Admiral Dufek's Story Of Operation Deepfreeze

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28702, 27 September 1958, Page 3

Admiral Dufek's Story Of Operation Deepfreeze

(Reviewed by D.R.W.I Operation Deepfreeze. By RearAdmiral George J. Dufek. Harcourt, Brace. 243 pp. Index.

After more than 30 years as a naval officer—during which time he had served in battleships, air-craft-carriers, and submarines, been a naval flyer and held a wide variety of shore and sea- ■ going x commands —George Dufek. past 50, began to feel ther- was something missing in his life, j had a gnawing feeling that time was slipping by him, and > that he had failed to leave, in his own words, “any positive and concrete work” behind him. “Everyone who takes part in the building of a bridge, from the financial backers to the steel workers, has a warm feeling of participation,” he wrote, some years later. “Men in other professions and trades often have a similar feeling of accomplishment in a creative enterprise.” Then, one hot August day in Washington, in the stiihmer of 1954, he was handed a challenge: to build the bases the -scientists wanted in the Antarctic for the International Geophysical Year. He took the job, was given one room on the fifth floor of the Pentagon, one telephone, and one chief yeoman, and told to get on with it. This was to be his life’s work. “I felt that if I could use the knowledge gained over the last 30 years in the handling of ships, planes, and men in the construction of bases at the bottom of the world for the use of scientists, I, too) could gain that sense of accomplishment, of contribution to useful purposes.” In 1956, and with the first season of the operation behind him. George Dufek returned to the Antarctic, flying south from Christchurch on the first aircraft. “For two years our men had planned and laboured. In our minds the symbol of our greatest triumph would be a successful landing by plane at the South Pole and the building of the first American base there. Would we be successful? Many of the oldtimers had raised their eyebrows and said behind their hands: ‘The Navy has taken, on more than it „ can finish.’ Maybe so. But wp had confidence that the job could be done.” In the last days of October, after one of his aircraft had crashed after the 2200-mile flight from New Zealand and a blizzard had set in to further delay the operation, George Dufek was still waiting, impatiently, at McMurdo Sound to make the first landing at the South Pole. “In the back of my mind,” he

wrote in his notebook one night, “is the haunting concern that the Russians will beat us to the South Pole. “Our correspondents are with us and the world knows our plans and progress. We know nothing of what the Russians are doing. Every delay caused by weather, every mishap that slows our operations, makes me impatient, j and it is difficult for me to ' sleep longer than a few short j hours at a time. I, too, am getting ' the ‘big eye’.” i Then the weather cleared, the i half-way weather station and refuelling camp at the foot of the Beardmore glacier was established, an aerial, survey of the Pole by Globemaster showed that the snow surface was hard and rough, and the flight was on. Shortly after 8.30 p.m. on the evening of October 31, George Dufek, the sailor who wanted to build something; who craved a feeling of accomplishment, stepped out of an aircraft at the South Pole. “The bitter cold struck me in the face and chest as if I had walked into a heavy swinging door.” The temperature was minus 58 degrees—9o degrees of frost. The party tried to take photographs, and their cameras froze; they set up radar reflectors for later flights; planted an American flag in a hole chipped into the hard snow surface; and then, as the white spots of frostbite began to show on his ruddy face, the first American to have stood at the South Pole turned to the small group of flyers with him and said: “Let’s get the hell out of here.” “The significance of our mission was all the more real to me in the light of the news we received from the rest of the world,” he writes. Fighting had broken out in the Middle East, Hungary’s people had revolted against their Gommunist leaders, and the United States was on the eve of a Presidential election, with its discussions of war and. peace and the hydrogen bomb. The first South Pole landing claimed only a few lines in the world’s press. But in the Antarctic, .American sailors, airmen and some soldiers were working together for peace. “Our victories would be (fliiet ones in the service of knowledge; our ‘beachheads’ were the stations at the South Pole and elsewhere in £he Antarctic. The ‘occupation forces’’ that would follow us as soon as the bases were built and ready would be teams of trained scientists. Their only opponent would be the unknown.” This is George Dufek’s story, and in “Operation Deepfreeze”