Show Me a Hero

by Jeremy Scott

  As business manager Ellsworth hired Sir Hubert Wilkins, who had clung to him like a limpet since the absurd collapse of his own expedition. Ellsworth, who was no stranger to disappointment himself, felt sorry for the man, sending him to Norway to buy a ship. Rechristened the Wyatt Earp, she still stank abominably of fish. When the Polar Star was ready, the plane was shipped to Norway. The fuselage was lowered into the vessel’s hold and the little ship started on her 18,000-mile voyage to New Zealand with Balchen and Wilkins on board.

  Ellsworth and his wife met the Wyatt Earp on arrival. Mary Louise chartered a small biplane and flew over the ship as it steamed out of the harbour. ‘Mrs Ellsworth waved and waved again to her husband who stood on deck visibly moved and sad,’ reported the New York Times. The couple had been married less than seven months and, in view of Ellsworth’s plan, it was probable they would never see each other again.

  29.

  STRAIGHT MAN REBELS

  In his small rank-smelling cabin aboard the Wyatt Earp, Balchen shares his cramped quarters with the Polar Star’s bulky state-of- the-art radio. It is his choice to do so, he wants to become thoroughly adept with it before they reach Antarctica.

  Life has changed greatly for him since he was served with a deportation order three-and-a-half years before. He had not gone to Byrd for help with that devastating problem – indeed he suspects the problem originated with Byrd – but it was solved for him conclusively by Mayor La Guardia who called to say it was a ‘goddam outrage’, and he’d spoken to the President about the matter. Very soon after, a special bill was passed by Congress granting Balchen full US citizenship. He was cheered and delighted by the result. He writes that to become an American is ‘bigger to me than any medal’. But the memory of that snub still rankles.

  Among Balchen’s first acts as a citizen of his new country was to marry, take a job as Tony Fokker’s chief test pilot, and to father a son, Lillegut. From the Canary Islands, where the Wyatt Earp stopped to pick up water and stores on the way to New Zealand, he wrote his wife Bess a letter which was tender with love and longing. He missed her and Lillegut keenly but Ellsworth had made him an offer too good to turn down. A bonus of $15,000 for a successful trans-Antarctic flight was a lot of money, it would pay for their son’s schooling, a home, car, and the trappings of the good life in America.

  In the middle of December the Wyatt Earp reached the pack ice, and for the next three weeks butted and shoved her way through the floes to anchor in the Bay of Whales. Next morning Balchen and Chris Braathen, the Norwegian flight mechanic, strapped on skis and went to look for Little America. No one had visited the place since Byrd had abandoned it four years before. They found the township completely buried beneath the snow, only the radio masts showed its location, together with the tail of the buried Floyd Bennett, sticking up above the surface. Balchen scooped away the snow covering the fuselage and lowered himself into the cockpit. Sitting in the pilot’s seat, he set his hands on the frozen controls, remembering the flight with Byrd when he’d piloted the aeroplane to the South Pole. Something caught his eye, an object lying discarded on the cockpit floor. It was his own miniature slide-rule which he’d used previously to calculate the mileage and speed of the Jo Ford when he’d flown her around the States with Bennett after Byrd’s triumphant flight to the North Pole. Balchen picked it up thoughtfully and slipped it into his pocket.

  When the Wyatt Earp was moored securely to the edge of the thick ice covering the Bay of Whales the fuselage of the Polar Star was winched out of the hold and swung onto the ice. The following day a storm blew up. Big waves rolled in, smashing at the edge of the bay ice. Starting up the motor, Balchen taxied the plane a mile toward the shore to what looked to be a place of safety. At 4 a.m. next morning the seventeen men aboard the ship were woken by the rumbling as of an earthquake. Leaping from their bunks, all rushed on deck. They were met by a sight so contrary to natural law that for a moment it paralysed them. A half-mile away the level plain of ice was erupting into a moving hill. Jagged slabs of ice were punched up from below with such force they were leaping into the air. A noise such as none had heard before was coming from beneath the sea; it sounded like a giant orchestra banging upon discordant instruments. As they watched, the churning fault-line raced toward the Polar Star. The ice the plane stood on heaved up and split. The fuselage thudded down into the gap. Men piled into the ships’ boats and rowed frantically through the grinding floes toward the plane. The Wyatt Earp manoeuvred close. The aircraft was attached to the derrick. All looked on in stricken silence as the plane was hauled up. It hung there with undercarriage smashed and one wing drooped down like a broken bird. Many of those watching were in tears.

