that place where we wanted to go across—

DOB: The crevasse area. Is that what you're talking about?

VY: That's right.

DOB: Now you'd already seen this, had you not?

VY: No. I'm coming up on this cold. I saw Smitty there so I got hold of Smitty, I said "What's this thing look like?" He says, "I think you can make it. It's going to be tight." "What do you mean tight?" He says, "Well, there's crevasses on both sides." "Well," I said, "that's not so bad as long as they aren't in the middle." "But," I said, "I'll tell you what, Smitty. Suppose you toodle along in a Weasel or something behind us. I'm going to go over here. I'm going to go across this thing with the first sled."

Well, before this, we had talked about the possibility that the weight is going to be causing a stress on the lane. So we think maybe it would be better if we would take one sled across at a time, and in fact it would be easier doing that because of the twists and turns. Take one sled across at a time, and then let's wait eight hours for it to solidify Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 27

again to take the next one across, and we'll see how this does. I said, "Okay, that sounds good to me."

So we broke the train up and hooked up one sled and took it across. And it was tight, but you could maneuver around these places. And I wanted Smitty with me in case we did make a crack or anything, which subsequently we did, he could investigate it. Get down in there and investigate what the story was. But we subsequently lowered the wait from eight to four hours, and finally got the train across onto the plateau.

DOB: How long did that take? Days?

VY: Oh, a couple days. I don't remember how many days it took.

DOB: How did the men feel about this? Were people still spooked about Max Kiel's accident? Did people not want to go?

VY: Not any that I know of. These men that I had, there was not even the slightest bit of reluctance about doing anything. The kind of people that you like to have with you. They were just outstanding. That's all I can say. No, there was no reluctance whatsoever in going. If we could step this thing down from eight hours to four hours, okay, let's give it a go. That sort of thing.

DOB: And you had a lot of confidence in Smith?

VY: Sure. Yes. And what the heck was his name? The other guy? Anyway, I had talked to the major, as I said, before he even went out on this and told him my feelings about it. And I think they all knew it, because I was the guy that was going to either say yes, we're going to go across or we ain't going to go across. But whatever Smitty came up with, it was really the best you could think of. I knew he wasn't grabbing something out of the air. He had been down there looking around, and he had a darn good idea of just what this whole seven-mile stretch was.

I learned a long time ago that you learn to have trust in some people, and in some people you don't have it. But we got across all right, and then when I got them up on the plateau, I put the train in a column of twos instead of one behind the other. Then I didn't have to go three-quarters of a mile back and forth.

Oh. Remember I told you about this carrier block? Someplace along the trail I would come alongside of a tractor in this Weasel—that was my home—and watched for these things. Now I see a buildup. An unfortunate aspect of this is that you would have to stop the train in order to clear all this out.

But at this one time I come up and there was a buildup starting, and the operator thought I meant for him to hit the brake because I pointed at the thing. And he popped his brake, Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 28

and when he did he snapped the track, and it scattered that ice in nine different directions. When I saw that happen, I went to look down the other side, and the same buildup over there. I told him to do the same thing. He hit that brake and no more ice.

Well, I went up to the front to the first men and told them what happened. "When I come alongside and I point there, hit your brake. If it's on the other side, hit that brake," and why I wanted them to do it. So I went to each tractor on this watch and told them what the scoop was. And then at the change of watch I told the next crew. And that was one thing that helped getting that train there in the time—it took eighteen days to get there, but it would've been longer if we'd have had to stop and clear the stuff out.

That was just one of those things that nobody sat down and said, "Well, if we do this . . . ." It's just one of those things that happened. It was a misunderstanding in communications. I pointed to the carrier block, and he thought I meant hit brake. Pow! He hit the brake and woooo! It flew! So we had things like that happen. And lots of other things happened up there.

Old Cooper or somebody had an infected tooth, and the weather was bad. Bad weather. And our radio, that Navy radio for communications, you couldn't get around the block with it. But had ham gear with us, so we got the ham gear out and threw a bowtie antenna just on the snow. And I fired it up, and the first thing you know I'm talking to Syracuse, New York—to old Paul up in Syracuse, New York. I used to talk to him all the time from Little America. I told him I wanted to get hold of Little America. "I've got a problem here," and he said, "Stand by." And so he got on their frequency, told them that I was calling, and when I got Little America I said, "Get the dentist to the ham shack." So we got the dentist there, and I had a young lad that was a hospitalman with me and I said, "Tell the dentist what's going on with that tooth." So he told them, and the dentist told him he'll try to get up there but the weather's bad. Either that or they'll try to get a plane up. Instead of him coming up, evacuate him. But in the meantime, sedate him.

