Fragment: Lot #7770

Transcript

Transpolar Expedition

Admiral Richard E. Byrd

Polar Center 18 Tremont Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108

January 30, 1947

The honorable James V. Forrestal

The Secretary of The Navy

Washington D.C.

Dear James:-

Before I go any further, I need to reiterate that this letter is for your eyes only and of the utmost importance.

You're probably questioning as to why I am choosing a letter for something so important when an I.M. would be quicker, but I would like to remind you that Little America is far outside the range of the gods. Which is precisely why the errant Children of Zeus and their followers fled to this frozen hellscape.

But even if an Iris message were possible, I still would not use it. For reasons that I hope will soon become apparent.

On January 15th at precisely 0600Z the USS Mount Olympus and the Central Group arrived at the Bay of Whales and began construction of Little America IV. As the official objective of this operation this went well with only the usual SNAFUs. Lots of pictures were taken, speeches given, and an appropriate amount of flag waving was performed so that the western world can sleep peacefully at night knowing that an attack could not be launched from the frozen south.

But that's just the patriotic version that will be told to the public. Truth of the matter is things went very different.

The Central, Eastern, and Western groups arrived a month prior and began searching the coasts for any signs of German encampments. On December 15th, the remains of such an encampment were discovered by the Western Groups near -70.13, 24.75. The encampment was abandoned, but the ever present eagles and lightning bolts adorning nearly every conceivable surface left little question to whom it belonged.

As ordered, the aerial reconnaissance commenced to search further inland for the camp's former inhabitants, with another base found approximately 200km inland.

When a ground team arrived at the scene, they discovered that the encampment had been seemingly hastily abandoned with three strange exceptions. Within the largest shelter were found the corpses of three young men, all seated in the center of the structure with their backs to one another and weapons clenched tightly in their frozen grasps. The onsite medic believed their cause of death to be a mix of starvation and hypothermia, a belief that was later collaborated with by the Henderson's physician. While such a death is not unusual in such frigid climates, it is strange in that within the next tent was enough fuel and rations for weeks.

Perhaps they had gone mad, but it is my belief that something had those poor bastards afraid to go outside.

With only three of the expedition accounted for, the search continued, with the Eastern and Central groups providing addition recon.

This is where things deviated beyond SNAFU.

On December 30th, a Martin-PBM-5, call sign George 1, went down in a blizzard around 75.12, 65.53. However, the official story will be it was part of the Eastern Group and crashed on Thurston Island, 72.64, 99.00, as there is no logical way to explain how an aircraft crossed the continent in such weather with only a single tank of fuel.