  Next day the Wyatt Earp sailed back to New Zealand with the dead carcass of the Polar Star.

  Lincoln Ellsworth was a supremely unlucky man, but he was no quitter. Nine months later he tried again. This time his plan was different. The Wyatt Earp would transport the aircraft and expedition personnel not to Little America but to the Weddell Sea on the other side of the continent. From there he would attempt to fly to Little America over what might or might not prove to be the 900-mile channel of frozen water dividing Antarctica into two.

  The expedition’s base would be upon an island where there was an abandoned whaling station which could provide some shelter from the weather. Appropriately – as it turned out – the place was named Deception Island. They reached it on 14 October 1933 in a gale of driving sleet which continued for five days, while the ship heaved in the island’s lee. At last the wind dropped. The fuselage and wings of the aircraft were unloaded and dragged up the snow-swept beach. It took Balchen ten days to assemble the plane. He decided to test the motor and pressed the starter switch. The propeller made a quarter turn, and stopped with a crack like a pistol shot. Lubricating oil had frozen solid in the cylinders and a connecting rod had snapped. There was no replacement.

  ‘I am determined to carry on until I succeed or see there is no hope left’, Ellsworth cabled the New York Times. A new rod was ordered by radio from Northrup, who flew it to Magalanes in southern Chile. The Wyatt Earp set off with Hubert Wilkins on the 1,800-mile round-trip to fetch it. Ellsworth, Balchen and three others remained, camping in the derelict whaling station. Snow and sleet beat against the wooden walls, wind howled through the broken planking. It was a particularly desolate situation.

  The Wyatt Earp returned a month later with the necessary part. The aeroplane’s motor was repaired. But the snow covering Deception Island had melted, there was no place for it to take off and the Wyatt Earp sailed under low cloud in sleet and hurricane winds to search for level ice. Three days later they reached Snow Hill Island. But it was impossible to fly, impossible even to get the plane onto the shore. The blizzards continued for a whole month. A settled gloom descended upon the men living aboard the Wyatt Earp. The constant grinding sound of the pack ice wore away their nerves.

  Ellsworth trekked across the island, searching for the hut of the Swedish explorer Baron Nordenskjöld, who had been trapped here through two winters thirty years before. He found the place exactly as it had been abandoned. The mummified bodies of three sledge dogs lay outside the door, where they had been shot when the party fled. Clothing and equipment were scattered on the floor inside. A clock on the wall had stopped at three o’clock. On the table was a gramophone, tins of sardines and a chocolate cake. He tasted it and thought it delicious.

  The storms continued for two weeks but the morning of 3 January was clear of cloud. Ellsworth said to Balchen, ‘Let’s make a try!’ While he was preparing the aircraft Ellsworth despatched a cable to the New York Times: ‘FLASH. Balchen and I took off at seven this evening, heading for the unknown. The great adventure so long awaited is at hand. The motor is breaking the silence that veils the earth’s last great unknown…’

  Climbing to 3,000 feet, Balchen set the course given him, but he was not a happy pilot. In his estimation, Ellsworth had become deranged by his ambition. He had
wanted to launch the Polar Star by catapult from the deck of the Wyatt Earp; where they were going to land, when and if they returned, seemed not to bother him. Balchen told him bluntly it was a crazy idea.

  The sleek silver aircraft flew at 200 miles per hour for Little America 900 miles away. In the cockpit Balchen held the wheel steady while, behind him, Ellsworth busied himself with the mapping camera. To reach that destination meant validation and genuine achievement for Ellsworth, $15,000 dollars for himself. Not only for himself, for his wife and son. It meant a home and security, the grubstake to a new life. Throughout the last dreary disappointing weeks, to think about his family had been his only comfort.

