At this point of the Depression, Byrd was ready to be guileless.
My dear Mrs. Gavronski,
On all of my expeditions and on two air stations, which I had command of during the war, I have had something like three or four hundred people who are in the same status with me as your son. I have gotten jobs for as many of these people as humanly possible and have spent a good part of my time doing so. So months ago, I used up all the influence I had and have more or less reached the end of the rope in the matter of getting jobs for my friends. As much as I would like to, I don’t know what I can do to get your son a position. If he will tell me what to do, I will be glad to help or will give him a letter of recommendation. As for getting a Government position is concerned, it is impossible for me to do this. I am not a politician and have no patronage to give out. I am very sorry, indeed, Mrs. Gavronski.
Admiral Byrd
It was true. Byrd was increasingly stretched to the limits himself. He had put his second expedition on hold and volunteered to serve as chairman of the National Economic League, helping Roosevelt tackle the nation’s growing poverty by reducing unnecessary governmental expenditures, which would in turn permit lower taxes. Heroism no longer required great feats of glory in far-off lands; it took getting the poor back to work. Hours of his day were devoted to the cause.
He was still trying to plan another expedition before polar explorer Lincoln Ellsworth—with plenty of experience at the top of the Earth, some of it partnered with the late Roald Amundsen—took off to Antarctica with Byrd’s old pilot Bernt Balchen. (Balchen was by this time saying to all who’d listen that Byrd was a terrible navigator and that he himself had navigated the flights he’d flown over the South Pole.) With Balchen on his rival’s team, Byrd was worried stiff that the Chicago-born Ellsworth would eclipse him as the hero of the Antarctic by making the first flight across the continent. Would Ellsworth’s success erase Byrd’s precious legacy?
The admiral was also busy developing a newsworthy attraction celebrating his Antarctic exploits for the 1933–34 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the Century of Progress International Exposition. Byrd wanted to sign off on everything.
• • •
That summer, the genuine City of New York was set up as a walk-through attraction at the Michigan Avenue Bridge and Wacker Drive. Forty million Chicagoans and tourists went to see the Byrd exhibit, an ad hoc museum that housed a collection of historic relics, animal specimens, scientific instruments, cold-weather clothing, and dehydrated foods. There were dead animals galore on the old flagship, all taxidermied by the crew: penguins and skuas and an unborn baby whale. The Museum of Natural History spent $15,000 constructing a replica of Little America. It was good for public morale, Byrd justified. Former members of the expedition served as lecturers and guides. Harry Adams, grateful for any dollars in hard times, oversaw the attraction.
It was the Byrd World’s Fair exhibit that introduced millions of American kids to the Antarctic. Shackleton and Scott get most of the glory, even today, but it was Richard Byrd who put the mysterious continent into America’s popular consciousness.
• • •
Byrd’s second expedition got under way that fall, financed by even more gifted goods than the first expedition and $150,000 in small donations doggedly raised in the middle of a Depression. The expedition is best remembered for the weekly radio broadcasts from Little America, with shortwave connections transmitted to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and from there to CBS studios in New York. If most of the crew found these casual scientific talks hokey, they were enormously popular back home, cementing Antarctica as part of American heritage.
This second expedition was a smaller undertaking than the first, with two ships, not four: the dainty barquentine Bear of Oakland and the stout steel cargo vessel Jacob Ruppert. Billy did not swim to their side when they departed Boston for Dunedin, and no one tracked him down for comments. The Polish stowaway kid was old news, but three Kiwi stowaways were discovered on the Bear when it left Dunedin for the ice. All were allowed to stay on ship but, like Billy, not selected to overwinter.
Only the best and the brightest from the first expedition were asked back—or, one could say cynically, the men that Byrd felt least betrayed by. Of the seventy-one crewmen who journeyed on this second voyage to the Antarctic, eighteen were from the first. Those lucky enough to winter over included Paul Siple, now a biologist (as well as a dog driver), chief airplane pilot Harold June, meteorologist William Haines, and communications officer Charles Murphy.
