Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with William T. Beckett, UTC, USN (Ret.) * conducted on March 28, 1999, by Dian O.

Transcription

1 Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with William T. Beckett, UTC, USN (Ret.) * conducted on March 28, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger DOB: Today is the 28th of March, I'm Dian Belanger and I'm speaking with William Beckett about his experiences in Operation Deep Freeze. Good morning, Bill, and thank you so much for talking with me. WB: Good morning, and I'm glad to be here to say a few words about Deep Freeze. DOB: Thank you. Well, begin please, Willie, by telling me something about your background: just briefly where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, and I'm interested particularly in any of those threads that might have suggested that you'd end up in a place like Antarctica. WB: Okay. First, I was born in a town called Gloucester, New Jersey. At sixteen I went into the Merchant Marine, and I came out of there because too many of them were getting sunk by the submarines. So I said I want me a big battleship. So I joined the Navy in 1942, April, and naturally I stayed till '71 which was almost thirty years. Now Deep Freeze... I was up in Russia. In fact, I was a prisoner of war up in Murmansk, Russia, for a couple of years. So the cold weather didn't bother me, and that's the first thing they asked me. Petty Officer Moss interviewed me and he says, "Can you take cold weather?" I said, "Yes, I can take all they got." I was younger then. But anyway, Deep Freeze was a good challenge. The reason being is, it was fantastic. Everybody was equal. I mean I don't care if you was a lieutenant or an ensign or a third class or who you were, everybody helped each other. I mean you had to to survive. Now a lot of people think we flew down there. We didn't fly. There was two ships transporting MCB (Special): one went to McMurdo and one went to Little America 5, which a few years later busted off and went to sea. That's not there no more. A ship called the Wyandot went over to McMurdo, and the other one, the Arneb, went over to Little America with * William Beckett died in February CW04 William Stroup, USN (ret.), who wintered over with Beckett in 1956, volunteered to review this oral history transcript. His substantive clarifications and comments are included as shaded text.

2 construction supplies. We had all the equipment for each base on these ships. DOB: Let me back you up a little bit. I want to get there, but... how did you find out about Antarctica? WB: Okay. The Bureau of Naval Personnel, I call it the bureau... [inaudible] yesterday was standing up. Okay. They come out with an AllNav, what they call an AllNav, it's a notice comes out and it's got different areas (of distribution) to go. They said they're going to start Operation Deep Freeze in 1955, which they did. So I just put my name down. I was in MCB-8, a construction battalion. So I put my name in to go, because they were going to decommission MCB-8, so I said, well, I'll try Deep Freeze. DOB: What was the appeal? Why did you think that would be a good place to go? WB: Well, I thought the work and experience down there would be good, because where I was at then, I was in Cuba and Cuba wasn't no experience. It really wasn't. It was mostly camp maintenance, very few challenging construction projects. DOB: How old were you at the time? WB: I was about I'd say twenty-nine. DOB: You'd done a lot by then in your life. WB: Yes. I actually put four different winters down there. I was going to spend five, but they wouldn't let me. DOB: Where did your Antarctic adventure begin? Did you go to Davisville first? WB: Okay. Let me explain that to you. I'm getting ahead of myself. Everybody reported to Davisville. DOB: And what did you do there to prepare for WB: They split the crews up. One for McMurdo, say a hundred and some people, and one for Little America 5. They sent Lt. Comdr. Dave Canham, which is a fly boy I use a fly boy expression, excuse me. Well, he went over to McMurdo because they were going to have airplanes over there. Okay. Now I went to Little America 5 which had the senior CEC Seabee officer there, Commander Whitney at the time. What we had to do there was

3 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, funny. Admiral Byrd stood up there, and he says, "Okay, gentlemen. This is it. Either you build a home or you freeze to death." I mean there was nothing. Just flat, like the Sahara Desert. So we decided we'd better start building. The huts were put together they were four inches thick with clips. You clipped them together with metal clips. It was my job to put the heat in there and get the water for whatever we needed, like the mess hall and stuff like that. Okay. The heat was these what you call a Coleman space heater, stands about 40 inches high, with a fuel oil tank in the rear. They were used to heat the shop areas, heads, and some work spaces. In the quarters we had what they call jet heaters. Take the shell away and the basic heater looked like a jet pod that sucked the outside air through the fire box and into the manifold that distributed the hot air through eight outlets for distribution through ducts. You had this flexible aluminum tubing that went up to the roof joist, then through to registers that were wall mounted and spaced throughout the berthing area. That was my job to do the water and the heating in each Clements hut and all. DOB: Were the buildings completed before you started your work? WB: Yes. They had to be. See, the way we made water down there, we melted snow. We had what we'd call a snow melter, and that was for the mess hall and drinking water and shower water. There were two snow melters: a small one at the galley (mess hall) and one large one at the power plant for making water for the showers. DOB: How did you do that? WB: Well, we had what they call a scoop, a front-end loader, and they went out away from the camp where there wasn't no human waste or nothing, you know, and scoop up a big scoop of snow and just dump it in a hopper. Okay. So what I did, I made a good one. I mean I... I don't like this small stuff where you make about 200 gallons an hour, you know. So I made one that the minute you hit that with the snow, it would melt it. It would make I'd say about four or five thousand gallons a day. DOB: How did you make it work so well that you could do so much? WB: First, when they designed it, the engineers, they had what they call an asphalt melter. In other words, it's like a tank thing which melts asphalt on the road. Okay. So that one used at the mess hall only lasted so long and it burned out. So I put this eight-inch pipe in there with an oil burner. We had two burners, one at each end, used to heat the pipe. They'd burn