  Beneath the aircraft the sun glittered on the broken pack ice of the Weddell Sea, which stretched ahead as far as the eye could reach – perhaps all the way to the other side of the continent. But ahead Balchen saw something else as well… and so did Ellsworth. What Ellsworth observed – as he recorded later – was a squall with the glow of the sun shining through it. What Balchen saw was a solid wall of cloud blocking off the route ahead. Pressing the wheel forward, he went down to 500 feet to look for a way beneath it, and saw none. Suddenly they were through the wall and in the thick of it, the murk was all around them. He banked hard in a full turn with the mist shredding past the cockpit window… only after minutes coming out of the dark wall into the sunlight. But now they were flying in the opposite direction, headed back the way that they had come.

  One hour and a quarter later Balchen circled the Wyatt Earp and brought the plane down onto the glacier on Snow Hill Island. He taxied over to where Wilkins and others from the ship were waiting at its edge, and cut the motor. Ellsworth climbed out of the cockpit without a word. White-faced and stiff with anger, he pushed his way through the group of men and strode down toward the shore. Balchen followed more slowly. ‘What happened?’ Wilkins asked.

  ‘Ellsworth can commit suicide if he likes,’ Balchen told him, ‘But he can’t take me with him.’

  30.

  HERO’S SOLILOQUY

  When Admiral Richard Byrd returned to the States after his flight with Balchen to the South Pole in 1929, he came home a double hero; he’d achieved both Poles, the ends of the earth. His media reception and public adulation was wraparound, his celebrity stellar. To many he personified the American dream in its noblest manifestation: the dauntless pioneer who has won through to make it big. The public idolised him.

  The Navy detested him. At a time when the service was being wound down and many officers let go, he’d come back promoted admiral. Such was his national status, so close his intimacy with the politically powerful, the top brass feared that Byrd was going to take over the Navy. Their fears were misconceived. Byrd had chosen his destiny – Explorer. For months following his return from Antarctica he lived on the adrenalin of applause. In his lectures he was fluent and assured, modest yet heroic. And so clean-cut handsome, his lack of height undetectable along with the limp as he stood at the podium. He was what they would like to be in their secret selves and they felt close to him. He did lectures, interviews on radio and in magazines, accepted invitations to speak to learned institutions and to open schools. But the era – and with it mass media, which had made Byrd – had brought with it an appetite for the new. Byrd was very conscious that fame fades and needs to be renewed; the action hero at rest is no longer news. But the mood of his audience had changed, for another pressing matter had come to dominate men and women’s minds; in more than one sense to distract them, for some had put a gun to their head while others threw themselves from high buildings. The Wall Street crash had blotted out the bright prosperity of the 1920s and the nation was deep in the Great Depression. In the headlong course of that previous decade the Good Life had not just been invented, not merely shown by magazines and movies to exist, but achieved. People’s earlier ambition of a full dinner pail had been sumptuously exceeded… and now all of it had been snatched away. A change had taken place in people’s lives, cataclysmic in its scale. Black cloud covered the sun. Men with slack expressionless faces stood in soup lines, families were evicted from their homes, old people grubbed for food in garbage cans.

  The country’s savings had been invested on Wall Street and people had been persuaded to borrow on their houses, their farms, their businesses to put onto the market. When it collapsed not just their savings but everything went. Now banks were failing, factories shut, dockyards closed. Thirty million people were living on charity, a family whose weekly earnings had been $35 were receiving $8. In Manhattan a third of the city’s three million working population were unemployed. Society women were selling their fur coats in hotel lobbies. In Central Park a Third World slum of cardboard and tarpaper shacks had grown up, without drainage or electricity. Hooverville, it was called, and there were Hoovervilles in every major city, filled with ragged angry people looking for who to blame. Big business and capitalism were indicted, the men who had ruled the country were named ‘malefactors of great wealth’ and stood accused of killing the goose that had been laying golden eggs.

  When in 1932 Byrd tried to raise funds for another expedition to Antarctica he came face to face with the reality of the Depression, as against a solid wall. But he already had seed money amounting to $150,000 from his loyal patrons Edsel Ford and John D. Rockefeller Jnr. The first use he made of this campaign chest was to hire a business manager, Victor Czegka, and set to work on a lode-bearing seam which had proved profitable before. Now, by mining it anew, Byrd and Czegka obtained ship and aeroplane fuel, clothes, food, technical equipment and free radio-telegraph communication for his projected venture. And then there was the media. A contract for syndication rights with the New York Times was easy, he’d provided good copy in the past. But now there was another major player in the game: commercial radio. To William S. Paley, owner of CBS, Byrd sold the idea of a national radio programme transmitted from Antarctica. General Foods agreed to sponsor it.