Well, when I looked at that thing in there, it looked terrible. I mean it was all red, you know, and I'm thinking, gee whiz. If he don't come up here, we can't keep on doping this guy up. Maybe we ought to, you know, try to get rid of it. So I said to the hospitalman, "You ever pull a tooth?" He said, "No!" I said, "You know how to deaden that thing?" "Well," he said, "the stuff we have is frozen." I forget the name of that stuff, but he said it was frozen. Because I was thinking maybe we could do something without—I know we had pliers like that, you know, the water pump pliers. But no, you can't do that . . . you can't do that. Anyway, we finally got a plane up there and threw Cooper on there and sent him back.

DOB: So he didn't get to Byrd, huh?

VY: I do not know why I said that, this happened at Byrd Station. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 29

DOB: How fast can you drive?

VY: With a tractor?

DOB: Pulling two sleds.

VY: Oh, three miles an hour.

DOB: Could you have gone faster, or is that the limit of the power?

VY: If you get into fourth gear, you might get a little bit more out of it, but you would be lugging the engine. Three miles an hour is the best you're going to do, I'd say.

DOB: Did you run into other crevasses or were they mostly in that one bad area?

VY: Once you get on the plateau, you're home safe. It's the ice shelf—the stresses and strains from the glaciers coming off the plateau. That's where you've got to watch out is on the ice shelf. But once you're past there and you get on the plateau, you were all right. We had just the crevasses that we had to go through on the seven-mile lane, but once, as I say, we got on the plateau we didn't have any more crevasses.

DOB: What does it look like? Describe this journey for me.

VY: At Little America, if you looked— DOB: I mean on the trail.

VY: On the trail. Like you're at sea, only it's all white.

DOB: Is it flat?

VY: When you say flat, is the surface flat or are we looking at undulating hills?

DOB: Well, just answer both.

VY: The surface is not flat. It's like serrated. It's called sastrugi. But with the heavy tractors, it just crushes it. But with the Weasel, it's like going over waves. You are pitching and rolling and trying to sleep in this thing. And it was a rise from the ice shelf to Byrd Station up to five thousand feet. But you didn't seem to notice it.

DOB: Very gradual.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 30

VY: Just a level climb. Not like running through mountains in North Carolina or something. I don't know the degree of rise. I can't tell you. I don't know. But it wasn't any too sharp. Gradual.

DOB: And it's light all the time?

VY: Oh yes.

DOB: How was the weather on your trip? Did you ever have to stop for weather?

VY: No, the weather cooperated with us pretty good. The weather on the fuel train was bad. But we were in good weather for the tractor train to Byrd Station.

DOB: Lucky or is it typically not too bad at that time of year?

VY: We were at the best time of the year.

DOB: But still probably lucky.

VY: Yes, that's correct. Now for surface transportation it wasn't bad. It was all right. But for flying, there were times when they couldn't fly. And that's another thing. Without old Harvey Speed and his R4D—I told you we couldn't go the whole distance without having a fuel dump someplace so we could top off the tanks. They established one out there for me about 250 miles out. It was on the plateau then. It's a Marine refueling outfit. It's a big bladder, and they fill it with fuel. And they had, I think, four of them that they had filled with fuel out there. DOB: And it doesn't freeze?

VY: Oh no. No no. And it wasn't there too long before we got to it, but by this time our tanks were kind of low, too. And we came up alongside there with the train and start topping off all the tanks, and I think we sucked up thirty-four hundred gallons of fuel. Just emptied out half the bladders. That meant that they had to do it all over again.

[End Side A, Tape 2]

[Begin Side B, Tape 2]

VY: The Air Force had dropped about thirty drums of fuel up near Byrd Station, so the air support was needed and it was there.

DOB: Altogether, according to the records, you spent only four days at Byrd Station.

VY: Four days? [Laughs]

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 31

DOB: Is that right?

VY: Oh Lord no. We got there, when was it?

DOB: Well, according to the written record you arrived there on the 23rd of December, and you were back on the trail on the 27th of December.

VY: Not me. That's people taking the empty train back.

DOB: You didn't go back.

VY: No, I was building the station.

DOB: When did you get—how did you get back?

VY: I eventually got back because I was ordered back. The Curtiss was in, and they were going to depart and if I wasn't there, I wouldn't get on that. So I left . . . I guess it was . . . January 24th?