4 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, about a gallon-and-a-half of fuel oil in about a minute, but it kept the pipe red. These pipes were solid red, and when the snow hit it, it melted the snow. In the mess hall and all, we used a lot of water. Now getting the water in the washrooms and the laundry room and stuff like that was a challenge. In the large melter there was a set of coils that went around in this tank, and that was fed by hand. Everybody went by and shoveled some in. That was just a voluntary thing. We had good showers and laundry facilities and stuff like that in there. We had no problem with that. And then after a period of time during our winter, April through July, we had to sit down and I had to get all the plumbing stuff ready for that trip out to Byrd Land, where we were going to build another base. That's where we drove those D-8 tractors 675 miles. I made up each building's heating and plumbing kit during the winter. In other words, I had enough stuff that I could throw half of it away. But we sent the material out on tractor trains. Now wintertime, we had movies. And we had a builder. He was terrific and he built a bowling alley [not during Deep Freeze I]. DOB: Really. Who was this? WB: A fellow by the name of [inaudible], and he was good. But he built that bowling alley. And the heating system only lasted one year, and then you threw the thing away when you come back down. DOB: Why? WB: Because it was firing so hard. It was a 210,000 Btu unit. It stood taller than this room. But it was firing so hard to keep the temperature up to 70 degrees. DOB: So then the next year they'd have to build a new one. WB: No, you just get them in a crate. They're heaters. So I always figured every time I went down there, I'd just change it because it was all burned out. DOB: Tell me about the trip [Deep Freeze I]. Did you sail on the Arneb? What ship did you go down on? WB: Yes, I was on the Arneb.

5 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, DOB: What's it like when you start sailing into water with icebergs in it? Tell me what it looks like and feels like. WB: Okay. We had two breakers, one Coast Guard and one Navy was ahead of us all the time. You could see them out there, you know, because an iceberg is only about... above water I think it's only one-tenth or something like that is what they claim, and we had two breakers with us, go in side by side. Now Little America 5, we docked right up to the ice. In other words, the ship had cranes on it like lifts. They put the D-8s on there, and then we had to assemble these twenty-ton sleds to carry the cargo up to Little America, where they're going to make Little America. Now figure this in mind, figure the whole base is not there no more. It busted off and went to sea. But we had to take the D-8s off first. DOB: Because you needed them. WB: Yes. We took those, then we towed the sleds up with the D-8s, and then we unloaded the stuff, the buildings. Okay, we had that in priority how we wanted that. The buildings come off first, and then the crew built the buildings. Everybody helped. I don't care what you were, an electrician or what you were, you helped. Then we put the heat in there. The first thing we did was put one of these space heaters... if you can visualize the old days, they had them on the floor out there back in the cold weather, and that's when we put a big pan of ice on there and we made our drinking water to start. But after that we had our regular water system. The ship coming down, it was funny because even the captain... if you never crossed the equator, you went through an initiation. Everybody went through that. So we had that on our way down, and then we split somewhere down there between McMurdo and Little America 5. I would say Little America 5 was built about three or four miles from right up against the ice. DOB: How long did it take you to do that? I should think those first weeks would've been rather chaotic. WB: It took us to build the base there, I would say, a couple of months, two months, because we had to get in there. That's what Admiral Byrd said. He said, "This is it, boy. You're going to do it or you freeze." DOB: He was on the ship, wasn't he? Did he come on land? WB: Yes, he came down on an icebreaker, I think. But he didn't stay. I mean he didn't stay for the winter. His hut's down there. Scott's hut and his

6 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, hut and everything else they still left down there, at least I hope they still left it. There was a lot of funny things down there and a lot of [inaudible]. [Laughs] It was funny. DOB: Tell me a funny story. WB: Okay, I'll tell you a funny one. One year, we were down there in what they called a meteorology room. That's where the admiral was sitting up there... Dufek he was the admiral at the time. Okay. The pilots were sitting there. They get the weather to see if they can fly to these outlying stations, you know, like it might be maybe Byrd needs some equipment or something. You never know what it is. But this young fellow was working in there, and he thought it was neat because he could see himself on TV. But he gets in front of the camera and he goes, "La-da-la-da-la-da-la-da!" And here the admiral and the pilots are looking at that TV. [Laughs] That was so comical. And the chief of staff come down and grabbed him by the neck and explained to him the facts of life and took him back up there. But he thought that was funny because he could see himself on TV. But they're looking at the weather, and they had a big chart, and what they'd do is televise it and it goes out to the airstrip plus up to the admiral's quarters and then they can tell if they're going to fly. DOB: Well now, you were the chief utilitiesman at LA 5? Is that correct? WB: Yes. I was the chief utilitiesman. During Deep Freeze I, Bill was a UT1. I saw him in 1961 when he went through NAS Key West from Cuba for another trip to the ice. He was a UTC then. DOB: How many others were there? WB: There was about six of us who worked. Bill had two other UTs, John Young and Wendel Wilson, both third class, who wintered over. DOB: But you supervised all of them. WB: Yes, I did. See, we had another chief UT, UTC Hubel, but he went over to McMurdo. We split the crew. Now what we did before we went down there, this one company was sending us supplies. We packaged those ourselves and numbered them so we'd know what's in there. In other words, I would know if I had a hot-water heater in this wooden crate or I'd know if the mess hall stove was in there, one of them. I had all the numbers in my pocket. We crated them ourselves... all the stuff.