  The expedition Byrd was planning was to be the biggest, best equipped, most ambitious ever mounted. The goods and money he’d obtained were not enough, to obtain the rest he appealed to the man and woman in the street. His new expedition had a comprehensive scientific programme: astronomical observation, cosmic ray investigation, geophysical and meteorological research. All of it incomprehensible to the public. Instead, the dream Byrd offered them could be understood by anyone. To ruined and restricted lives he proposed the idea of a glorious adventure – the search for an untold wealth of treasure buried at the furthest extremity of the world. He would explore and map the Pacific quadrant of Antarctica, a quarter of the entire continent. He proposed to claim and annex for America an area of land in excess of 1¼ million square miles – together with all the oil, silver, gold, diamonds and other riches which lay beneath its surface. That concept people did grasp. They were used to the movies, it was their sole escape into a better world, but this one was in full colour and a promise they could play their own small part in making it come true. As the Wall Street Journal had exhorted them when the market first began to fail, ‘Don’t part with your illusions: when they are gone you … have ceased to live.’ In 1932–3 the average Joe could ill afford the $1, $2 or $5 he or she contributed to Byrd’s expedition, but yet they did, for the gesture purchased a share in something fine which transcended the drab mundanity which composed their existence. Hope was a commodity grown rare and precious, in their desperate need people bought into it.

  Byrd’s expedition sailed on 25 September 1933 from Boston Navy yard. It travelled in two ships, which carried four aircraft on their long journey south. Byrd’s principal plane, a Curtiss Condor, had its supercharged engines and a wingspan of 82 feet; the Pilgrim monoplane was lent by American Airways, the Fokker by General Motors. The Kellet Corporation loaned him an autogiro, their prototype helicopter. Also on board were two snowmobiles contributed by Edsel Ford, three snow tractors specially built by Andre Citroën (whom Byrd had cultivated since meeting him at the Paris shindigs which follow
ed his trans-Antlantic flight), and from the Cleveland Tractor Company a massive vehicle resembling a tank, which could haul a 10-ton load. All of these represented the last word in automotive engineering, but the expedition’s ships also carried reliable equipment from a pre-technological age: 150 Eskimo sledge dogs and four cows provisioned with tons of hay.

  On the voyage to Antarctica the ships stopped at Tahiti and New Zealand, and it is testimony either to the glamour of Byrd’s venture or the sheer desperation of the times that, on departing, the Bear found she was carrying two stowaways, while the Jacob Ruppert had acquired a further nine.

  On 17 January the Jacob Ruppert moored in the Bay of Whales at the end of a voyage of 13,000 miles. On the way Byrd had been troubled by a disturbing thought that Little America might not be there when they arrived; the Barrier supporting the base might have split off and floated away with the buried township. But he received an encouraging report from Lincoln Ellsworth, who was already in Antarctica. As we know already, Balchen and Braathen (both of whom had been there with Byrd in 1929) had skied over to find Little America still in place and the two aeroplanes he’d left there apparently in good condition, raising the number in his squadron to six.

  Soon as he came ashore at the Bay of Whales, Byrd set off with half a dozen men to inspect the place. The route was unrecognisable, obstructed by pressure ridges and huge jumbled blocks of ice. Little America was covered by an undulating plain of frozen snow, hard and smooth as glass. Only the three tall radio towers indicated its position. The tail of the Floyd Bennett projecting above the surface enabled them to calculate the location of the main buildings. With axes they hacked a hole through four feet of blue ice and broke through into the balloon station. On the table stood a coffee pot, a half-eaten lump of meat with a fork stuck in it, and a loaf of bread. Someone tried the wall switch and the lights came on. The party dispersed through the tunnels to explore the rest of the township. A little while later Byrd, standing in the mess hall, almost freaked out when the telephone rang. It was someone testing the line from the admin block. Everything was as they had left it five years before. In the kitchen a saucepan of whale and seal meat stood on the stove. They lit the range, cooked it and had lunch.