DOB: We'll look it up later.

VY: As men were brought up by air—well, first of all when we first got there, the crew was what we had. We needed supplemental men to get this thing going, so at 2200 or something that day—that night. It was night but I mean it wasn't dark. I think I remember 2205 or something, they brought men up from Little America to augment what I had.

DOB: By air.

VY: What?

DOB: They came by air.

VY: By air. Yes. Well that was part of the plan. And they participated in getting the station built. And I do know that I commissioned the station on 1 January—

DOB: Nineteen fifty-seven.

VY: Nineteen fifty-seven. That's right. That's right. And then there was more work to be done yet. But I can remember sending that message back: "Commissioned at" whatever time it was "on 1 January."

DOB: Had scientists begun to arrive by then?

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 32

VY: The weatherman was there. I think some of the Deep Freeze II people—I don't know if they were scientists or what—were there. I know the weatherman was there. He was sort of a nut so I remembered him. But I don't know. I was there until I think it was January the 24th or something like that.

DOB: Okay. So you didn't go back with the tractor train.

VY: No. No no. I kept on sending men back by air. Oh, they were flying in food, and when they would fly in food I would send so many men back until there was just about three of us left. That's when I was told to get back. So I said, "I'm ready, but I need the air, the bird, you know." Well, when our weather was good down there, at Little America it was bad, and then vice versa.

There was one time, Speedy—Harvey Speed in the R4D, Que Sera Sera was the name of it, he launched anyway from Little America to come up and get us. And when he got up to us, we were in a whiteout. And of course we're in communication with him. And he says, "Do you hear the aircraft?" "Yes, we can hear you all right." "Well, am I over you or what?" And we vectored him around to where he landed and then he says, "Okay, I'm down, but I don't know where I am." I said, "I can hear your engines. We'll take a bearing on your engines and go out that way." And we went out that way to where his engines were more audible, you know, and then brought him back to where the base was.

And he says, "Come on. You've got to get back or else you're not going to get on the Curtiss." So what I did not know is that he had jet-assisted things on the side of his aircraft, and we were roaring down there taking off and all of a sudden, bang! I thought the airplane fell apart. [Laughs] But that's what it was. But he didn't tell me he had them on there, the rascal.

DOB: So you went home, then, right directly then?

VY: Well, no. I got back to Little America, and then I went aboard the Curtiss and I took a shower and I changed into fresh khakis, no more Army cold-weather clothing. Navy-type khaki, you know.

"Chief Warrant Officer Young, lay up to the bridge." So I go up to the bridge. "They say they want you back over to Little America." And that's the O.D. that's telling me this. I said, "When are you guys getting underway?" He says, "Pretty soon. We got to git." "Well," I says, "don't forget me over there, huh?" So I went back over there in a chopper to find out what was going on, and the Deep Freeze II wanted some—I can't tell you now what they wanted. They wanted some information. Whether it was about the base, whether it was about the trail, whether it was about—whatever it was I could answer the questions, and I said, "Is there anything else?" They said, "No." I says, "Lead me to the chopper." So they flew me back out to the Curtiss. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 33

And then we stopped in Auckland. Well, we stopped in Wellington to pick up a screw for the Arneb. She had bent up a screw in the ice and was going into dry dock over in Australia to have this screw put on. And then went up to Auckland, and I have relatives in Australia, so I asked permission to leave the ship and meet it in Sydney. "Go ahead."

So I flew over to Melbourne. I stayed at Melbourne for a day or two, and then flew up to Sydney and spent the rest of the time with my uncle and some friends up there. My father's family—my father and mother were born and brought up in Scotland. And his father, my grandfather of course, and all the family went to Australia except my father. He came to the United States. So all the relatives were over there, and I had never seen them.

DOB: That must've been interesting.

VY: Yes. I finally saw some of them during the war. We went into Melbourne for some relaxation and so forth, but I didn't know who they were or where—I knew the name. And my mother had said, "If you ever get down there, the name is Robert Young and Albert Young" and so forth. And that Robert Young was a butcher.

DOB: And you found them.

VY: I found them.

DOB: That's great. Let me ask you just a couple things more about Byrd Station, because we know that Pole Station, South Pole Station, was built entirely by airdrop.

VY: That's correct.

DOB: Why wasn't Byrd done that way?

VY: Why wasn't it done by air?

DOB: Yes. Since there were some airdropped materials and people.

