Operation Highjump: Did Admiral Byrd Battle a Nazi Base in Antarctica?

The Story

After World War II paused activity in Antarctica, the Navy went back in force. Operation Highjump, in the southern summer of 1946–1947, was organized by Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who had led the first flight over the South Pole in 1929, and commanded by Rear Admiral Richard H. Cruzen, according to the National Archives. A Navy aviation history calls it 'a massive effort that included 14 ships, 4,000 men, and 25 aircraft,' among them seaplanes, ski-and-wheel R4D transports flown off the carrier Philippine Sea, and early helicopters.

Its size, and the fact that it was classified confidential, made it a magnet for speculation. The theory goes that Nazi leaders escaped by U-boat to a hidden base under the Antarctic ice and that Byrd's fleet was really sent to destroy it.

Highjump 'was designed to train the US Navy for a possible war with the Soviet Union in the Arctic, and not to attack an alleged German base in Antarctica.'

The theory borrows from real events. A German expedition did visit Dronning Maud Land in 1939, apparently intending among other things to set up a base. Two U-boats did surface in Argentina in July and August 1945, after Germany's surrender. In a 2007 paper in the journal Polar Record, Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching wrote that, given how little was known at first, 'it is not, perhaps, surprising' that people connected these episodes into 'a myth of a large German base existing in Antarctica and of allied efforts to destroy it.'

Working from what has been published since the 1940s, the paper concludes 'that the two U-Boats could not have reached Antarctica; that there was no secret wartime German base in Dronning Maud Land,' and that Highjump 'was designed to train the US Navy for a possible war with the Soviet Union in the Arctic, and not to attack an alleged German base in Antarctica.'

The Navy's account of the results is about exploration and equipment. 'The expedition's flights observed more than 700,000 square miles of Antarctica which were previously unexplored,' it says, and the operation proved out helicopters, rocket-assisted takeoff and ski-equipped aircraft for polar work.