7 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, DOB: Who decided what to bring? You said you had lots extra. WB: We had a set of blueprints of what we're going to build. We just copied off the prints, and you order them off this company. I don't know who did the order in Supply. For Little America 5, I didn't have to order the huts. That was already standard. But I had to order all the galley stuff and all the stuff for the washrooms and stuff like that and laundry, so I just made the list of required material off the blueprints. Everything was on a blueprint. DOB: Did you have catalogs to order from? WB: Yes. You went up to Supply and they let you order what was needed. We had a pretty good sock of money. Supply used to help us out a lot because we'd go up there and order out of commercial catalogs. A lot of stuff. You had to. Like we had washers and dryers and stuff like that. DOB: When you got down to the ice, did you say, oh, we forgot to order something or other and then have to... you had enough of everything? WB: What you have to do, you have to make it work or fit. You've got no choice. If you forget it, it's your dumbness, and it is, so you have to make it work. DOB: And did that happen very often? WB: No, because... only down there I had to make it. Let me explain something to you like, say you've got a big hot-water heater. You come out of the heater with maybe a one-inch fitting, but then to put all the pipes all over the place, it might be reduced to a half-inch. They didn't figure that. So what I had to do, I took different size pipes or couplings and welded them together. When I went out on that tractor train to Byrd Station, I made about three thousand of them (various size reducers or couplings). I had all I wanted. I mean I could throw them away. And then the hardest thing down there in the winter is to keep the smokestacks clear because it would snow, blow in, and then they'd get plugged up. DOB: Plugged up with snow? WB: Snow. Yes, because when it wound up, Little America was under the snow. It wasn't on top no more. It was down in the tunnel.

8 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, DOB: How'd you fix it? WB: It was just a tunnel. We just left the tunnel there. It was a square tunnel. We let the snow stay there. DOB: But how did you clean out the smokestacks? WB: With your hand and a screwdriver. It was simple. You walk on top of the snow, and then when you see one, a smokestack, you can tell because the smoke is coming back into the quarters. So what you do is take a screwdriver, tap the stack, and that clears it out it goes down. It'll burn. I mean it'll melt. It won't hurt the heater. DOB: What were the most repetitious problems that you had in keeping the utilities running? WB: Well, we had to improvise a lot. What happened, we had these jet heaters. They were terrific, but the electrodes is like a spark plug. The electrodes weren't long enough, so you had to fire one in the air inside this heater it was a round heater and it was jet-propelled like. But they wouldn't ignite properly, so what I had to do was... I worked with this welder, I had a good welder, and we just added to, extended the electrode. It worked beautiful after that. And then I put a fuel system in, which you used to have to go around, when you first started, and they had those five-gallon cans on the back of each space heater, so I just had nozzles where you squeeze the nozzle. I mean I didn't want to work too hard. The five-gallon fuel tank was filled from an improvised fuel sled that had a fifty-five-gallon drum mounted on it. Pull the sled through the tunnel up to the hut door, pull the hose into the building and fill the fuel tank direct from the drum. The jet heater fuel tanks were outside next to the entrance filled from the same fuel sled. What you've got to do in the Seabees, you've got to improvise. I mean they're going to tell you to do this job, I don't care if it amounts to nothing. They do, and that's the way it is. But like I'm saying, I hate to bring this back, but yesterday I did, I felt kind of sad because one fellow lost his life out on that runway. It was a shame. He backed right into the ocean. The ice gave way. DOB: Who was this? WB: Williams. Williams and Max Kiel died out in the trail in a crevasse.

9 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, Once you got the problem, it was pretty easy to figure it out. You know, you've got to do this and you've got to do that. DOB: So you could kind of build anything that had to do with utilities. WB: Yes. That's the way it is in the battalion. With the chief there, he's got to do it or he's going to find out why. DOB: After a while, it got to be winter for a long time. WB: Other than Deep Freeze I Yes. Well, in that time I had a fifty-six-foot shop. I had a beautiful room in there, too. I mean I had a Hollywood bed and all. [Laughs] DOB: You slept right there. WB: Yes. But anyway... even the officers wanted that room. So me and a guy used to keep exchanging every year so nobody got it. Deep Freeze I The winter comes in... what I had to do was get everything ready for the tractor train and the equipment to go to Marie Byrd Land. So I had to make sure I had everything ready, and we put them on the sleds. DOB: And you had the sleds packed and ready to go. WB: Yes. In other words, I had to heat so many buildings. I didn't have to do the buildings because they had builders that do that, but I had to put showers, washer and dryer, and water for the mess hall and so forth. Okay. The water for the mess hall came from the snow melter which was right next door in the generator room. So you take the heat off the exhaust from the generator into the snow melter, and that's how you get your water. There are coils circulating around inside the snow melter. So we had plenty of water there. But when we got there, I think it was in the afternoon sometime. We got there, say, two o'clock. DOB: Are you talking about Byrd Station now? WB: Yes. At 3:30 we're inside a nice, warm Clements hut. We had showers and all. We didn't fool around. It wasn't quite that fast. One structure was up in less than twenty-four hours with a Coleman heater. The