VY: The only thing that I know was airdropped was thirty drums of fuel by the Air Force. The rest of the stuff—building materials were all brought up by tractor train.

DOB: Right. But why weren't the building materials brought by air like they were for South Pole?

VY: I haven't the faintest idea why. I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know why that—maybe I do know why. Maybe I do. You see, the only airfield we had that Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 34

could handle aircraft that could do that type of work was down at McMurdo Sound. Now they're 400 miles from us. So that may have had some bearing on it.

DOB: But Pole was even farther.

VY: I don't know how far it is from McMurdo to Byrd Station.

DOB: Yes, that could've been farther.

VY: From McMurdo to Little America was about 400 miles.

DOB: Yes. It probably was farther.

VY: Well, I don't know if that was the contributing factor, but it seemed to me that that might be a partial answer. That's a good one to grab at.

DOB: Well, it just seemed that it was very risky and all to do that—

VY: There's always a risk whatever you do.

DOB: Yes it is. Well, Jack Bursey in his memoir seemed to pine for the days of dogsleds, and he said, "Well, we had a lot of danger and all of that, but we never lost anybody with a dogsled."

VY: Of course not. How are you going to lose them with a dog?

DOB: Do you think you could've gotten to and built Byrd Station with dogs?

VY: [Laughs] Yes, probably if we'd had about four thousand dogs or something. [Laughs] Then you'd need a ship just to carry all the chow.

DOB: Not too practical.

VY: I don't think that would—I'm guessing that—see, when I came aboard, it was a done deal that it was going to go by tractor and sled. And frankly I never questioned why it was going to go that route. All I did was started planning how I'm going to utilize that stuff. And subsequent events made Plan A no good. You have to go to Plan B. So I don't know why. I can't answer that question, Dian.

DOB: Okay. I would like to ask you some just general questions about your experience, unless there's something else that you'd like to tell me about anything that we've covered so far that I've missed.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 35

VY: Well, of course it had nothing to do with Operation Deep Freeze, but I went down there again in 1960, because of what I did in Deep Freeze. Remember I told you that the supply officer asked me if I'd prepare a place for him to put his material, and I told you I rolled a place for him? Well, in 1960, the Winter Olympics was being held, or going to be held, up in Squaw Valley, California. And the organizing committee for the Olympic Games had done a great job of planning and building the quarters for the athletes and the ice thing for the hockey and all this sort of stuff. And then all of a sudden it dawned on them, they had no place to park all the cars and buses and so forth that were going to be coming there. And they made choices or suggestions like we'll park them on Route 80, and the highway department says, "Like hell you will." And the highway patrol says, "Oh no."

Well, you've got to visualize. Squaw Valley sits back in here, has got a little two-lane road that runs back to where the games are going to be. On the left-hand side there's a thirty-acre meadow with a little stream called Squaw Creek running through it, and they get the idea in their head that they heard that the polar division of the Civil Engineer Lab was doing some snow compaction work up in the Sierras. And they went to the Navy and said, "You fellows can compact snow. How about doing this meadow for us so we can use it for a parking lot," and the Navy said, "Get lost. This is just an experimental thing. We don't even know what we're doing. We're just trying something." Well, you know, you have an organizing committee which does the up and down lifting. Then they had the Olympic committee, and they're the men with the pull. So they go to Knox, Secretary of the Navy Knox, and I guess President Eisenhower, too, for all I know. All I know is that it all rolls downhill, and it rolled down to the Navy to go up there and do that meadow, because the organizing committee thought, well, if they can get the meadow they can use that.

Well, they talked to the man who owned it who was an airplane driver for Pan Am. He says, "Yes. I can lease it to you, but put it back into the original condition." Well, put it back into the original condition, they can't park on the grass. They're going to have to stabilize the top of it somehow. They can't put rock—they'd have to take it all off again. They can't put pavement. They could, but they'd have to take it all off again. So they come back to snow.

Well, because of what I did with that roller, I was stationed then at Port Hueneme when the word came down to the people in the Civil Engineering Lab and the Navy at Port Hueneme to go up there and see about doing this. And you know the only guy who had experience in snow compaction? And I wasn't even in that outfit. I was over in YDSO, which used to be called the—it wasn't Navy Facilities Engineering Command, it was Yards and Docks Supply Office then. Well, I was with YDSO which was the supply command for Yards and Docks. And I get a set of TAD orders to CBBU, Construction Battalion Base Unit, to go up there to Squaw Valley and talk to these people up there and make preparations to construct a parking lot.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 36

Well, on Washington's birthday, the 22nd of February, in that year, of '60, we had thirteen thousand cars and buses on that meadow on compacted snow, and not a one of them got stuck. There was much more to it than that, but anyway it worked. I learned an awful lot just by experience there. Developed a thing called a ransom rod so we know how much we have to compact to take so much weight, and how to get most of the air out of the snow by stepping up the transmission in the Pulvamixers. Anyway, I was done.