Billy was privately devastated to read that Siple was asked along, but it was actually a wise decision on Byrd’s part. The ex–Boy Scout became an accomplished explorer, authored four books, and coined the term windchill factor. After Byrd, his would be the most significant name in US polar history.
And Billy? It was almost as if he had never been on Byrd’s first expedition at all. He was still in touch with Harry Adams, but less so. He had even drifted from his childhood friends who knew him back when he was obsessed with Byrd. There was hardly anyone around anymore to remind him of his grand, forsaken hope for a life of significance.
• • •
The Columbia University dropout lifted himself out of despair with a plan hatched at four in the morning: instead of becoming a dentist or an explorer, or a worker bee on a dreary nine-to-five, he would become an officer in the US Merchant Marines. It was the only foreseeable future with any promise of adventure; a compromise between the realities of adulthood and his adolescent dreams. Since 1775, the Merchant Marines have been a civilian fleet senior to all the armed forces, transferring cargo and passengers in peacetime and military personnel and matériel in war. Billy studied to be an officer at home and in night school, after days of swabbing decks or working any odd job he could find in Bayside sweeping floors. In February 1936 he received his third mate license, issue 2114986—No. 016452. If he found employment as such, he would be a safety officer and fourth in command.
But there were no third mate jobs to be had. Billy did enough asking at the dock to sign on as a general seaman with several of the ships he hoped to one day become an officer of, such as the SS Manhattan, traveling regularly between New York and Hamburg, Germany. In July he was aboard the Manhattan when it left Pier 60 with 334 members of the US Olympic team, a vigorous group on its way to Nazi Germany to compete in the eleventh Olympic Games, presided over by Adolf Hitler in Berlin. In a ship commandeered to be a floating gym, Billy met dozens of athletes, perhaps even track-and-field great Jesse Owens, a black man who would infuriate Hitler by winning four gold medals at the Games, or runner Louis Zamperini—the spirited athlete who would be later shot down over the Pacific, his story told in Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling book Unbroken. As a US Army Air Forces bomber pilot in 1943, his plane was shot down; he and two crewmates drifted at sea for nearly seven weeks before being captured by the Japanese. (One of the three died during the ordeal at sea.) Zamperini spent the rest of the war under harsh conditions in prison camps in Japan. Billy was six years older than Zamperini but his equal in verve. Perhaps these two young men found each other on board during the long passage across the Atlantic.
In 1937 Billy got his first officer assignment as an extra third mate on the Manhattan. He would never forget the quietly haunting discussions he had that year with Jewish first-class clientele fleeing the Third Reich by ocean liner, already fearing the worst. Surprisingly, the Nazis encouraged this exit of Jewish elites to remove leadership and alienate the world against Jews begging entry to foreign lands. On the Manhattan, the young Polish officer spoke to the fleeing Jews in German; when the conversation turned sobering, he switched to perfect Yiddish. Like the parents who had hired him to be a Lower East Side Shabbos goy, the Jewish passengers were dumbfounded that the Polish American spoke their secret tongue. They were lucky to get out, they told him; others were being rounded up, and disappearing, and laws were being instated that prevented them from going about their lives. What a c
onflict he felt, an American who knew too much. Billy cried openly when in June 1939 the SS St. Louis sent back Jewish German refugees who had made it nearly to Miami. The ship had originally headed to Havana, but immigration officers there accepted only 29 of the 937 desperate passengers, and requests for mercy to the United States were turned down.
Passengers Jewish and Gentile told the commanding officers to look out for that young man Gawronski, a treasure. The captain liked the fellow already; he came experienced, pleasant, and, most importantly, deferential. Captain Harry Manning had a word with Billy. Had he ever considered becoming a sea captain?
The thought hadn’t really crossed his mind. It took proper schooling to attain a position of significance. Hadn’t Byrd taught him that? Wasn’t that why he had impoverished his parents in pursuit of that abandoned Ivy League degree? But no. No. He thought back to the kindly Captain Brown, with no more than a high school education to his name. You just had to be scrappy, that was all. When you got caught on the New York, you tried again on the Bolling. Surely Billy knew that.
