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Chapter 3 - Breakthrough
- University of Missouri Press
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Chapter 3 Breakthrough ate in 1923, rumors began to circulate in Washington that Billy Mitchell and the Army Air Service were planning a dramatic new initiative for the following year: a round-the-world flight that would consume many weeks and fix the world’s attention on long-range airpower. The navy needed a counter. According to one knowledgeable contemporary, Bob Bartlett, who had played a major role in breaking the trail for Robert Peary’s final, and ostensibly successful, rush to the North Pole back in 1909, saw a chance “to sell the Navy a bit of Polar exploring enthusiasm. He quickly teamed with Dick Byrd and other Navy dirigible balloon enthusiasts to plan a Polar exploration” using the navy’s huge new dirigible , Shenandoah. Moffett proved receptive, and Navy Secretary Edwin Denby, with President Coolidge’s approval, directed his chief aviator to chair a seven-man commission to study the feasibility of reaching the North Pole by air. Byrd was named to the commission along with Bartlett and Fitzhugh Green, a navy lieutenant commander who had been out on the polar sea and was considered a great Arctic expert. Moffett ordered Byrd to take the lead in coordinating plans for Shenandoah’s Arctic trip on which he would be chief navigator.1 The Moffett committee reported to Denby in mid-December with a proposal to send the airship out to San Diego and up the coast to Alaska. From Nome, Shenandoah would fly to the pole and either return to Alaska or pass on to the island of Spitsbergen , in the Svalbard archipelago north of Iceland. From there Shenandoah would fly home to Lakehurst, New Jersey. However, early the following month a seventy-mile-an-hour gust tore the dirigible from its mooring mast at Lakehurst, and Congress began to voice concern over an Arctic flight: the project would be costly, the weather questionable, basing arrangements difficult, and hazard to the 60 crew high. In mid-February 1924, President Coolidge himself killed the operation . Moffett, Byrd, and their fellow crusaders were crushed as they watched Mitchell and the Army Air Service take control of public relations. Seven months later army pilots successfully completed their global mission. Naval aviators would have to accomplish something equally spectacular if their service wasn’t to fall into permanent eclipse. Donald MacMillan thought he had the answer. Like Bartlett, MacMillan had been one of Peary’s men on the admiral’s controversial 1909 Arctic expedition, turning back above 84 degrees north with frozen heels. With his Arctic credentials firmly established, MacMillan became one of the great, if unsung, polar explorers, returning to the Far North as either leader or participant in thirty-one expeditions over the next forty-five years, concluding his last adventure when he was eighty. Widely perceived as a weighty, quiet man of great force yet calm temperament, MacMillan specialized in biology and the linguistics of Arctic native peoples. A lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, MacMillan had developed a long-standing connection with the National Geographic Society, and had just burnished his growing reputation with a two-year expedition to northwest Greenland and adjacent Smith Sound and Ellesmere Island.2 Early in December 1924, while Mitchell’s fliers were rightly being treated as public heroes, MacMillan wrote Moffett, expressing disappointment over the scrubbing of the Shenandoah mission and offering the navy any help it needed in furthering its aviation objectives in the North Polar region. In response, Moffett urged MacMillan to continue to speak out on behalf of naval aviation’s role in the Arctic. Moffett’s letter galvanized MacMillan. Following a radio address about his North Polar adventures on a Chicago radio station, MacMillan sat down with Eugene F. McDonald, head of the fledgling Zenith Radio Corporation, to plan another Arctic journey. Like MacMillan, McDonald was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve and an intelligence specialist as keenly interested in expanding the uses and applications of radio as Richard Byrd was in expanding the role of aviation. Following his consultations with McDonald, MacMillan in February 1925 dispatched a three-page proposal to Moffett. The navy should spend the coming summer exploring the Arctic by airship—certainly Shenandoah and perhaps another craft, if available. Based on tenders riding at anchor off the westcentral Greenland village of Godhavn, the great dirigibles would explore the two million square miles of North Polar wastes not yet seen by man. If weather and ice conditions permitted, the dirigibles...