Show Me a Hero

by Jeremy Scott

  On 24 August the sun momentarily became visible above the northern horizon for the first time in months, though for several days before men had been climbing the radio masts at noon to catch a prior glimpse of it. Light and colour were restored briefly to the world, though a day lasted no longer than a few minutes. But to the forty men at Little America the sight signalled their enforced hibernation was at an end. They emerged blinking from their burrows into a landscape made of fire and ice, and set to dig out their equipment and prepare for the purpose for which they’d come: the flight to the South Pole.

  The hangar for the Ford tri-motor had been constructed in a large pit in the centre of the camp. Now Balchen and his team of mechanics went to work on the motors. In a few days he had these tuned and was ready to take the Ford up on a test flight. He returned to report that it was handling perfectly. The aeroplane was operational and ready to go. Byrd had named it the Floyd Bennett after the dead pilot who had flown him on that famous flight to the North Pole, which had made his name.

  On Thanksgiving Day the Ford stood ready to take off on the attempt. The movie news crew and cameramen were assembled for a last photo-call. Byrd, dressed in a fur-hooded anorak and polar bear trousers shook hands with his team leaders, saluted, then climbed into the plane. They took off at 15.29 hours. With Byrd and Balchen were Harold June as radio operator and Captain McKinley operating the mapping camera. The round-trip flight ahead of them was 1,600 miles. Its principal hazard lay in the Queen Maud mountains which rose to 16 or 17,000 feet. The Ford’s operating ceiling theoretically was 11,000 feet, but she was carrying an unusually heavy load of fuel. There were two passes through the mountains, the Axel Heiberg Glacier and the Liv glacier. Both named by Amundsen when he’d come this way to the same destination in 1911. Balchen was sharply aware that, equipped with a thermos of coffee and sandwiches, they were flying at 100 mph over terrain where his childhood hero had struggled to gain a hard-won twenty-five miles a day, always cold and always hungry.

  With Balchen at the controls, the Ford flew due south steadily at 1,500 feet. At 20.15 hours they spotted Dr Gould’s support party, which had left Little America three weeks before, on the ice below. Dropping them a package of chocolates, cigarettes and letters, Balchen now opened the throttles wide and began to climb. Fifty miles away the peaks of the Queen Mauds rose above the horizon dead ahead. The mountains grew in size as they approached, a fortress wall flaring in seams of pale blue light reflected from its glaciers. At 21.15 hours they were at 8,000 feet and still climbing. Harold June poured the last jerrycan into the gas tank and dropped the empty container overboard. They were using 60 gallons an hour and had enough in reserve to continue.

  The Liv Glacier, named by Amundsen for Nansen’s daughter, led up in front of them in a series of frozen waterfalls flickering with pale blue fire in the sun. The rock walls rose sheer around them, they were entering a canyon with no space to turn around. The Ford was at 8,200 feet – which felt to Balchen its ceiling with its present load. He gestured to June, who was standing by to jettison weight. June reached for the gasoline dump valve but Byrd stopped him, pointing to the emergency food. June kicked one of the 150-pound sacks out of the hatch and Balchen felt the plane lift in his hands. June kicked out another sack and the Ford staggered a little higher. But not enough to clear the pass ahead. There was only one thing more for Balchen to try. He edged the labouring aircraft to the very side of the canyon, looking for a back eddy of air. The right wing was almost scraping the cliff. Suddenly the plane rocked in a blast of wind which heaved it up to sweep it over the crest with feet to spare.

  Flying at its maximum altitude the Ford continued another 400 miles to their objective, reaching it at 01.14 hours. There Byrd sent a message, WE HAVE REACHED THE SOUTH POLE, to Little America, and dropped a flag weighted with a stone from Floyd Bennett’s grave. Balchen turned the plane and headed back to base. He writes: ‘I am glad to leave. Somehow our very purpose here seems insignificant, a symbol of man’s vanity and intrusion on this eternal white world. The sound of our engines profanes the silence…’

  On 10 January Larry Gould and his party returned to Little America from their eleven-week sledge journey to the Queen Maud mountains. On the way they had come across a small cairn of heaped stones, obviously man-made. It contained a can of kerosene and a box of matches in a waterproof seal. Also a note, pencilled in Norwegian. When Gould got back, he asked Balchen to translate it. The message read: 6–7 January 1912. Reached and determined the Pole on the 14th to the 16th of December 1911. Passed this place on the return, with provisions for 60 days, 2 sledges, 11 dogs. Everybody well. It was signed ‘Roald Amundsen’. He had been there, seen that, done that years before.

