The Secret Land Operation Highjump

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By: United States Navy

The 1948 best documentary and Academy Award winner document the Antarctic expedition in 1946. The operation was named Operation High Jump officially titled The United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program. It was organized by Admiral Richard E. Byrd Jr, USN Retired.

Highjump’s objectives, according to the U.S. Navy report of the operation, were:

Training personnel and testing equipment in frigid conditions;
Consolidating and extending the United States' sovereignty over the largest practicable area of the Antarctic continent (publicly denied as a goal even before the expedition ended);[citation needed]
Determining the feasibility of establishing, maintaining, and utilizing bases in the Antarctic and investigating possible base sites;
Developing techniques for establishing, maintaining, and utilizing air bases on ice, with particular attention to later applicability of such techniques to operations in interior Greenland, where conditions are comparable to those in the Antarctic;
Amplifying existing stores of knowledge of electromagnetic, geological, geographic, hydrographic, and meteorological propagation conditions in the area;
Supplementary objectives of the Nanook expedition (a smaller equivalent conducted off eastern Greenland).

Naval ships and personnel were withdrawn back to the United States in late February 1947, and the expedition was terminated due to the early approach of winter and worsening weather conditions.

Admiral Byrd discussed the lessons learned from the operation in an interview with Lee van Atta of International News Service held aboard the expedition's command ship the USS Mount Olympus. The interview appeared in the Wednesday, March 5, 1947 edition of the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio and read in part as follows:

“Admiral Richard E. Byrd warned today that the United States should adopt measures of protection against the possibility of an invasion of the country by hostile planes coming from the polar regions. The admiral explained that he was not trying to scare anyone, but the cruel reality is that in case of a new war, the United States could be attacked by planes flying over one or both poles. This statement was made as part of a recapitulation of his own polar experience, in an exclusive interview with International News Service. Talking about the recently completed expedition, Byrd said that the most important result of his observations and discoveries is the potential effect that they have in relation to the security of the United States. The fantastic speed with which the world is shrinking – recalled the admiral – is one of the most important lessons learned during his recent Antarctic exploration. I have to warn my compatriots that the time has ended when we were able to take refuge in our isolation and rely on the certainty that the distances, the oceans, and the poles were a guarantee of safety.”

Some parts of summary taken from Wikipedia

Link to original article:
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/imagenes_antartica/antartica22_03.gif