I was going to go back then to YDSO, and Dave Feinman from Task Force 43 says to me, "Admiral Tyree would like for you to join the task force." I said, "Task force? You mean Task Force 43?" He says, "Yes." I said, "Why do I want to join that for?" "Well," he says, "he wants you to come down there and build a road from McMurdo Base out to Williams Airfield so they can run trucks over it instead of the tractors. And then to go back up on the ice shelf and build a snow-compacted runway in case the ice goes out we can" . . . . I said, "This is orders or are you and I talking, Dave, just like" you know. He says, "Well, you can consider it—I think you'll be getting a set of orders." And I did get a set of orders with a proviso I can pick out men that I wanted from any of the battalions. Well that was a help because I had in mind just who I wanted, so I picked out all the men, and we went down there and we did it. We built the road out there, and they ran two-and-a-half-ton trucks out there—vrooom, vrooom! [Laughs] We were just finishing it up when the operations officer from the task force comes down there and says, "We've got a problem. The ice runway, there's a swale in it, and the planes are getting too many g's. Do you think you can do something about that?" I said, "I'm not rigged to do anything like that. The only thing you can fix it with is more ice." And I said, "Yes, I think I can do something like that, but I need a drill to drill through the ice, I need a pump, and I need the hoses." "Anything you want that public works has up there, you have carte blanche to go get whatever you want."

So that's what we did. We scored that ice with the Pulvamixers, chipped it up, put the chips in the swale and flooded it, and let it set for a couple of hours, then we put another lift on, let that sit for a couple of hours. I had seventy-two hours to get the thing done, and well before the seventy-two hours we had it to grade . . . and hard. It was frozen. They had stopped all air traffic to repair the runway. The first plane in said it was just like landing on a concrete runway. It was beautiful.

DOB: All right.

VY: Yes. So then we went up and built the strip up on the ice shelf to the extent that—we were only supposed to be there for the summer—to the extent that it would take—the Otter landed without any problem, right on his wheels. The R4D landed on skis and then put his wheels down, and we had him do some figure eights. And it just made it a little mark in it. He could have landed on there. The P2V, when put him down there, he did break through a bit. So it was no good for the P2V. But push come to shove, you could've landed an R4D on wheels there—definitely on skis. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 37

And that was enough though. It was time now for the crew to go back. And the ship was in, in fact. So they said okay, go back on that ship to Christchurch, and we took our seabags down to the ship. And we even helped them offload the ship. We offloaded this fifty-ton rock crusher and the trucks and the front-end loaders and the generators, etc.

And then, the operations officer from the task force comes down again, and he says, "Can you crush rock?" I said, "Sure, we can crush rock. Why?" He says, "Well, public works people up there say they can't crush rock." I said, "They're all Seabees up there." He says, "Yes, but they can't do it. Oh," he said, "tell you what. You take your crew up to Observation Hill and crush rock, enough for the—they're going to put in a nuclear power plant. If you will take your crew up there and crush that rock, Admiral Tyree says your men will have the first seats on the Connie going back to Christchurch. You won't have to ride the bucket of bolts." I said, "Hey, guys, let's offload all of your stuff." "What for?" "We're going to go up on Observation Hill and crush some rock. But we go back on the Connie, number ones." "Oh. Okay."

We offloaded the crushing plant. We hauled it up there along with the other stuff, but none of us had powder experience. But fortunately one man over there at the public works was a powderman, so we snatched him and he did the powder work and we did the rest. We crushed enough of that rock for two nuclear plants. And we went back on the Connie.

DOB: All right.

VY: Numbers ones on board.

DOB: Connie being Constellation?

VY: Yes. That was the airplane of that day.

DOB: Well, okay. We're going to run out of time before too long. You were in a military operation that was really in support of civilian science. This is all of the work that you were doing during Deep Freeze was for the International Geophysical Year.

VY: Right.

DOB: And after forty-four years, the Navy is not doing all of this, and the military is just not really very much involved. What difference do you think that'll make?

