McMurdo Station had become a real hub of activity by the time we had returned
from our flight to Little America Station.
The Operations Plan for the summer placed foremost priority on getting an
emergency radio station set up halfway between McMurdo Station and the South
Pole, about 300 miles inland. As I had mentioned earlier the station was
named Beardmore Station and it was to act as a radio relay station, a weather
reporting station and an emergency refueling station for R4D's returning from
the South Pole and other remote locations. The other three squadron R4D's had
already started shuttling back and forth from McMurdo to the new Beardmore
Station. (This name is a misnomer because the Beardmore Station was not
located at the foot of Beardmore Glacier as planned in the Operations
publications, but at the foot of the Liv Glacier, about 80 miles to the east
of Beardmore Glacier. The pilot of the first R4D going south found the
surface of the ice shelf at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier too rough for
landing and scouted eastwards until he found a smoother area, which just
happened to be at the foot of the Liv Glacier. Since the new refueling base
was shown in the operations publications as Beardmore Station the name stuck,
even though it was geographically incorrect).
The R5D, which made the first flight southwards from New Zealand, was now
busily engaged in making several long distance exploratory mapping flights of
the interior of Antarctica. Another P2V had flown in to McMurdo from New
Zealand and was making some exploratory flights of its own.
While all squadron aircraft were now involved in operational flights, McMurdo
personnel were making preparations for the arrival of the giant Air Force
C-124 Globemasters, which were to be used for air dropping cargo at the South
Pole Station. As mentioned before these large aircraft couldn't land anywhere
on the Continent except at McMurdo, because like the R5D's, they made only
wheel landings and the ice runway at McMurdo was the only hard landing spot
on the Continent.
McMurdo itself was showing signs of coming to life after the long winter
isolation that was just passed. The newly arrived people were starting to
take over from the wintering over group and the streets of the small village,
which had seen little activity for over a half year were now full of people.
Our return from Little America, like a lot of later missions, was treated
with little fanfare. Everyone seemed to be so busy working at their own
activities that they seemed to have little time to care much what our
squadron flight crews might be doing.
Our second Antarctic flight mission, as well as several others that soon
followed was to join with the other R4D's in getting Navy personnel, radio
equipment, supplies and fuel to Beardmore Station, which was about 400 miles
south of McMurdo Station. After all this equipment was unloaded on to the
snow surface we then emptied our large internal fuel tanks of aviation fuel
into rubberized tanks which had been spread out on the snow surface near the
tents which would house the base radio operators. We seldom had to use any of
this fuel but it was good to have fuel available should things have gone
wrong.
It should be noted that one phenomenon of the Antarctic regions was that when
the Sun developed sunspots (volcanic eruptions on the surface of the Sun)
radio communications were disrupted to different degrees and long distance
radio communications became difficult or impossible for days on end. It was
hoped that the Beardmore Station radio operators could relay messages that
might not get through to McMurdo and the Pole Station without their help.
Beardmore Station personnel also made frequent weather observations which
they forwarded to McMurdo and Little America. These reports helped the
meteorologists at these two stations to make better weather predictions for
all our flight operations.
On my first flight to Beardmore Station I found myself once again amazed at
the grandeur of the Antarctic Continent. Our flight path took us over the
Ross Sea Ice Shelf which is flat and mostly featureless for over 400 miles.
We kept over the western edge of the ice shelf, where it meets the mountains
that surround the Antarctic Continent. Heading southwards towards Beardmore
Station I had the magnificent ice clad mountains that bordered the Continent
on the right hand side of the aircraft. These mountains held back the great
mass of ice and snow of the continental plateau. Since the air was superbly
clear mountains many miles away seemed much closer than they were. Although I
knew that these icy peaks were extremely cold and forbidding for anyone to
traverse on foot, still they looked from my distance wonderfully smooth and
inviting. Like a beautiful painting you want to study in order to feel the
vibrancy of the art, the view of these pearl-like beauties caused me to stare
at them for hours at a time, as we flew southwards. 30
About fifty miles south of McMurdo we flew over a large area of disturbed
ice, perhaps twenty miles square, where the slowly moving ice shelf met and
was squeezed between two large mountains. The tremendous pressures that were
generated caused the surface of the ice to fracture and form into thousands
of enormous crevasses. For anyone not familiar with what crevasses are they
should imagine that the surface of the ice cracked open leaving a deep
fissure which might be several hundred feet deep. Some crevasses in time form
a thin bridge of snow deceptively covering the gaping holes below. An
unsuspecting person walking over this snow bridge could easily break through
this snow bridge and then fall into the deep crevasse below. Many an
Antarctic explorer has fallen through these snow bridges and quite a few have
met their death this way. Even large motorized vehicles have unexpectedly
been lost when the surface gave away without warning. The airfield at Little
America V was called Kiel Field, in honor of a U.S. Navy sailor, who in 1955
lost his life when his large tractor broke through the snow bridge of a giant
crevasse and he and his tractor plunged several dozens of feet to the bottom
of this terrible chasm.