10 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, DOB: My. combination generator hut, shower and laundry area took a couple days because of equipment placement. WB: That's all it takes when you've got a crew that just goes. You don't have to tell them nothing, practically. Everyone assisted as necessary. DOB: Was this in a Jamesway? WB: No, the huts are panel huts, four inches thick Clements huts. DOB: And you had one built in an hour-and-a-half? Sled with building material ready to offload. Structure up in less than twenty-four hours, electrical and heating a little longer. WB: Yes. You put the crew on and they know what to do. You don't have to say, hey Joe, you do this or John, you do this or chief, this is it. No way. Nobody said nothing to nobody. They just put the timbers down first and then put the hut right on top of them. We were in there sleeping and everything. You don't fool around. DOB: You can't out there, can you? WB: But we had plane support from VX-6. I'll give them credit. They come out and said hello to us all the time. And they cached fuel for the D-8 tractors in bladders. DOB: You were on that tractor train... the first one? WB: Yes. There was only one that went out there with Deep Freeze I. DOB: Had the trail been set by them or were you on the trail-blazing party? WB: No. Mr. Young and a crew went out to find out if there were any crevasses or any big holes in the ground. We did lose Max Kiel, the driver. He went back into one, and he's still there. But they have a crevasse detector it's a round disk. You can see one in here if you want to look at it. It picks up a crevasse through sound waves. So what you've got to do is back up and push the snow in there and make it solid. But when I went out there, all the crevasses were taken care of. The whole trail was flagged with red flags. Of course I wasn't too good with that D-8. I used to wander off once in a while. DOB: You were driving a D-8?

11 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, WB: Yes. What they did, they put like a builder in one and a mechanic in the same tractor. That way, if you changed the oil or anything happened, you helped each other. Then we had the cook with us, that was called a wanigan where you ate your food. Then we had a sleeping wanigan. You changed shift every twelve hours, that's the way it was. It was nice. You just washed up and went to bed and got up in twelve hours, doing the same thing all over again. DOB: How long did that trip take? WB: It was 675 miles, and we went three miles an hour. So I calculated it up about, I don't know, twelve days or something like that... ten days, twelve days. DOB: Did you have problems with weather? WB: No. We were lucky. We went right on out. We had a little bit of storm, but we didn't pay no attention to that one. But they had a trail boss, like if you've seen in this cowboy stuff where they've got a trail boss. Warrant Officer Young was. He rode back and forth in one of the weasels, and he used to check the tractor train all the time. He made sure you didn't wander off like I used to once in a while. I pulled too much on the levers. You can do that on one of those D-8s and you're wandering. DOB: Had you been trained to be a D-8 driver before that? WB: No. I just learned how to do it out there. I mean I pushed a little snow, helped them out. I knew how to operate them. It was real fascinating. I tell you, there was an ex-quartermaster chief transferred to surveyor chief that went with us named George Moss that's what he was in the military. He was supposed to get to a certain spot at a certain time, latitude, longitude, and all that stuff. He got us within about two feet of where we were supposed to go. He established the route of that whole trail. He was good. He was. He pinned this right down. Then there was a pilot named Speed, and I didn't see him out there. But he was VX-6 and he flew the R4Ds. He's told us... see, we were going to go back on the Curtiss. We didn't go back on a plane. We went back on a ship called the Curtiss, seaplane tender. He said, "I'll be out to get you no matter how the weather is." Boy, he did, because when he came out that day, you couldn't see. But he was. He came out to get us there. DOB: How often when you were on the tractor train did planes come by?

12 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, WB: They had this little Otter that used to come out and bring mail and if you wanted anything, you tell them to bring it back. They had trouble with a part on one D-8 and they had to go back and get it and fix it up out there. But we had what they call an Otter. It's a single-wing plane. DOB: Single-engine. WB: Yes. It just flies out there. But what happened, I don't know if you've seen those R4Ds two-engine? They used to put the 800-gallon tank in there and that's how they got the diesel out to us in rubber bladders. They could put 5,000 gallons in one and you'd gas up there. We had storage tanks on ours, too. It was fascinating how they figured it all out. But Mr. Young, the warrant officer, he was the one that had to make sure the tractor train got through. I mean they put it right to him. It wasn't funny, but the admiral down there says, "If you can't get through on the trail, then you guys are going to have to jump out of a C-124." I said, "Man, I'm not jumping out of that sucker." [Laughs] "I don't care what you do, boy, I ain't bailing out of one of those planes. You're nuts!" He said, "Well, we have to build that base for the scientists," and I said, "Okay." But I tell you, it was a good crew and I'd go anywhere with them. DOB: Did Young do a good job? WB: Yes. He did terrific. He kept especially me he kept me straight and narrow with that D-8. They're big. They've got two levers there right or left. You want to move it, okay. With the clutch it's like man, you just give a little bit and you're going to wander, and he used to keep an eye on me. DOB: How many tractors were on the train? WB: There was, I think, eight. DOB: And each one pulling one sled? WB: I'll show you this. I can explain this to you, I think. Okay, here they are right here. See, something like that was what you call a sleeping wanigan. And here's the size of your D-8s. Now the pads on these, or tracks, is fifty-four inches. And there's where we hit it right there, right dead center. But there's another picture in here.

