We Were There with Byrd at the South Pole by Charles S. Strong

All were very fond of Byrd, but evidence has accumulated that Byrd may well have lied about having successfully reached the North Pole, an event which brought him much of the fame he relied on to gather funds for the South Pole trip. In fact, many surviving participants were very reluctant to be interviewed. Eugene Rodgers, in Beyond the Barrier: The Story of Byrd's First Expedition, to Antarctica does not gloss over the man's flaws. But he was, after all, as he said, in the 'hero business.' He was forced to raise most of the funds for his expeditions himself and money was not always easy to come by for his famous expedition to the South Pole. Richard Byrd had his share of faults, lying being one of them. Read moreĪll classical heroes should have at least one clay foot. The book further reveals a crisis over drunkenness among the men (including Byrd), the admiral's fear of mutiny, and his rewriting of news stories from the pole to embellish his own image. Interviews with surviving members of the expedition together with a wealth of other new material indicate that Byrd, contrary to his claims, was not a good navigator-his pilots usually had to find their way by dead reckoning-and that he was not on the actual flight that discovered Marie Byrd Land. Nor was the expedition without its problems. Without discrediting the expedition's success or Byrd's leadership, Rodgers shows that the admiral was not the saintly hero he and the press depicted.

With this study Eugene Rodgers provides a scrupulously honest and objective account of Byrd's 1929 expedition to Antarctica. Previous books on the legendary polar explorer had to rely on sources subject to the admiral's vigilant censorship or the control of his heirs and friends. When this book originally appeared in 1990, it was hailed as an important new work because of the author's access to Adm.

We Were There with Byrd at the South Pole by Charles S. Strong