VY: None. Well, it'll deny some person in the Navy a chance to go see what the Antarctic is like. Now, of course, it's nothing anyway. In my estimation, it's just become a resort. There's no more adventure attached to it.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 38

DOB: Well indeed, one of the big issues in Antarctica now is tourism.

VY: Yes. That's right.

DOB: What do you think of that?

VY: Lousy.

DOB: Why?

VY: Well, I don't know. I guess because I live in a location where you get loaded with tourists going to the beach and then you get loaded with tourists that—snowbirds come down from the north. But I don't know. It's just a feeling, I suppose. Bring them down. What the hell. I guess they've got the facilities there for them now. So what have we got to lose? But I'll tell you one thing I would be against—any sort of commercially extracting minerals of any type or that type of business.

DOB: Do you think that'll happen? VY: We talked about it many times, you know. We said, oh, the problem with getting it out would be so difficult. But over the years, things have developed—machinery, equipment and so forth have developed to the extent that maybe it wouldn't be so difficult getting it out. And I really don't know enough to talk about it, about how much of that sort of stuff is there.

DOB: Well, the Antarctic Treaty forbids it.

VY: Yes. I wouldn't want to see them change that. That's what I mean. Don't let them do that. Use your influence to tell them they can't do that.

DOB: You wintered over the one time in Deep Freeze I.

VY: At Little America, yes. Deep Freeze I.

DOB: What effect does the long winter night have on the amount and the kind of work you can do, and on your spirit?

VY: Well, with that very thought in mind, we purposely—at Little America—we purposely set up a regular routine, just like you'd have if you were working on Guam or Midway or wherever you might be. Very relaxed, though, but they were working hours. They tended to differentiate between the time. It's the morning. We know it's the morning because we had a thing called reveille and we had breakfast. And after that, we know it's night because we knocked off at four o'clock or 1600 or whatever, and the movie was at 1900, and taps was at whatever it was. I forget. Maybe 2300 or something.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 39

And we left things to be done like building lockers, putting linoleum down, but with lots of time off to go down to the galley and get a cup of coffee and tell a couple of sea stories over the coffee and then go back. But there was always the knowledge that this is night and this is day, even though it's pitch black.

It wasn't always pitch black. There is a certain beauty down there. In the meteorology building they had a blister, sits on the top, and it had like a bosun chair. It's a piece of wood placed across chains, and a curtain you could pull all around. And when you were sitting there, your head was up in this blister. And I used to sit up there sometimes and just marvel at what I was looking at. When the moon was so bright and things were so crystal clear, you could see the play of light and shadows, as far as the eye could see. It was a harsh beauty, but you've seen the beauty of fall when the trees are all in color. It's a different beauty than that. I've never really mentioned this to anybody because I don't think they'd understand it . . . but I think you would.

DOB: Yes, I do.

VY: So I knew it was very dangerous out there. I had gone out one time during the winter night to look at an antenna that was out there, and I had a scarf around me and everything else. But I must've had a little opening someplace because the wind got up there, and when I got back in I developed a big blister here. Doc Ehrlich looked at it and he says, "What the hell are you doing out there? You've got a . . . ." I had something. He said, "It could be bad. That tissue and stuff in there could rot." Fortunately, you know, it didn't. Not sunburned, but . . . frostbite. "You've got frostbite there." He proceeded to tell me how stupid I was and so forth. "Ah, shut up." [Chuckles]

DOB: Well, I interviewed Dr. Ehrlich as well.

VY: He is something else, ain't he?

DOB: Yes, he is. And one of the things that struck me about his conversation was that he felt that the real leaders at Little America were not the people nominally in charge, but rather other individuals, mostly petty officers who had really earned the respect of the men who were there. Do you think—

VY: Absolutely. That's exactly what I was saying before.

DOB: Who would you name as the leaders?

VY: Well, I think of course—

DOB: Besides yourself, whom he named.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 40

VY: I think as I said before, like Hammer Hon and Buckets, I keep calling him—Beckett is his name—and Stroup, Willie Burleson—he's dead now . . . Doc Aldrich. You know, it's hard really to pinpoint any individual because I think every one of them was . . . what am I trying to say? Pulling their load. They were doing their job. You know, you never had any trouble.

DOB: It's amazing, isn't it?

VY: Yes. We didn't have any disciplinary trouble at all. And some of the things that some of the—well, Boom Boom Wedemeyer. Now there was another man you could depend upon. He was the dynamite guy. And he and Beckett had a—well, we'd better leave that one go. It involved the head up at the end of the long tunnel with the buildings facing into the tunnel. And it was anchored at the one end by the head and at the other end by the garage. We had a problem with the head in the middle of the winter, and it was solved with dynamite.