  Byrd’s message WE HAVE REACHED THE SOUTH POLE had been picked up by the New York Times radio station and broadcast live through loudspeakers to the cheering crowd gathered in Times Square. When the City of New York got back to her home port the following June it was to a tremendous welcome. The media was gathered in force on the pier amid a mass of people. As ever, Byrd did not disappoint his public. Although it was a baking hot summer day, he walked down the gangway wearing his fur anorak and polar bear trousers.

  He came home to a very different America to the one that he had left. While he was away disaster had struck and the sun-kissed country he had sailed from twenty months before was now a desolate and despairing land of frightened people. The end had come, the climax to a decade of dazzling growth and gratified expectation. Automation – the machine harnessed to native know-how and inventiveness – had brought wealth to all. American business had discovered the secret of permanent prosperity. The stock market had gone up and up and up, most people believed it would go up for ever. On Inauguration Day, when President Hoover had assumed the White House in March the previous year, the Dow Jones leapt twenty points. In August it hit 380, at the start of September it stood a highest-ever of 381. Soon after there came a seismic rumble. The Wall Street Journal and the business columns steadied the populace, this dip was a correction not a trend. Nevertheless people had started to shed stock fast, on 22 October six million shares were sold.

  Then on 24 October a fissure split wide in the solid ground where the nation stood. US Steel, which had been selling at 261¾, opened at 205½, crashed through 200, and dropped to 193½. General Electric, which had been above 400, opened at 315 and slid to 283. The unthinkable was happening. Shock, stunned disbelief… then the news flared down the electric pathways uniting the country and set off panic. Two days later thirteen million shares were sold, the ticker-tape was hours behind in recording the orders. On Wall Street people had begun to jump. On 29 October huge blocks of shares were being dumped in wholesale lots, and a record 16½ million shares were sold. The long bull market was dead, and American confidence and courage had died with it.

  Byrd came ashore an admiral; he’d been promoted after his successful flight. Other honours followed fast. After a parade with band, drum majorettes and ticker-tape, there was a reception at City Hall, then the whole party embarked on a special train to Washington for a banquet given by the National Geographic Society. Among the distinguished guests were the President and Vice-President of the US, the speaker of the House of Representatives, most of the cabinet, thirty-one senators, sixty-two members of the House, thirty-five generals, thirty-six admirals and all the big-name sponsors of the expedition. Also Byrd’s wife, who had just received a very special present from her husband: he had discovered and named Marie Byrd Land in her honour.

  In the speech made by the President of the Society, Byrd was congratulated on ‘the most comprehensive, dramatic and productive exploration of modern times’. The President of the US awarded him the National Geographic Society’s Special Gold Medal of Honor. Next day President Hoover received all the members of the expedition at the White House. Filmed by a rank of bulky news cameras on wooden tripods, in a flickering strobe of magnesium flare, Byrd and four of his pilots were presented with the Navy Distinguish
ed Flying Cross. But not Balchen; it was explained to him he could not receive the award as he was not a member of the armed forces.

  Balchen was stung by the omission. With some reason, for the pilots of the crashed Bremen (two of them German nationals and one an Irishman) had all been given the medal. He was ‘sick at heart’, he records, and wondered what had promoted his exclusion – though he had a pretty good idea of it: his commander Admiral Byrd had been behaving increasingly oddly toward him of late. Balchen had noticed him staring at him coldly, he’d been abrupt and rude in conversation; Byrd’s manner had become aggressive.

