Richard Byrd

American aviator and explorer

• Born: October 25, 1888
• Birthplace: Winchester, Virginia
• Died: March 11, 1957
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Byrd played a central role in the development of naval aviation and was a major figure in Arctic and Antarctic exploration.

Early Life

Richard Byrd (burd) was the son of Richard Evelyn Byrd, a lawyer, and Eleanor Bolling Flood. The families of both his parents were active in Virginia politics, and Richard’s brother, Harry, became an influential U.S. senator. Small and slender, Richard was nevertheless strong and athletic. Playing war games with his brothers Harry and Tom and exploring the woods and hills near Winchester increased Richard’s desire for adventure. When he was twelve, he was invited to visit a family friend who was serving as United States circuit court judge in the Philippines. Richard had his parents’ permission to go to Manila by himself. He remained a year, writing about his experiences for a Winchester newspaper. He then completed his journey around the world alone. It was about this time that he wrote in his diary that he wanted to be the first person to reach the North Pole.

Three years at the Shenandoah Valley Military Academy prepared him for admission to Virginia Military Institute, where he studied from 1904 to 1907, before transferring to the University of Virginia for a year. In 1908, he was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, from which he was graduated in 1912, sixty-second in a class of 155. As a midshipman, he played tennis and football, wrestled in the 135-pound class, and specialized in the rings in gymnastics. While engaging in these sports, he suffered injuries that would later cause him to terminate his active duty with the Navy. He broke bones in his ankle playing football and broke them again in a fall during a gymnastics routine. Shortly after receiving his commission, he fell down a hatchway on the USS Wyoming, reinjuring his right foot and causing him to walk with a slight limp. Despite this setback, he served with distinction in the Caribbean, twice saving men from drowning. It was at this time, in the summer of 1914, that he took his first airplane ride.

In 1915, Byrd married his childhood sweetheart, Marie D. Ames. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels asked Byrd to serve as his aide on the USS Dolphin, but after a few months Byrd asked to be retired on a medical disability because his injured foot prevented him from performing regular naval duties. The political influence of his family enabled him to be promoted to lieutenant jg (junior grade) and assigned as administrator of the naval militia of the state of Rhode Island on his retirement. As a retired officer on active duty, he served in various posts for the next forty years.

Life’s Work

During World War I, Byrd persuaded the Navy to allow him to enter flight training at the naval air station in Pensacola, Florida. He received his pilot’s wings on April 7, 1917, and began making plans to be the first person to fly across the Atlantic. Wartime duties took him to Nova Scotia, where he helped to establish naval air stations. When the Navy was slow in supporting his plan for a transatlantic flight, he turned to his friend Walter Camp, the popular football coach at Yale University. With Camp’s help, Byrd convinced the Navy to create the Transatlantic Flight Section of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Navy regulations prohibited Byrd from accompanying the flight he had organized, so he failed to share the glory of the crew of the NC-4 flying boat when it reached Lisbon, Portugal, on May 27, 1919. Undaunted, Byrd began planning a solo flight across the Atlantic. Navy orders again thwarted his dream when he was sent to England to assist in navigating a British-built dirigible to the United States. He was fortunate, however, when he missed a trial flight that ended in a fatal crash.

Byrd spent the next three years on aviation duty with the Bureau of Navigation. In 1925, he commanded a naval unit on an expedition to northern Greenland. Encouraged by his success in using airplanes in the Arctic, Byrd decided to enter the aerial race for the North Pole. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and the American aviator Lincoln Ellsworth flew to within a few hundred miles of the pole during the summer in which Byrd was in Greenland. Knowing that Amundsen, Ellsworth, and the Italian adventurer Umberto Nobile all had plans to fly to the pole, Byrd moved quickly. After being released from active duty with the Navy, he secured financial backing from Edsel Ford, organized a team of pilots and mechanics, and sailed for Spitzbergen Island. On May 9, 1926, he and Floyd Bennett flew north in a Fokker monoplane named Josephine Ford in honor of Edsel’s daughter. Fifteen hours later, they returned with the news that they had flown over the pole. Although their claim would later be disputed, Byrd and Bennett returned to the United States as heroes. Both were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. In his book Skyward (1928), Byrd explains that they were considered heroes because “in us youth saw ambition realized.”

In June, 1927, less than a month after Charles A. Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, Byrd finally flew across the Atlantic. Flying with Bert Acosta, Bernt Balchen, and George Noville in a Fokker trimotor, Byrd demonstrated that regular commercial transatlantic flights were practical, despite the fact that his plane was forced to crash-land on the French coast because of heavy fog in Paris. The energetic and ambitious Byrd now turned his attention to the South Pole . Receiving financial support from Ford, the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims, and others, Byrd sailed with forty-one men, ninety-four dogs, a Ford snowmobile, and three airplanes on two ships, the City of New York and the Eleanor Bolling.

On January 1, 1929, the party began building a base camp, Little America, on the ice shelf at the Bay of Whales. Eleven months later, on November 28 and 29, Byrd, Balchen, Harold June, and Ashley McKinley flew their Ford trimotor to the South Pole and back. In addition to the historic flight, the expedition mapped and photographed a large section of the unexplored continent; made geological, meteorological, and zoological observations; and proved the feasibility of a permanent base in Antarctica. Byrd again returned home to a hero’s welcome, and Congress promoted him to the rank of rear admiral.