DOB: Did it solve the problem? VY: Yes, it solved it. Yes. Of course it had to solve it because there was nothing else you could do.

DOB: Okay. Were you ever truly scared?

VY: Scared for my own—

DOB: Yes. For yourself—for your life.

VY: I guess just momentarily when we hit that open lead with the Weasel and the water boiled up in the floorboards.

DOB: At McMurdo.

VY: Yes, down at McMurdo. And then I was kind of concerned, too, when we were out there and the wind started gusting up and getting hit in the face with these ice crystals. Until we got the parachute tent rigged, I guess I was—I don't know if I was scared. I guess I was kind of concerned. And then of course the other thing that crossed my mind—this is far-fetched—but there were seals up there, and I don't know how we would do it. I don't know if I could kill them or not. But I guess I said to myself, well, we won't starve. We've got seal here or something.

But I can't think of a time when I was scared, for instance, like you would be if people were firing at you. You're not concerned then. You're scared. And anybody that said they're not scared is a liar or stupid, one of the two.

DOB: But that didn't happen to you in Antarctica. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 41

VY: No.

DOB: How do you account for that? You were in some pretty tricky situations.

VY: Maybe I was too dumb to realize it. I don't know. On the other hand, maybe—

DOB: Or maybe you were well prepared?

VY: To the best of my knowledge, yes. And it was maybe because I was thinking of exactly that thing so there wouldn't be any problems. There are seven P's. You bring them into consideration all the time and you'll be all right.

DOB: Seven P's.

VY: How can I say this? I don't know you. I think it's: Proper prior planning prevents a certain type poor performance.

DOB: [Laughs] You don't want to use the word.

VY: You fill in the blank.

DOB: All right. Well, maybe you've already answered the question. What are you the proudest of from your Antarctic experience?

VY: The proudest of?

DOB: Yes.

VY: I guess I would have to say I'm the proudest of the men that made possible the construction of Byrd Station and the running of the train. I'm proud of the men that did the thing that I was supposed to do. In other words, the mission that I was given to do. I'm proud of the fact that we accomplished it, and I'm proud of the way that they performed.

DOB: And yourself.

VY: I'm satisfied with what I did.

DOB: You sound overly modest.

VY: Well, you know, they gave some of us a medal, and that's the only way—they can't give you a raise, so that's the only way they can say hey, thanks a lot.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 42

DOB: And you got one.

VY: I got one. And I was instrumental in getting another one for—well, I recommended George Moss for one, and I also sometime back recommended him for warrant officer. And our paths parted after we got back and I subsequently found he got it and he went on.

DOB: You may have answered this question already, too. If you were an artist and could capture on one canvas the essence of Antarctica for you, what would you paint?

[End Side B, Tape 2]

[Begin Side A, Tape 3]

DOB: All right. I was asking you about your painting of Antarctica.

VY: More than anything I—two things maybe. You know what I mentioned before when I was looking out that blister? Just being able to paint what I saw. And the other thing—

DOB: What colors would that scene have been?

VY: It would be in black and white. The colors you mean?

DOB: Yes. Were there other colors of black?

VY: No. Oh.

DOB: Colors of white?

VY: Well, the black would be whatever a shadow is. I don't think that's really a black black is it?

DOB: Probably not.

VY: I don't think so. And the white, of course, is the bright light of the moon. So that wouldn't be—it would sort of be an attenuated white. I don't know. I'm not an artist. I don't know these things.

But I'll tell you the other thing that I would paint is that cliff that faces you when you approach the Antarctic—the land, the ice shelf. You have seen pictures of the White Cliffs of Dover? It puts me in mind of that. I've never seen the White Cliffs of Dover except as pictures. But you look at that thing and it's awesome. And it's not stable. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 43

It's moving, then when it gets so far out to where the action of the sea can start affecting, it's going to work it till it breaks off.

DOB: Did you see that happen?

VY: No. I never saw it happen. No. And of course that's why we had to go to Kainan Bay because where the Bay of Whales was, that was all filled up again.

DOB: I saw a glacier calve off in Alaska. It's awesome.

VY: I'll bet.

DOB: It sounds incredible. Okay. Well, I've got all kinds of things that you might want to talk about: what you did for fun, or how you kept in touch with your family at home, or anything you want to tell me about living there. VY: The mail isn't going to go very far that you write, and so actually—I enjoyed, actually, keeping whoever I could keep in touch with their families through amateur radio.