  The expedition’s welcome excluded Balchen, but it cannot be said he received nothing at that splendid occasion. As he was leaving the White House after being received by the President, a stranger stopped him outside the gate, asking if his name was Bernt Balchen. Sure, he replied, and was handed an envelope. Surprised, he tore it open. Inside was a subpoena from the immigration authorities. It informed him that he had broken his US residence in going to the South Pole; his citizenship papers were therefore void. The form was an official notification he was to be deported from America.

  28.

  SUPPORTING PLAYER SEEKS LEAD ROLE

  The image filling the screen is that of Balchen as, isolated by the event among the throng enjoying their White House welcome, he is handed the notification he is to be deported from America. The camera focuses on his stricken face… then the picture cuts to black.

  The fade-in to the next scene is slow, two years have passed. This is the summer of 1931, and ice cubes rattle in the glass as Lincoln Ellsworth, stylishly dressed in a belted tweed suit and bow-tie, takes a long pull from his highball and looks down upon the Arctic Ocean 3,000 feet below from the de luxe comfort of the passenger saloon of the Graf Zeppelin.

  Little has happened in his life since his flight with Amundsen and Umberto Nobile in the Norge, five years ago. Too little, in his own estimation, though one’s sympathy for his plight is mitigated somewhat by the fact that on his father’s death he came into a considerable fortune. As Ellsworth sips his whiskey in the saloon of the Graf Zeppelin his income from trusts and bonds alone amounts to $125,000 a year (equivalent to c.$2m today).

  The Norge flight had resulted in disappointment and ruin for Amundsen; Ellsworth had lost money and experienced equal disappointment. Perhaps greater, for Amundsen had already accomplished much in his life, but Ellsworth’s dream of becoming a famous explorer had hardly been achieved. He smarted from America’s failure to honour him, the man who had carried her flag on the first crossing of the Polar Sea. He’d told Amundsen it was ‘rotten unappreciative’. He’d willingly accepted Amundsen’s leadership, and with that renounced all publicity, on the flights he’d financed and made with him; but now Ellsworth was a novice no more, he’d served his polar apprenticeship and he wanted to be seen and recognised as an explorer.

  He writes, ‘Gradually the desire was building in me to go exploring once more to the ends of the earth … I felt I had dropped out of the world. I was restless, almost desperate for something to do…’ He visited for the first time the medieval castle in Switzerland his father had bequeathed him, where every chair, every table, every bibelot was labelled with the price the old man had paid for it, together with the dollar equivalent. His son wandered through the innumerable rooms accompanied everywhere by the sound of the castle’s 100 clocks striking the passing hours and quarters at more or less the same moment – a constant reminder of time running out.

  Ellsworth had received a visitor that summer; Sir Hubert Wilkins came to stay. Wilkins had an Arctic project for which he was seeking funds: he wanted to go to the North Pole and make a crossing of the frozen Polar Sea by submarine beneath the ice. The scientific value of the voyage was negligible but he was a plausible fellow who knew a sucker when he saw one. Ellsworth writes, ‘As he outlined the scheme to me, I grew enthusiastic for it … I consented to attach my name to the submarine expedition as scientific adviser…’ He also put up $20,000.

  Meanwhile, Hugo Eckener in Germany had been busy negotiating a deal to generate personal publicity and profit from the giant airship he had designed and commanded. In June, Hearst’s syndicated newspapers flagged an upcoming first-time happening. The Graf Zeppelin and the Nautilus would meet up at the North Pole to exchange mail. Eckener had invested his own and his backers’ money in a special issue of stamps commemorating the inauguration of a polar mail route, together with thousands of specially designed postcards and envelopes. He was in that predicament familiar to all explorers: debt. All explorers, that is, except Ellsworth. Eckener hit on him for $8,000, offering a place on the flight, the title of Arctic Expert on Navigation and the right to sell his own account of the event to the National Geographic Magazine. Ellsworth accepted.