At last his run of bad luck seemed behind him. At the tail end of the Depression, late in 1939, twenty-nine-year-old Billy obtained his first master’s license (which qualified him to become a captain) and joined the Alcoa Steamship Company of Weehawken, New Jersey, to work on vessels of the Hog Island type, made at the shipyards of Hog Island in Pennsylvania, now replaced with Philadelphia International Airport, and then engaged in Caribbean and South American trade. His initial assignment was as second officer. Not even a year later, he was chief mate, sailing out of San Francisco on the SS Yarmouth. Under the prewar authority of the US military, the ship had a “Caribbean” route—although it also served Newfoundland, Labrador, and Greenland—transporting a combination of cargo and soldiers even before the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that catapulted the United States into World War II.
Soon after he showed up in San Francisco, he secured temporary living quarters on Gough Street and began frequenting a nearby bar. He had his eye on another regular: a twenty-three-year-old nurse named Goldy Mundy, a tarty type never without the reddest lipstick and often accompanied by her older sister, also a nurse and also at ease with the men at the bar. Despite Goldy’s loose reputation with the regulars, he asked her to dinner. He was in great spirits, making real money now as an officer, and he had a hot date who made other women nervous and men a little jealous.
Rudy had never been able to get his interior decoration business going again, and now the rising Billy wanted to use his contacts to help his father’s career—a means of atonement for being the irresponsible young’un he was. The Merchant Marines were planning a new academic facility, with offices in the once-luxurious 1920s Chrysler Mansion in a wealthy enclave of Long Island called Kings Point, the inspiration for the fictional West Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. With a letter from Billy, Rudy got a secure government job at the US Merchant Marine Academy, his title head of interior decoration. (He would be proud of his effort here, especially as he witnessed the building’s dedication by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943; Rudy’s handiwork was in every room the president visited. Today you can still see the upholstered sides of the campus chapel, although none of Rudy’s much-admired curtain work remains.)
Across the country in San Francisco, things heated up between Billy and Goldy, that spicy gal. She was four years younger than him, flushed with youth and the exhilaration of ditching her strict religious parents back in Friendship, Illinois. On every date, she sported tantalizing clothes that soon came off. His friends didn’t love her—didn’t even like her—but to this bachelor officer open to adventure, and with the first bit of extra cash in his pocket in a long while, she was the opposite of a stick-in-the-mud. She even outranked him: a nurse captain and her chief mate. Billy liked that about her: a woman who let him know she was important. Yet his friends pressed him to drop her. But Billy was smitten.
His parents were alarmed to learn by letter that she might be the one, remembering all too well how rashly he had talked of marrying his senior-year girlfriend in high school. But Billy couldn’t stop thinking about her. With his encouragement, Goldy wrote to his mother as if this woman she’d never met were already her new mother-in-law, addressing her as “Dear Mother Gawronski.”
Well, Francesca admitted to Rudy, she seemed polite enough on the page.
• • •
Richard Byrd no longer had to fund-raise to conduct an expedition south. For his third expedition to the Antarctic, from 1939 to 1941, he worked with the US Navy, the State Department, the Department of the Interior, and the Treasury—federal agencies that covered most of the costs. This was America’s first government-sponsored expedition, authorized by Byrd’s old friend President Roosevelt and known formally as the US Antarctic Service Expedition. The many objectives included establishing two permanent bases and mapping the continent’s mostly unknown west coast.
There were 125 men—a proper expedition this time—some civilian scientists but mostly navy personnel. Former Boy Scout Paul Siple was selected for his third trip with Byrd—the only man from the first Antarctic expedition to return—and was put in charge of the West Base (at the Bay of Whales) party of twenty-nine overwinterers. East Base, on Stonington Island, was 2,200 miles away by sea. Lesser known was twenty-three-year-old George Gibbs, a native of Jacksonville, Florida, and a navy man added to the expedition as a mess boy. Gibbs may have been peeling potatoes to pay his way, but he fulfilled the dream that Robert White Lanier had been chasing for almost a decade: On January 14, 1940, he became the first black man to walk in Antarctica. Admiral Byrd shook his hand and welcomed him to Little America.