13 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, DOB: We're looking in National Geographic. WB: Here's George Moss and here's Admiral Dufek right there. See, it ain't that cold. DOB: When the sun is shining it helps, doesn't it? WB: Yes. There's a set of tracks. But you can imagine trying to change them. Here's a few more pictures. DOB: Well, we'll look later. WB: But you can see the size of one of them things. DOB: So that there's less pressure on the snow. Otherwise, they'd sink, right? WB: Oh yes. Yes. Fifty-four-inch pads is what they were, because we had to change one one day. Whew. DOB: That's got to be big, heavy work. WB: Not Deep Freeze I There they are. There's the whole thing. See, there's the fuel.... Remember me asking for Commander Epperly yesterday? Were you around? No, I don't think you were around. Anyway, that was my shed that I used to put fuel in to fuel these planes. Well, I took his wings off. [Chuckles] He came out screaming. "Oh, boy! Oh, wow! I can't fly!" DOB: That was quite an experience. You've mentioned a couple of times that WB: There's Mr. Young. I'm no driver, only UT. There's the warrant officer. He's a good guy. And there's the cook. Mr. Young told him when he left, he says, "Just make meat and potatoes for these guys." So then the cook came back and he made cookies and cakes. DOB: On the trail? WB: Yes, he made the whole thing. He didn't fool around. DOB: He must've liked the job. WB: Yes, he did. DOB: What was his name?

14 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, WB: Ray Mishler. DOB: Is he still around? WB: Yes, I saw him in Cuba. But he's one of these religious guys now. DOB: You mentioned twice the death of Max Kiel, which happened in a crevasse out on the Byrd trail. WB: Yes. What he was doing, they found this crevasse and he was filling it up, but he backed too far and the bridge over the crevasse gave way and down he went. DOB: What did that do for the confidence and the courage of those who had to come after that? WB: No, it didn't... I mean they came back to camp and we knew because they radioed back. We just said we're going on the trail. Okay. But that's when the admiral said, "Well, if you can't get through, boy, you're going to jump." Not me. DOB: How long were you at Byrd Station when you were there with that first party? WB: I was there almost a month, but then I went back again for another winter. DOB: And so after that... when you left Byrd, that was when you... did you fly out or did you take the train back? WB: No, we took a ship. DOB: No no. From Byrd back to Little America? WB: Oh. R4D. We flew back. Commander Speed was the one that flew in the fog. We didn't see nothing, then all of a sudden we heard two engines, because he said, "I'll come get you no matter how the weather is," and he did. So he took us out of there. And we had to get back to LA 5, then we helicoptered over to the Curtiss. That's a seaplane tender. It's a big thing. And they took us back. DOB: So you went immediately back then to the United States? WB: No.

15 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, DOB: I mean from... you didn't go back to LA 5 to stay there for a while? WB: Yes, I stayed about four days till they got that thing ready. And I was talking to the new people coming in because I had to tell the guy what I'd done, because I did a lot of shortcuts and help him out. Yes, I stayed there about four days, and then we were on the Curtiss and that was good because we went to Australia and New Zealand. We had a cruise. But we had to work on there. DOB: What did you do there? WB: I used to be a boilermaker down below in the fire rooms, you know. So I went down and volunteered to just take a watch, so I stood a couple of watches for them and helped them out. They thought that was pretty good. I keep my hand in it, you know. The Curtiss is a big seaplane tender, is what it was. They brought that down and back we went. We went into San Diego. DOB: How long were you back in the United States before you decided to go back to Antarctica? WB: I had about a year. DOB: What made you decide to go back? WB: I liked it. I did. It sounds funny. Now I'm not crazy or nothing, but I loved it down there because of the work. I mean I could do what I wanted and get what I wanted and everything else, and you can't get that in a battalion. But I used to go down there and... myself and another fellow stayed four years. An electrician me and an electrician. He'd go down one year and I'd go down the next and back and forth. DOB: Isn't that something? The second year [Deep Freeze III] you stayed at Byrd? WB: Yes. I had to relieve a guy because they sent him down without going... oh. Let me explain something to you. I jumped the gun a little bit. Before you went down, you had to go through a psych... I mean you had to have a psycho check. Now the way they set that up, the whole team come from Washington, DC. Okay. You had three groups. You had to be with a group, maybe a hundred people, or you had to be with a group with nobody, like yourself, and that's the way it worked. So I was pretty

16 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, lucky. I could go anywhere I wanted to go. But everybody has to go through a psycho check. I'll tell you one thing that I really respect, and it sounds funny to say it, but there was no gay, I mean none. To me, that was amazing because those psycho psychoanalysis or whatever you call them, they went right through them, boy. They did. DOB: Well, you went back then to Byrd Station for a whole year? WB: Yes. DOB: What was different about Byrd Station from Little America? WB: It was a small station. We only had twelve guys, that's all we had. DOB: In addition to the... the scientists would've been in addition to that. WB: Yes. DOB: How did you get along with the scientists? WB: Real good. You know the fellow that made the speech yesterday? The Chinese? DOB: Erick Chiang. WB: I swore he was out at Byrd Station, I did. We had a Chinese out there looked just like him, I swear we did. DOB: This one would've been too young. WB: Yes. We had a scientist, we had an electronic tech for Navy, a mechanic. You've always got a mechanic and you've got a driver and me. But what you do is go to a station like that and you've got a free hand. You can set up what you want. In other words, the way I had the fuel set up, I had 10,000 gallons setting up over the top of the buildings in the rubber bladder. So I decided to work it like a gas nozzle and fill up the heaters. I had a cart I used to pull around with a fuel drum on it. DOB: It's easier than hauling it, isn't it? WB: Yes.