Three years later, in the depths of the Depression, Byrd organized a second Antarctic expedition, this time with fifty-five men, three airplanes, an autogyro (a forerunner of the helicopter), and several snowmobiles. After reestablishing Little America, Byrd sent a small party to build an advance base more than one hundred miles south, where he planned to station three men to make weather observations through the winter (April through August) of 1934. When storms prevented the planes and sledges from transporting enough supplies, Byrd decided to remain at Bolling Advance Base alone. Although he nearly died from inhaling carbon monoxide leaking from his stove, Byrd made most of his daily observations. The scientific achievements of the second expedition surpassed the first in many ways. The thickness of the ice was measured in several places, the outline of the continent was mapped more accurately, new astronomical and meteorological observations were made, and oceanographic data were collected.

The four-and-one-half-month struggle for survival at Advance Base left Byrd exhausted mentally and physically, and his career after 1935 was less spectacular than it had been. On the eve of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled Byrd to active duty and put him in command of the first government-sponsored Antarctic expedition since the voyage of Charles Wilkes in 1838-1842. During the war, Byrd helped find new air routes in the Pacific. In 1946, he returned to Antarctica with Operation Highjump, a naval exercise involving four thousand men, the largest expedition ever sent to that area. In 1955, he visited Antarctica for the fifth and last time during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) activities involving thirteen nations. He died two years later secure in the knowledge that he had contributed significantly to America’s awareness of the importance of Antarctica and the need for international cooperation in scientific exploration.

Significance

Byrd was a complex and controversial person. His drive and success aroused strong feelings, and he was never without his critics. In a sense, Edwin Hoyt was correct in calling him “the last explorer” of the generation of Amundsen, Robert Scott, and Robert Edwin Peary, a person driven by the desire to be the first to stand on uncharted ground and to survive incredible hardships. Certainly his failure to be the first to fly the Atlantic and the little accidents that plagued his early naval career drove him to seek recognition in Antarctic exploration, but there is also a mystical side to Byrd’s character. He confesses in Alone (1938) that he chose to remain at Bolling Advance Base by himself less for science than “for the sake of experience.” He compared himself to Henry David Thoreau at Walden and to Robinson Crusoe. Ultimately he found a harmony with the universe in the freezing Antarctic night.

Byrd’s plans for the first two Antarctic expeditions were as much an experiment in social organization as in natural science. There was a traditional American utopianism in the “constitution” he drew up for the government of Little America. “We have no class distinctions as in civilization,” he wrote in Alone. “He who may have failed back there has his chance to make good here; and he will not be judged by the position he holds so much as by the way he plays the game and does his job, however humble it may be. . . .” Byrd played the game of life in the context of the social and economic upheavals of World War I and the Depression. The failures of the old world made the exploration of a new one all the more urgent. Utilizing the advances in airplane technology, aerial photography, and meteorological instruments, Byrd may also be called the “first explorer of the modern age.”

Bibliography

Bertrand, Kenneth J. Americans in Antarctica, 1775-1948. New York: American Geographical Society, 1971. A scholarly history that places Byrd’s expeditions in a larger context. Excellent bibliography.

Bryant, John H., and Harold N. Cones. Dangerous Crossings: The First Modern Polar Exploration, 1925. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2000. Before he went to Antarctica, Byrd was part of an American naval contingent that explored the area north of Canada. This was the first polar expedition to use both aircraft and shortwave radio in its explorations, and the book focuses on the technology that Byrd and others employed during their expedition.

Byrd, Richard E. Alone. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938. Reprint. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1986. The most interesting of Byrd’s books because it is the most personal. Byrd describes his struggle to survive alone for four and a half months in Antarctica. More than a diary, this book is a discussion of the reasons for seeking extreme hardships. Obviously written to establish the author’s reputation as a literary adventurer, it bears comparison to Charles Lindbergh’s We (1927) and Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World (1900).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Discovery: The Story of the Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935. Reprint. Detroit, Mich.: Tower Books, 1971. Detailed history of the expedition of 1933-1935, omitting discussion of the solitary four and a half months at Advance Base. Good on equipment-testing and life in Little America.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Little America: Aerial Exploration in the Antarctic, the Flight to the South Pole. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930. Details of the first Byrd expedition, 1928-1930, and the building of the base Little America.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Skyward: Man’s Mastery of the Air as Shown by the Brilliant Flights of America’s Leading Air Explorer: His Life, His Thrilling Adventures, His North Pole and Trans-Atlantic Flights, Together with His Plans for Conquering the Antarctic by Air. 1928. Reprint. Chicago: Lakeside Books, 1981. Hastily written first book; the subtitle shows how Putnam promoted Byrd. Portions of this book had already appeared in magazines.

Hoyt, Edwin P. The Last Explorer. New York: John Day, 1968. Written without access to Byrd’s private papers, but still a complete account of the great explorer’s life.

Parfit, Michael. South Light: A Journey to the Last Continent. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Updates Bertrand and describes conditions in Antarctica in the late twentieth century. Good discussion of the 1956 treaty under which more than a dozen nations maintain dozens of year-round scientific stations without relying on territorial claims.

Rose, Lisle A. Assault on Eternity: Richard E. Byrd and the Exploration of Antarctica, 1946-47. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1980. Detailed account of Operation Highjump, a naval training and scientific mission in which Byrd was marginally involved.