Operation Highjump: What the Navy's Own Files Say Really Happened in Antarctica

0:00 Cold open

In December 1946, the United States Navy sent an aircraft carrier to the bottom of the world. Thirteen ships, 4,700 men, a submarine and the most famous explorer alive. Eight weeks later, they turned around and came home, early. Three of them never came home at all. They are still down there, under the ice. And for almost eighty years, the internet has told you why the Navy really left. A hidden Nazi base. Flying saucers. A battle the United States lost. The Navy kept its own records of what happened down there. Tonight, we read them. This is Directive 003, Operation Highjump.

0:55 The biggest trip south in history

Officially, it had a far more boring name, the United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program, Task Force 68. In command, Rear Admiral Richard Cruzen. And riding along as officer in charge, Admiral Richard Byrd, the first man to fly over the South Pole, a national hero for twenty years. Before Highjump, every expedition that ever went to Antarctica put together had seen a fraction of the continent. This one would try to photograph as much of it as possible in a single summer. They split into three groups, one headed east, one headed west and the center group pushed straight through the pack ice for the Bay of Whales to build a base on the ice shelf itself. Little America, the fourth one.

1:47 The orders

So what were they actually there to do? The orders survive. They're not subtle. Train men and test equipment in extreme cold. Extend American claims over, quote, "the largest practicable area" of Antarctica. Find out if bases could be built, supplied and flown from on the ice. And then there's this line, develop techniques for air bases on ice with particular attention to using them later on in interior Greenland. Greenland, not Antarctica. It's 1946, the war is over, the next one already has a shape. And if America ever fights the Soviet Union, the shortest route between them runs straight over the top of the world. Highjump wasn't a science trip for a few sailors. It was a cold-weather rehearsal, run on the one continent where nobody would be watching.

2:46 The ice fights back

The ice started winning almost immediately. The submarine, USS Sennet, couldn't handle the pack. It had to be escorted out by an icebreaker and sent somewhere it could actually survive. Ships were trapped, hulls were dented, propellers bent. Then the Navy tried something nobody had done before. Six twin-engine transport planes, each one strapped with rockets, took off from the deck of the carrier Philippine Sea. They could launch from a carrier, they could not land on one. Every pilot knew it. Once you were airborne, the only way down was a snow runway at Little America, more than 600 miles away and crews were still carving it out of the ice. Admiral Byrd was on one of them. They all made it.

3:35 George One

Not everyone was that lucky. December 30th, 1946, a seaplane, call sign George One is flying over the coast near Thurston Island. Total whiteout, no horizon, no ground, just white. The crew thinks they're well above the ice. They aren't. The plane slams into a ridge and bursts into flames. Two men die instantly. Ensign Maxwell Lopez, Radioman Wendell Hendersin. Two hours later, a third, Radioman Frederick Williams. Six survive, burned, frostbitten in the wreckage of a plane in the most hostile place on Earth. They wrap themselves in what's left, they bury their friends in the snow beside the wreck, and they wait, for thirteen days. Search planes fly over and miss them again and again in the weather. Then on the thirteenth day, a crew spots smoke. The survivors are told to drag themselves miles across the ice to open water where a plane can land. They do it. The pilot, Ralph LeBlanc, was so badly frostbitten the surgeons had to amputate both of his legs. And Lopez, Hendersin and Williams, they are still there. The glacier they crashed on has been moving inch by inch ever since. Their families have spent decades asking the Navy to bring them home. A fourth man, Seaman Vance Woodall, died in an accident while unloading cargo. Four men lost, that's the real casualty list of Operation Highjump.

5:11 The oasis

But that's not the strangest thing they've found down there. February 1947, a pilot named David Bunger is flying photo runs along the coast and in the middle of an endless sheet of ice, he sees something that shouldn't exist. Bare brown hills, no snow and lakes, lakes of open water, some of them blue, some of them green. He lands his seaplane on one. The newspapers back home lose their minds. A warm oasis at the bottom of the world, they call it a Shangri-La. It's real. You can find it on a map today, the Bunger Hills. It's ice-free rock where the wind scours the snow away and dark ground soaks up the sun. Strange, rare, not magic. But remember that word, oasis, because somebody else did.

6:08 How a myth is built

The operation ended in late February 1947, earlier than some had expected. The Navy's reason was simple, winter was coming early and ships that stayed would be frozen in. A few days later, on March 5th, a Chilean newspaper called El Mercurio ran an interview with Admiral Byrd. He talked about the lessons of the trip and he warned that America had to be ready for an attack coming over the poles. In 1947, everybody knew what he meant, Soviet bombers. But now, put the pieces side by side. Before the war, a German expedition really had flown over part of Antarctica and named it New Swabia. An American fleet goes in. It finds a warm oasis. It comes home early. Its commander warns about enemies coming from the poles. Decades later, writers stitched it together. The fleet was sent to destroy a secret Nazi base. The base had flying saucers. The Navy lost. Then came Byrd's "secret diary," describing a flight into a hidden land beyond the pole. It surfaced long after Byrd was dead. It doesn't match anything in his real papers, which are archived at Ohio State University and which anyone can read.

7:25 What the files show

So here's what the Navy's own records actually show. No battle, no base, no saucers. Four dead men, three of them still out on the ice of Thurston Island and about 70,000 aerial photographs. Here's the twist, many of them turned out to be almost useless for maps. The planes had flown so fast and so far that nobody on the ground had marked where the pictures were taken. So the next year, the Navy had to go back, Operation Windmill, just to pin the photos to the ground. Highjump didn't run from anything, it ran out of summer. But the real secret of Highjump was hiding in plain sight, in one line of its orders. It was never really about Antarctica, it was about being ready to fight across the ice at the top of the world. And that turned out to be very real. The government's own files tell us this much. We'll keep reading.