17 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, DOB: I think the first year at Byrd they didn't have the fuel set up as well and ended up spending a lot of time out in the cold and the dark moving it around. WB: Yes, well, they had barrels fifty-five-gallon barrels. The fuel was transferred from the fifty-five-gallon barrels into the elevated bladder by using a Wisconsin hand pump. It pumps it out of the barrel into the bladder. The pump has a long piece of pipe that sticks down inside the barrels and you just hand-pump it. Put a regular Wisconsin pump into the barrel, and it pumps right into the bladder. That's the way you set it up so you don't have to carry the fuel so much. When it comes time to fill that thing [heaters/stoves], whew! When you're standing out there in the cold, it ain't no picnic about it, boy, you're in there. DOB: Was it a lot colder at Byrd than it was at Little America? WB: No, I don't think so. I think the coldest was Pole. I think it got down to... we got a message one time it got down to 110 below. So I'd say Byrd was 60, 65 below. DOB: Not too bad. WB: No, not too bad at all. But we had 5,000 foot of snow. DOB: Under you. WB: Yes, under us. And then there was some kind of rock. I don't know what it was the scientists knew that. I was telling Diane last night, we had a drainage system was five hundred and some feet down. The water off the showers and the washing machine went right down in the snow, and I sounded it one time with a tape and it was five hundred and some feet. DOB: Did you worry much about what was happening with all that wastewater in those days? WB: No. DOB: Today, you know, they're much more careful about the environmental impact of all of that. WB: Oh yes. I understand that. I was talking to a fellow... I understand down there now... have you been down there? DOB: Not yet.

18 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, WB: But I understand they've got a barracks and they've got a drain coming out of the galley or mess hall there. When the power goes off, it freezes. They wrap it with this tape that's got electric wires in it, supposed to keep it from freezing. What I would do if I was down there, I'd go ahead and drill for water. I mean it's no strain using a drilling rig. Or you could set up an evaporator plant because you've got salt water right there, you can do all you want with it, like the one up in Santa Barbara. You can make thousands of gallons. A carrier can make about 3,000 an hour. But then you've got fresh water, good and fresh. You don't even need no softener. Well, with the snow you don't either. DOB: Well, now, you wintered over two more times, and those were at McMurdo? WB: Yes, I went to McMurdo twice after that. DOB: In the early '60s? WB: Yes. DOB: What did you do there and why did you still keep going back? WB: I loved it, and I don't know, maybe I was simple. I was utilities there. I was in charge of the heat and snow melters, laundry service. I was telling Diane last night, that's where we got cheated out of a patent, because we had these big washing machines and dryers. In fact, the fellow that operated them, he could sit inside of them. He could. That's how big they were. But what happened, on a shaft going back they had oil bearings. Well, he would wash sheets for everybody, but the oil would come out of the bearings [inaudible] seals. So me and this machinist down there, we said, hey, let's do something here. So what we did was put two high-pressure grease fittings in there, and it worked. But we sent back to Mobil Oil and stuff like that and wrote them a letter and they said, "Oh, yes. That's a good idea. We're thinking of that now." So I said okay. DOB: It must've been different being at a place like McMurdo in the early '60s, which is now a going concern. There aren't new things to do there. Just simply to maintain what has already been installed.

19 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, WB: Yes. I was fire chief down there, too. One night the snow melter caught on fire. But I told the photographer now, no disrespect to him, I said, "I don't want to see no flashes in there, because if I'm down where the oil's burning, I don't want a flash because I don't know if that's the oil flashing up or you." But he had to do it one night, so I just took my [inaudible] under pressure about a hundred and some pounds pressure This has to do with the fuel oil pressure into the fire chamber. [End Side A, Tape 1] [Begin Side B, Tape 1] WB: back down again. There was another guy, an electrician. He went down four times, the same as I did. Bill must be talking about the fellow he rotated places with. DOB: Have you been back since? WB: No. DOB: Would you? WB: No. I wouldn't fly down there, no, because that plane run right smack into the mountain. No, I wouldn't do that. I'd take a ship down. DOB: Would you winter over again? WB: Well, with my wife, no, and my sickness, no, I couldn't. I mean I'm just not physically fit, because I've got anemia and the wife takes care of me a lot. She makes sure I'm at the doctors and so forth, and I couldn't do it. I'd just be a burden down there. But I'd love to go down just to see it. Put my foot up there again and say, "Yay! I made it again!" But I wouldn't mind going just to see it, because I understand there's ten million changes down there. DOB: It's got to be different. WB: Yes. Well, I was talking about the Antarctic... I was down at the VFW one Sunday and this girl said, "I'm going down with my husband." I said, "You're going to what?" She said, "Oh yes. We go down there, couples." I says, "What do you mean?" Oh yes. DOB: What do you think about having women in Antarctica?