  The Nautilus sailed from Provincetown NJ in June, carrying 4,000 items of mail and Wilkins’ party of scientists, pressmen and sponsors in a blaze of publicity, but almost immediately things began to go calamitously wrong. One after another every electrical and mechanical system on the ancient submersible ceased to work, and it was found that somewhere along the way the submarine’s elevator had got knocked off, so it could not dive. The leaking hulk was towed back to Norway with its disgruntled passengers and scrapped.

  Which left Hugo Eckener with a problem: The Graf Zeppelin was loaded with 600 tons of mail. Desperation kept him at the task and he fixed for the Russian ice-breaker Malyghin to pick up the mail aboard the disabled Nautilus. The Malyghin and Graf Zeppelin would meet to effect the transfer amid the polar ice. The Arctic postal service would be just a little late in delivery.

  The above ludicrous chronicle explains why Ellsworth is sitting nattily dressed with drink in hand in the passenger saloon of the Graf Zeppelin, as he was at the start of this chapter. The airship is approaching its rendezvous with the ice-breaker and from the window he looks down upon an archipelago of barren islands sheathed in ice, scattered over a dark though sunlit sea. All are uninhabited except the last and most northerly. Standing off it is a ship, the Malyghin.

  The Zeppelin descends slowly till her inflated bumper bags rest on the black water between the glittering ice floes. Ellsworth tips back the last of his drink and stands up. Going to the airship’s hatch, he steps out onto the rubber pontoon supporting it. He fills his smoker’s lungs with a deep breath of cold remembered oxygen and looks across the sea. A boat has left the Malyghin and is coming toward them, loaded with sacks of mail. A man stands in the stern, and as the boat approaches it strikes Ellsworth there is something familiar about him. The man waves in greeting, but, even when he steps onto the pontoon, Ellsworth has to look twice to recognise Umberto Nobile, whom he has not seen since 1926. He has changed dramatically in appearance, the whole cast to his face is altered; the Italia disaster and disgrace has carved him into a different man. Ellsworth puts out his hand to shake but Nobile pushes past it to embrace him, tears in his eyes. Yes he’s well, he says, Tintina is still alive, his family is with him, he’s living and working in Russia, but there is no time to chat. The boat collects the mail from the Graf Zeppelin and departs at once, but both men find the brief encounter moving. Ellsworth writes: ‘As he left in the bobbing boat … waving goodbye as he stood unsteadily in the stern, the scene held an element of pathos I can never forget.’

  The stories of Nobile and Ellsworth will continue to the end, but this is the last time the paths of the two men intersect.

  From the milestone of his fiftieth birthday Lincoln Ellsworth looked back to review what he’d accomplished in the last half-century and found it deeply dispiriting. In the summer of 1932 he went to stay in Schloss Lenzburg to fulfil his statutory Swiss residence as its owner. There he met a young woman, Mary Louise Ulmer, who was making the Grand Tour – and married her. But marriage did not provide the answer to his restlessness.

  By the 1930s all of the world was mapped and known – though not Antarctica, whose five million square miles of land or ice was still largely
unexplored. And there at the bottom of the globe lay the one great geographical mystery remaining. Was Antarctica a continent, or did it consist of two separate islands? Whoever answered that question would fill in the last blank space to complete the map of the world. To Ellsworth the challenge was irresistible.

  In the spring of 1932 the New York Herald Tribune announced the plans of the Ellsworth Trans-Antarctic Flight Expedition. ‘Be careful whom you link up with,’ Admiral Richard Byrd wrote to Ellsworth, reminding him of the problems caused by Nobile. But in this case he was referring to Balchen, who had transferred his services from him to Ellsworth. He’s able to pay more than me, was how Byrd explained away the pilot’s move, though there was more to it than that, much more.

  In April of that year Ellsworth signed a contract to design and build an all-metal aircraft. The Polar Star would be a low-wing monoplane with a cruising range of 7,000 miles, far in excess of any aircraft then in existence. Bernt Balchen, together with his wife and baby, moved to live near the Northrup factory to oversee its construction. He was on a salary of $400 a month, plus a promised bonus of $15,000 on completion of a successful trans-Antarctic flight.