Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Donald C. Mehaffey, CAPT, SC USN (Ret.) conducted on March 30, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger DOB: Today is the 30th of March, 1999. I'm Dian Belanger and I'm speaking with Donald Mehaffey about his experiences in Deep Freeze I in Antarctica. Good afternoon, Don, and thanks so much for talking with me. DM: Hi, Dian. Glad to see you again. DOB: Begin by telling me just a little about your background, Don. I'm interested in where you grew up and where you went to school and what you decided to do with your life, in particular anything that might suggest you'd end up in a place like Antarctica. DM: Well, to tell you the truth, I hadn't planned to ever be in the Navy. I was at Cal in 1941. That was my freshman year. DOB: Berkeley? DM: UC-Berkeley at Cal, and of course Pearl Harbor came. After two years at Cal—all I'd ever done is gone to school, high school and college—nine of us in my fraternity that I belonged to said, "Let's enlist in the Navy." So we all enlisted in the Navy. I went to boot camp on July 1st of 1943 and was in World War II; was in the Solomon Islands and in the Philippine Islands. And at one time I said, "My Lord, this war is going to go on forever. I'm going to apply for a commission. I'm going to try to get an appointment to the Naval Academy." So I put in for it. Well, when the atom bomb was dropped in 1945, the war soon came to an end. I didn't have enough points to get out of the Navy, but about that time the approval came through for me to go back to Naval ROTC at Cal, and I didn't have a choice. DOB: Why not? DM: Well, I had said I would accept an appointment. I really wanted to go to the Naval Academy, but the Naval Board said just to finish at Cal. I guess maybe I did have a choice, but my dad said, "Take it. It's cheap schooling." So I did. I finished at Cal, Naval ROTC, and graduated in 1948. And I got my commission in '48. Well, for the schooling I owed the Navy four years, so I went into the Navy, went to Supply Corps School in Bayonne, New Jersey, and then went onto an aircraft carrier as disbursing officer. But in the meantime, the Korean War came on, and after my four-year stint was up, the Navy was not letting people out. DOB: Because of Korea? DM: Because of Korea, because I was a USN officer. So I just stayed on. Ultimately went to Naval Post Graduate School at Monterey, and also to George Washington University. I Donald Mehaffey Interview, March 30, 1999 2 got a master's at post-graduate school and got another master's at GWU in Washington, DC. DOB: So did I. DM: Anyway, so I ended up staying for thirty-one years. So I was in the Navy from July 1st of 1943 until June 30th of 1974, all active duty. A lot of it schooling, of course. Because I had two years and nine months enlisted service, and then went back as a midshipman at Naval ROTC at Berkeley, and then got my ensign's commission in June of '48 and went on from there. DOB: It must've been a good thing. DM: It was good. I loved it, really. I'd really planned to go to law school at Cal, but WWII changed my whole life. World War II changed a lot of us. I was good to the Navy, but the Navy was very good to me. DOB: How did you get interested in supply? DM: It wasn't so much interested in supply. I would've liked to have gone into naval aviation because I had my pilot's license. I had a private pilot's license which I got through the GI Bill of Rights also when I was going to Cal. I got that during the last two years at Cal when I came back into the Naval RO program. I wanted to become a Navy pilot, but my eye problems prevented that. I didn't want to go into the general line, so—and since my degree was in business administration at Cal, I went right in to Supply Corps School. My commission has always been Supply Corps, USN. I didn't want to become a general line officer, but I'd like to have been a pilot, but it didn't work that way. DOB: How did you learn about opportunities for you in Antarctica? DM: I didn't know about it. I was having a wonderful time stationed at Military Sea Transportation Service in New Orleans when I got a call from somebody from OP, Office of Personnel, part of Bureau of Naval Personnel. And I said, "I don't hardly even know where Antarctica is. Is it north or south?" Really, about that stupid. So I went up to Washington, D.C. to see the task force supply officer, Lt. Comdr. Don Kent. He interviewed me and said I'd have to make up my mind within forty-eight hours if I wanted to go or not, and I'd have my orders soon after that. I came home, talked about it with some of my friends in New Orleans, and I said, "Gee. You can go anyplace in the world, but Antarctica's someplace you'd have to join like a task force or something to go down there. I would love to see the South Pole." I'd heard of Admiral Byrd at the South Pole and all this, so I came home and decided I would go. I phoned Don Kent who called OP. I had my orders in a few days and headed for Davisville. All our staging was at Davisville, Rhode Island. Donald Mehaffey Interview, March 30, 1999 3 DOB: How old were you at the time? DM: How old was I? Let me see. I celebrated my thirty-third birthday down at Little America, so I guess I must've been thirty-two at the time. DOB: Okay. More mature than many of them. DM: Yes. A lot of the enlisted personnel were really, really, really young. I think Chief Hess and I are just about the same age. He might be a little bit older than I am. But really, I was older than a lot of them. DOB: So it all began for you at Davisville, Rhode Island. DM: It all began for me at Davisville, Rhode Island. DOB: And what happened there to prepare you for the ice and what were you assigned to do? DM: Well, of course I became the supply officer of MCB (Special), the Mobile Construction Battalion (Special), and to tell you the truth, the busiest time for me was at Davisville. That was our staging area. All the supplies came into Davisville. Everything was color-coded, this big system we had—well, we didn't talk about it but we will later on. We were going to have this perfect system where when we had to put supplies up on the ice, we had a well-coordinated color-code type thing. And Chief Hess was really the head honcho, as far as I was concerned. He and I worked very closely together. And it ended up that he went to McMurdo and I went to Little America 5. Incidentally, money seemed to be no problem. The task force people, if we needed more money, just seemed to throw it at us; even money to buy dogs, which I'm sure you've heard of already, which was a complete fiasco. DOB: Why? DM: Well, we had some people—some of this is going to have to be taken out—but we had people like Jack Bursey and even Admiral Byrd himself, who had dogs when they went down there in earlier times, but now we have helicopters to do exactly the same thing and much better. But some of the "old explorers" insisted we have dogs, so we got them. We had them at McMurdo Sound; not at Little America where I was. But I think they were absolutely useless, and it was $24,000 really spent very badly. DOB: Did that come under the supply officer's . ? DM: Yes. The money to purchase them was given by the task force. And there was a Jack Tuck—have you talked . ? Donald Mehaffey Interview, March 30, 1999 4 DOB: He's dead. DM: Oh my God, you're right. That's true. But he was the one really in charge of it, and an Air Force MSGT Dolleman, I think it was. He wintered over in McMurdo, I think. But they were really in charge of them. I just did the purchasing of them, and I thought it was a horrible way to spend money. DOB: Give me some sense of the complexity of the task of getting all these supplies organized—the magnitude and the complexity. Give me some sense of what you had to have. DM: What did we have to have? My God. Well, of course at the beginning we had to have shelter. We also put out the contract for all the Clements panels.