DOB: Were you a ham?

VY: Yes. We took turns running the rig down there in Little America, and of course I took my turn and talked to my family, too.

DOB: How often could you do that?

VY: I would say we all got through probably two or three times a month, thanks to the people like Paul up in Syracuse and oh, what's his name over in Davisville. I can't remember his name.

DOB: Somebody named Jules was up there somewhere.

VY: Oh, and Jules. That young fellow there, he was in New Jersey. Yes. He was one of the ones that really put a lot of traffic through for us. Paul used to send cards out. I think my wife still has a card. He had all the addresses, and he would send five maybe different things to say on a card, and you pick out either one, two, three, four, or five to Joe Schmo, five, and that means that number five whatever it said would go to that address. He did that on his own.

DOB: It's remarkable.

VY: Yes. So those fellows were a big help. And somehow or other I think hearing the voice had more impact than reading the letter, because I can remember several times the guys went out of there with tears in their eyes. Those were good times.

Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 44

DOB: You thought it was a positive experience.

VY: Oh yes. Absolutely. I worked with some wonderful men.

DOB: Where would you rank that year in Antarctica, say, with your Navy career as a whole?

VY: I was a chief warrant officer—

DOB: I mean in terms of the experiences of your life. Where would you place that year in terms of good or bad and in comparison with the rest of your career?

VY: I don't know. It was . . . . It's hard to say because I had so many things happen after that. You know, we got involved in Vietnam afterwards and there was a lot of stuff that I was involved in over there. I don't know. I guess I couldn't call it really a pleasure, but what could I call it then? Interesting? The most interesting? Yes, because it was something that I had an interest in. And the place, the place I had an interest in.

DOB: Why was there that interest? Was it a sense of being a pioneer or what?

VY: Yes. I guess that's a great deal to say for it. That's probably—like I say, I had read things about the Antarctic, and I visualized what those men were doing. And of course I—due to the interest in the place, I knew it was an enormous place. And we had just made a scratch on it. Who knows what we could find down there? It was like a last frontier, and that was very interesting to me. It was an adventure.

DOB: To make a difference in a place that was the last frontier?

VY: Was it different?

DOB: No, I said in the feeling of making a difference. You know, your being there made a difference in how things went.

VY: Well, that's what we were there for. But I always thought that yes, it's going to make a difference. But you know, the basic requirements for us to do these things were to support the scientists that were going to be involved in all these disciplines. And if they could learn something that they couldn't learn any other place than this place, then we had done something that might be beneficial to mankind.

DOB: You made a difference.

VY: And therefore we might make a difference. It takes the cooperation, though, of all hands. We can stick a place up, but the other men have to go there and see what that ionosphere is all about or whatever. So if I had a small part in doing something that might benefit mankind, that's satisfaction. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 45

DOB: All right. Paul Siple, the scientific leader at Pole Station and who had been down there years, many times, wrote that "the Antarctic generally wields a profound effect on character and personality," he said. He said that almost nobody is the same after they've been there for a while. Do you agree with that?

VY: Yes.

DOB: And were you changed by your experience?

VY: I think so.

DOB: How? VY: I think I had learned something to respect nature. How can I explain this? [Pause] I guess maybe it made me realize I was only a small part in this whole—not just Antarctica—in this whole universe. I think there was even a spiritual thing to it. You know, God made everything, including the Antarctic. And the Antarctic is awesome. And you think maybe there might be some degree of satisfaction or whatever if you as an individual felt that you did something that may be really worthwhile. Maybe you will never even know the benefit that might be derived from it, but you had a hand in it, in doing that.

And you know, in the normal course of life you don't even think of these things. You ask me questions like this, and it's hard to put words to what I might be thinking. But I'll always remember it. I think it's the highlight of my career. I don't know, I guess that's about it.

DOB: What haven't I asked you that you wish I had. And that's my last question.

VY: What haven't you asked me? [Pause]

DOB: Or are you hungry?

VY: Yes, we can eat, I think. Do you want to eat?

DOB: Sure. Well, shall we—

VY: I'll take you to dinner.

DOB: Well, before we do that, let me thank you so much for a wonderful afternoon.

VY: It was my pleasure.

DOB: I really appreciated talking to you. Victor Young Interview, May 10, 1999 46

VY: I'm sorry that I fouled up your schedule, though.

DOB: It's not a problem. Thank you so much.

VY: I'm glad to be here.

[End of interview]