Operation Highjump: What Was the U.S. Navy Really Doing in Antarctica?

The United States Sent a Small Fleet to the Bottom of the World

In late 1946, barely a year after the end of World War II, the United States Navy began moving an extraordinary amount of hardware toward Antarctica.

Operation Highjump, officially the United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program, assembled more than 4,700 personnel aboard 13 ships with 33 aircraft. The force included the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea, the submarine USS Sennet, the Coast Guard icebreaker Northwind, seaplane tenders, cargo vessels and a large collection of aircraft capable of surveying enormous stretches of the continent from the air. Rear Admiral Richard H. Cruzen commanded the task force, while the already famous polar explorer Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd served as officer in charge of the project.

This was not a handful of scientists arriving with thermometers and heroic moustaches.

It was a naval task force.

That simple fact eventually became the foundation for one of the more durable stories in modern conspiracy culture: that the United States had gone to Antarctica to deal with something left behind by Nazi Germany.

And there really had been Germans there.

Nazi Germany Really Had Explored Antarctica

In 1938, Nazi Germany sent the ship Schwabenland to Antarctica under expedition leader Alfred Ritscher. Aircraft photographed large areas of what is now Dronning Maud Land, and the Germans gave part of the surveyed region the name Neu-Schwabenland, or New Swabia.

The expedition was primarily connected with Germany's interest in Antarctic whaling. Whale oil was economically important, particularly for products such as margarine and soap, and Germany depended heavily on imports. The voyage also had obvious national and territorial dimensions, arriving during an era when governments were busily sticking flags into remote places and discussing ownership as though continents were unusually large cakes.

What the expedition did not leave behind, according to the surviving records, was a functioning underground military city.

There is no documented construction programme for a vast Antarctic installation, no supply infrastructure appropriate for one and no evidence of a wartime population quietly manufacturing advanced weapons beneath the ice. A detailed historical examination published in Polar Record found no evidence that Germany constructed such a base before, during or immediately after the war.

But the German expedition was real.

Neu-Schwabenland was real.

Then, seven years later, one of the largest Antarctic expeditions ever attempted arrived with American warships.

The mythology did not have to work terribly hard.

Highjump Was Military, But Not the Military Operation the Legend Requires

The official objectives of Highjump were considerably broader than simply drawing maps.

The Navy wanted to train personnel and test equipment under extreme cold conditions, determine whether Antarctic bases could be established and maintained, experiment with operating airfields on ice, conduct geographical and meteorological research and improve American knowledge of the continent.

One particularly revealing objective concerned developing methods that could later be applied in Greenland.

That places Highjump directly into the rapidly changing strategic world of 1946.

Germany was defeated. The Soviet Union was not.

American military planners were increasingly interested in polar warfare because the shortest routes between North America and the Soviet Union crossed the Arctic. Aircraft approaching the United States did not need to politely arrive across the Atlantic like previous European enemies. A future war could come across the top of the planet.

Antarctica provided somewhere remote to practise large-scale polar operations without conducting a major American naval exercise unpleasantly close to Soviet territory. Highjump followed smaller cold-weather operations in the Arctic and was itself followed by Operation Windmill in Antarctica during 1947–48.

There was also a territorial dimension. One stated objective in Navy documentation involved strengthening possible United States claims over as much Antarctic territory as practicable, although this aim was publicly denied before the expedition had even finished.

So there genuinely were motives that went beyond innocent science.

They simply point toward Cold War strategy rather than Nazis with anti-gravity engines.

The Expedition Was Supposed to Last Longer

Here the story becomes more interesting.

National Archives material describes Highjump as initially expected to last between six and eight months. Instead, major operations ended during the first months of 1947 as deteriorating weather and the approaching Antarctic winter made continued operations increasingly difficult.

Later conspiracy versions transformed this early departure into a retreat.

According to the more elaborate stories, American aircraft encountered a surviving German force based beneath the ice. Disc-shaped machines emerged, attacked the expedition, destroyed aircraft and forced Byrd to abandon the campaign.

There was a real fatal aircraft accident.

On 30 December 1946, the PBM Mariner flying boat known as George 1 crashed during a whiteout while conducting reconnaissance. Three crewmen died and six survived until rescuers reached them nearly two weeks later.

That tragedy eventually became entangled with claims that several American aircraft had been destroyed by hostile technology.

The records do not support that version. The documented crash occurred on the opposite side of Antarctica from Dronning Maud Land, the region supposedly containing the German fortress. Researchers examining the expedition records found no evidence that four aircraft were lost in combat or that Highjump was terminated because of enemy action.