As I flew over this myriad landscape of crevasses, I thought what a
forbidding place it would have been had we been forced to land there. Even if
our skis hadn't penetrated one of these snow bridges as we landed we would
not have been able to safely leave the aircraft for fear of an unseen
crevasse swallowing us up. I flew over this horrible place many times and
each time I thought of going down on that nightmare surface and I prayed that
our two engines would keep running until we were clear of the area.
Still it was a beautiful sight from the air with the almost geometric pattern
of the crevasses meeting the coastal mountains rising up many thousands of
feet into the air and I can easily say that all this was one of the most
thrilling vistas of my Antarctic sojourn.
As we proceeded southwards, we passed five or six major glaciers, each
spilling vast amounts of ice from the high plateau of the Continent. Although
each glacier was a thing of beauty, Beardmore Glacier was the most beautiful
and the most interesting. Glaciers have been described as frozen rivers,
however not so frozen that they are without movement. Explorers of the
Antarctic tell of grinding and popping noises which go on constantly as the
ice is pushed towards the mouth of the glaciers. Monstrous shapes are created
as the ice is crushed and tumbles forward making passage on foot a veritable
nightmare. If Beardmore Glacier is a river, it is the widest river in the
world, for it is over five miles wide at the mouth. From the cockpit of my
R4D I found the jumble of ice on the glacier as indescribable and had we
crashed landed while flying over it would have been like flying into the side
of a mountain.
After almost four hours in the air we finally reached Beardmore Station,
which had been selected only a few days previously. A lonelier site you
couldn't have imagined. The two men who lived at this site for weeks at a
time had nothing to look forward to except eating, sleeping, relaying radio
messages and taking weather observations. Whenever we shut off our engines
and climbed out of our aircraft cabin I was amazed at how very quiet it was
there, especially when there was little or no wind blowing. Since the snow
surface absorbed most noise, you could hear the sound of your own breathing.
The nearest mountain was about two miles away, yet it looked a lot closer.
Looking away from the mountains there was only the desolate ice shelf which
was featureless for as far as you could see. I marvelled at how men who could
stand living under such lonely circumstances for weeks at a time. They sure
enjoyed our occasional visits, especially when we brought them mail and
offered them some gossip from McMurdo.
Somewhere back in the States someone who anticipated the need for a toile)t
facility at this remote site, took out his carpentering tools and hammered a
wooden frame with its usual half-moon over the door. This outhouse on the
snow was prefabricated so that it was easily snapped together once we had
delivered it to the camp. It was built like any outhouse might be, with one
exception; inside it was so narrow that your knees stuck outside and the door
couldn't be closed. If there were any wind, and there usually was, you
managed to conclude your business in short order. Still, with the magnificent
mountains rising upwards to over 10,000 feet high just outside the outhouse,
the view was nothing short of magnificent.
Returning to McMurdo after stopping off at Beardmore Station should have been
the reverse of going there, however, it somehow was always different. The
view changed, the angle of the sun was different and the colors reflected
from the snow surface were somewhat changed. I would have thought, before I
went to the Antarctic, that snow was white and that was all there was to it.
What I found out was that as the sun angle changed, as the wind rearranged
the snow crystals on the surface and as the visibility changed, there was
also a change in the hue or color of the snow. Sometimes the snow appeared
blue like the sky, and at other times it appeared as various shades of pink.
The photographs I took at that time reflected this constant change of color.
31
It should be noted that the light reflected from the snow was so intense that
we were forced to wear sun glasses at all times. Once our Navigator, Ensign
Creech, left his navigation table to join us in the cockpit for a look-see at
the scenery. In the two or three minutes that he gazed out of the windshield,
a view he foolishly took without sun glasses, he burned the retina of his
eyes and had to be grounded for several days. Snow blindness results for
sunburning your eye retina and it is very uncomfortable, requiring that you
keep your eyes bandaged until the sunburn heals.
After we had completed three round trip cargo flights to Beardmore Station,
it was decided that the unit was fully operational and we could go on to do
other things. It was now time for the first South Pole landing, the operation
which was to test whether our R4D's could really land and then takeoff from
this most remote location, the bottom of the world. 32
Antarctic Facts
- According to theory, some 200 million years ago Antarctica
was joined to South America, Africa, India and Australia in a single large
continent called Gondwanaland. There was no ice sheet, and trees and large
animals flourished. Today, only geological formations, coal beds and fossils
remain as clues to Antarctica's warm past.
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