20 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, WB: No, I don't think it's good. Well, I met a couple scientists, Russians, and they were pretty sharp. They were. But I don't know. What happens if you get down there and you get kind of sick or something or homesick or anything like that. What are you going to do with them? They're there. I mean it ain't like you're going downtown New York. DOB: Well, men get homesick, too, don't they? WB: No. You straighten them out. I don't mean no disrespect. I had a fellow that relieved me, and he didn't volunteer. See, it was all volunteer. But they grabbed him and just pulled him right out of the hat. And I understand he stood down there and looked out the window for about a year. I don't know what he was looking for, but I come down there and I took a look at him and I told the public works officer, I says, "Get him out of here right now. I got it. I know what's going on." He was, though. They got him back to Hawaii and he was wandering around in a storm like, you know? They should've never done it. If you volunteer, you'll get no excuse. DOB: There were a lot of women who wanted to volunteer even then. WB: Yes, I know. But... I don't know. It might be okay, but I don't know. You know, it's just like you have a woman working for you. They've got them in the Seabees now. But how am I going to tell some woman, "Okay, we're going to get this twenty-foot invasion pipe (large, heavy semi-flexible pipe used for temporary fuel lines) hooked in there now. Now you're going to pick up an eight-inch piece of pipe." I mean you just can't do it, you know? DOB: Presumably if she were in that kind of a position, she could do it. WB: Now it's no disrespect. Really not. DOB: Was there somebody that you met while you were there that you just particularly admired? And why? WB: Well, the fellow that I admired was the captain, Herb Whitney. He was the commander, and he made captain. I admired him. He came back down again... not for the winter, for the summer. I do. He was quite the engineer. He was a professional engineer. In fact, I think he helped design the George Washington Bridge. But I admired him for coming down because he didn't have to. I didn't have to either, but I enjoyed it. DOB: Why was he particularly special?

21 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, WB: Because his age was on him. He was. I'd say he was about fifty-five, almost sixty. But you could ask him any question, and he had the answer for you and that's what I loved about him. Herb Whitney. I think he's passed away by now. He was quite the engineer. DOB: Who were the important leaders at Little America while you were there? WB: Captain Whitney, and I think Mr. Bowers was over at McMurdo because they had to have a flyboy over there. Dick Bowers was a lieutenant j.g.. Dick was the senior CEC officer at McMurdo. Lt. Comdr. D. W. Canham, a pilot, was the Officer-in-Charge at McMurdo. Whitney would have interacted primarily with him. DOB: Were the best leaders those who were necessarily in leadership positions? WB: Yes, I think so because... not just because I was down there, but they screened them pretty close. I mean you can sit down and figure... that's why I say I'd go anywhere with them fellows. I'd go up to Timbuktu with them. Let's go. Just give me what you want and I'll do it. DOB: Were you ever truly scared? WB: No. I never got scared. Even in the winter, it was so nice. You'd look up there and the stars were up there, you know, twenty-four hours. No, I never got scared. I never got scared in my life, and I was in three wars. The only thing, I used to say a prayer during World War II. It was "Now I lay me down to sleep. I hope I don't get torpedoed before I wake." That's the only thing I used to say. What was funny down there one time, we had a Catholic priest, and one year you'd get a Catholic priest and the next year you'd get a Protestant preacher, minister. So the Catholic priest was out there and he told these guys, he said, "How come you don't come to church on Sunday?" So they told him, "Well, how come you don't help us?" So he said, "I'll make you guys a deal. I'll help you guys, but you come to church on Sunday." And he did. I mean he broke his back, that preacher. He was a young priest. But he said, "I want to see you guys in church on Sunday." "Okay. We'll go." DOB: Father Condit? WB: Yes. The other one died in a plane crash. He was over there [inaudible] Seabee museum. The Seabee museum has a chapel with an LA 5 painting.

22 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, When he come back, instead of him taking a commercial plane to DC, he took a military and it crashed somewhere out there. DOB: Peter Bol? WB: Yes. He was the chaplain. We had a Protestant at our place and Father Condit, Catholic chaplain, over at McMurdo. DOB: What did you think of Peter Bol? WB: He was okay. I didn't know him that well actually, because he'd go his way and I'd go my way. But they did make a nice thing out of that chapel over in the Seabee museum. DOB: During Deep Freeze I and II, where there were the two stations, McMurdo and Little America, and then each of them was to build an inland station, and so Little America built Byrd Station and McMurdo built Pole Station. And Pole Station got all of the news, all the press, all the politicians. WB: You're right there. DOB: How did the people at Byrd feel about that and the Little America people? WB: They didn't pay no attention to them, because the guys said, "Ah, let them dry up and they'll be okay." You don't. Like all the fellows that I was with was in battalions, you know, some Seabee battalions over there. You don't worry about that, who's got the publicity and who's got the public relations. You just do your job. Like in Vietnam and Korea, you do your job. The heck with them people. We don't pay no attention to them. Like the admiral comes over and looks around, yes, okay, it's all right. It's going good. Takes the trip back. DOB: Tell me about Christmas on the ice. WB: Some of the guys got a little sad, a little homesick. But they had a Christmas tree and put it up. It was okay. I'll tell you what they did one time, and the guy was in tears. There was a Russian scientist with us down at McMurdo one year, and his government wouldn't give him nothing. I mean they wouldn't give him ten cents to buy a hot dog. They wouldn't. They just cut him off. So everybody chipped in and bought him a beautiful camera, and he loved that. He had tears in his eyes and everything else like he was going to cry. They had a nice little ceremony and gave it to him. Man, he thought the world of us then.