Antarctica itself was proving perfectly capable of attacking the United States Navy without subcontracting the work to anyone else.

Then Admiral Byrd Said Something Very Convenient

One of the most frequently repeated pieces of evidence for a mysterious encounter comes from an interview Byrd gave shortly after Highjump.

On 5 March 1947, the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio published remarks in which Byrd discussed the strategic importance of the polar regions.

In later UFO literature, this became a warning that the United States faced strange flying objects capable of travelling from pole to pole at extraordinary speed.

That would certainly improve the story.

Unfortunately, it is not what the newspaper actually says.

The Spanish report has Byrd warning that in a future war hostile aircraft could attack the United States by flying across one or both polar regions. His wider point was that oceans and geographical isolation could no longer guarantee American security.

In 1947, with long-range aviation advancing rapidly and relations with the Soviet Union deteriorating, this was not an especially paranormal observation.

The transformation from hostile aircraft crossing the poles into mysterious objects flying between them appears in later retellings.

A few altered words managed to provide several decades of UFO documentaries with employment.

Highjump Was Not Actually Secret

Another peculiar feature of the legend is the description of Highjump as a secret American mission.

Parts of its military findings were classified. Its strategic purposes were real.

The expedition itself, however, was extremely difficult to hide because the United States made remarkably little attempt to hide it.

Eleven journalists travelled with Highjump. According to expedition records examined by historians Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching, those reporters transmitted more than 478,000 words back to their employers during the operation.

The Navy also filmed the expedition.

The resulting documentary, The Secret Land, was released publicly and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

There are undoubtedly more discreet methods of conducting a secret battle against the surviving technological forces of the Third Reich than bringing eleven journalists, filming the campaign and submitting the footage for an Oscar.

The UFO War Appeared Later

The timing of the flying-saucer version is particularly revealing.

Summerhayes and Beeching traced the development of the Antarctic Nazi mythology through postwar publications. Rumours connecting surviving Nazi technology with flying saucers developed during the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s, writers were combining German secret weapons, Nazi fugitives, underground Antarctic installations and Operation Highjump into something much closer to the modern story.

A particularly influential 1975 book, UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapon?, helped establish the explicit claim that Highjump had encountered advanced German machines in Antarctica.

There is an obvious chronological problem.

The famous American flying-saucer craze itself did not erupt until months after Highjump had finished.

The UFO component was not a contemporary explanation of what happened to Byrd's expedition. It was attached retrospectively to an already unusual military operation.

And Highjump Barely Investigated the Alleged Nazi Base

There is an even larger geographical problem.

If Highjump had been sent to destroy a Nazi installation in Dronning Maud Land, its behaviour was remarkably uncooperative with its alleged mission.

The historical record shows no American landing there during Highjump and no particular attempt to concentrate reconnaissance on the region. Byrd's own flights were around the Ross Sea and South Pole, roughly 2,000 kilometres from the supposed German stronghold.

The task force explored huge stretches of Antarctica because that was what it had been sent to do.

It did not converge on New Swabia.

It did not assault it.

It did not occupy it.

When the United States finally did land personnel in Dronning Maud Land in 1955, the purpose was reconnaissance for possible emergency aircraft landing facilities connected with later Antarctic operations.

Whatever Highjump was doing, its movements do not resemble an expedition hunting Base 211.

Why Does Operation Highjump Still Feel Strange?

Because stripping away the flying saucers does not leave us with a boring story.

The United States really did send more than 4,700 men, an aircraft carrier, a submarine, icebreakers and dozens of aircraft into Antarctica immediately after the largest war in human history.

The expedition really did have military objectives.

Some of its findings really were classified.

The United States really was thinking about territorial influence in Antarctica.

The Navy really was experimenting with techniques intended to prepare it for operations in polar regions as relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated.

A fatal aircraft crash really occurred.

And only a few years earlier, Nazi Germany really had explored and photographed part of the same continent.

Those facts provide almost every ingredient required for a secret-war story except evidence that the secret war happened.

Operation Highjump therefore sits in an unusual historical position. The conspiracy was built around a real expedition whose scale looks excessive if it is described merely as scientific exploration, but considerably less mysterious once its actual military objectives are included.

The question is not why the United States sent a military force to Antarctica.

The documents give several answers to that.

The more interesting question is how a Cold War polar training operation, a genuine German Antarctic expedition, one fatal crash and a mistranslated newspaper interview eventually became a battle against Nazi flying saucers beneath the ice.

That transformation tells us almost as much about the decades after Operation Highjump as the expedition tells us about 1946.