• • •
There were no scrapbooks of Byrd’s third expedition in the Gawronski household. Billy was off on his own adventures. At great risk, still as a Merchant Marine, he served a stint as chief mate on a ship making a charity food drop to an extraordinary orphanage in East Africa, run by Franciscan monks in the hills of northern Tanganyika (now Tanzania), fifty miles from Mount Kilimanjaro at the foot of sloping, wooded fifteen-thousand-foot-high Mount Meru, Africa’s fifth-highest mountain. The orphanage was populated with several hundred once-malnourished Polish youngsters who had survived the Siberian Gulags, where a million soldiers, intellectuals, and other civilians had been sent with their families following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. Many did not survive the brutality of the camps, and the children who were lucky enough to be released before long were shipped to faraway places such as India and Africa to recuperate.
Billy had a way with courageous, vivacious kids. He had learned of the tragic foundlings from his Polish family and church, and was grateful to be part of a team bringing supplies. He was especially playful with a boy who called himself Tarzan. The chief mate, too, thumped his chest, whooping and climbing trees in a tangle of agave and cacti, while the orphans—hidden away in huts and barracks near safari grounds—giggled. Here was a man in an officer’s uniform bringing candy; a kind American who could speak to the children in their own language about the country far away where they made movies and no one starved.
This adventure was more rewarding than others he’d had in the past, Billy would say later—more human—but he still had a thrill-seeking itch that wouldn’t go away.
• • •
Jan Paderewski, the most famous living Pole, died in exile in New York in June 1941. The news greatly saddened Billy, who, as a boy, had recited a poem before him in his Lower East Side church; his lifelong love of poetry started there. He was always impressing people with how many poems he had memorized and would pack volumes of poetry for long sea journeys. Billy’s favorite poets were the Romantics: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and especially John Keats. On his own adventures now, he no longer read voraciously about those of others but instead about the intricacies of love and loss.
In a letter to his parents from sea en route to Hawaii, dated Augu
st 18, 1941, Billy said that Goldy was very proud of her engagement ring.
• • •
On December 7 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Billy was soon hired by the State Marine Lines of 90 Broad Street in New York City to serve on Liberty ships—the ugly ducklings so synonymous with this era. These assembly-line wartime vessels were built on the cheap in record time, sometimes in a matter of days, with women often welding alongside men.
The US Merchant Marines were civilians, not military men, yet they suffered the worst casualties of World War II without any of the glory and veteran’s benefits of their countrymen in the army, navy, and army air forces. In February 1942 Adolf Hitler thundered on the radio that US Merchant Marines were fools and would die a certain death. He was not that much of a liar, on this matter, at least. The waters were treacherous, especially for ships commandeered for cargo—cargo oftentimes more of a target than the men serving aboard.
On March 2 the South African petrol tanker Uniwaleco (formerly the Norwegian-built whaler Sir James Clark Ross that in 1928 had carried Arthur Walden and his nearly one hundred dogs as far as New Zealand) was torpedoed by a German submarine, or U-boat, in the Caribbean. Most of the men made it to lifeboats, but a follow-up strike sank the ship. Almost all of the men on life rafts were killed in subsequent attacks, with the two men remaining in the rear of the ship blown to bits.
Billy’s run was farther north, to ice-free Murmansk, a port city in the Soviet Union. Hitler had betrayed his treaty with Russian leader Joseph Stalin, launching a massive surprise assault in 1941. The reckless tactic not only drove Stalin into the arms of the Allies but also mired the German army in the east. At Murmansk, the US Merchant Marines unloaded manufactured goods and raw materials to help the fearless Russian fighters repel German troops from the Eastern front. However, big convoys sailing from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Murmansk were regularly preyed upon by Nazi U-boats. Eighty-five ships were lost en route, and hundreds more in other runs across the North Atlantic. One out of every twenty-six men died. Newspapers ran the same story each week: “Two Medium-Sized Allied Ships Sunk in the Atlantic.” In reality, the averages for 1942 were thirty-three Allied ships sunk every week—or one out of every four—8,500 Merchant Marines killed, and another 11,000 wounded.
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