23 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, But there's no difference. I mean I could ask him something and he'd ask me something if I could understand him. But Christmastime, some of the guys got half loaded and some of them didn't. There was plenty of beer. But they didn't mind it so bad because they knew that pretty soon it was going to come daylight. See, that's what they keep thinking in their minds: It's going to come daylight and I'm getting out of here. Deep Freeze I was limited to ten cases per person until resupply in November DOB: So Christmas is kind of a halfway point of the winter. WB: Yes. You know it's going to get daylight. [Both carelessly misspoke. Christmas occurs in the austral summer.] But nobody was that homesick. What they did that was a good morale booster was they had the ham radio that guys could talk home. You could go in there and talk. DOB: How often could you do that? WB: You could set it up like, say you wanted to talk tomorrow, I'll say. Say three o'clock or four o'clock you know you can get through. That was the main thing, getting through, because they used to have a real good fellow in New Jersey Jules was his name. I called my sister from there, and she almost went crazy. They said, "Your brother's calling you from the Antarctic." "I ain't accepting that charge!" [Laughs] He says, "No. From New Jersey." But the ham is one of the best morale boosters they've got for people because you can call Hueneme. Hueneme's got a station here, and they can contact others, and most of your Seabees come from here. Now your civilians, I don't know how they work it down there. DOB: How often could you talk with someone like your sister? WB: Oh, I could talk, I guess, every day if I wanted to but I didn't want to. I just, you know, occasionally. I called her on her birthday, I think it was. Wished her a happy birthday. But the operator has to say, "Your brother calling from South Pole," or McMurdo or whatever it was. She said, "I ain't going to accept that one!" [Chuckles] But she didn't know I was calling by ham radio. It was just from New Jersey to her house, and that's where she lived. But I'd go back again if I was physically able, but I'd take her [indicates wife] with me, because it's something fascinating. As long as it don't

24 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, interfere with your work, you've got it made. I imagine with a wife and all, you've got to worry about her plus you've got to worry about yourself. So it would be kind of difficult. I don't know. It would be a tough decision, because you're talking like 60 below zero in the winter. If you got froze or frostbitten or something, whew! DOB: How about the food when you were there? WB: Oh, that was the best. I mean I ain't kidding you now. I never ate that good nowhere in my life. Okay. What it was, it come in the boxes, but everything was boneless. Pork chops were boneless, steaks were boneless, everything was boneless. And everything come in cases. Like up at the shop, I used to eat a lot up there because it would save me the trouble of going down there and walking down there and all that stuff. But if I wanted tuna, I'd have to take a case because the cook would have to just scratch that off. But the food was terrific. I used to drink about forty gallons of milk and ninety gallons of ice cream... at that temperature. Everybody did. The food was terrific. And the Air Force, the first thing they would drop out of a '24 would be a crate of eggs with a couple of hundred-foot chutes, and there'd be none broken. DOB: How did they manage that? WB: I don't know. The two one-hundred-foot chutes would land soft though. But there wouldn't be none broken. We'd have fresh eggs. And the mail would come in at the same time. We had movies, and they had the bowling alley finally, and we had like a ship's store, and of course I smoked then. I used to smoke about two packs a day. It was just like a base. DOB: Who did the housekeeping? WB: We did. DOB: Did you keep it clean? WB: Yes. These huts were four inches thick, and they had like aluminum bottom in them. I even went down to the chiefs' club a lot and shoot the breeze with the guys. They'd take a mop and swab it down and everything else. I mean keep their rooms clean. The only thing they'd do is put the beer under their bed to get cold. [Chuckles]

25 William T. Beckett Interview, March 28, One night was funny. I ain't kidding you. We had a fire watch there. You've got to have a fire watch in each station, you know, just roaming around. He come back up to me and woke me up and says, "Hey, Chief. I was down at your quarters, down at chiefs' quarters, and you can't breathe." Well, what happened, the heater locked out. So it was about 90 degrees in there, and these guys were getting dehydrated. I knew it. See, you get dehydrated right away. So I went down there and I got it unlocked and straightened out. But I woke them all up and I says, "Get up. Drink all the water you can because you're going to be dehydrated." They did. They come out all right. But it must've been 90 degrees in there when that kid called me down there. And the flag quarters where the admiral stayed in used to call up... we used to put like a stack up with steel wires, and we used to get them so tight it would play him a tune. [Chuckles] He never liked that. And he used to call down to the shop and say, "Hey. I'm not ready to listen to a tune." When you have tension on wire, when the wind blows hard the wires vibrate and can sound like a musical stringed instrument. DOB: Well, as of yesterday, the military no longer plays a significant role in Antarctica. WB: I understand they turned that over to the Air. DOB: That's true. The Air National Guard. What do you think of seeing the military have less of a presence there? WB: I think they're going to be in trouble. I really do, because you've got to have radiomen you've got discipline for. I mean if them guys get arguing with each other, saying, "No, I don't have to do this, it ain't in my contract" or something, what are they going to do? In the Navy, you don't do that trick because you've got the respect. I'm afraid when you get all civilian, you're going to get in some arguments and these guys are really going to argue it out, because they're going to say, "Well, I don't have to do that, it's not in my contract." That's going to happen, I'm afraid, because being overseas I saw it happen a lot. The civilians start arguing with each other and they say they ain't going to do it. Over in Vietnam we had a lot of civilian contractors that built barracks and all. I don't know. They're going to argue, I think, down there and they ain't got no place to go. It ain't like here, you can go home and say, "I'll see you at five o'clock." You're there, and if you start arguing... unless they