When was admiral byrd born

Interested in polar exploration as a boy, he was appointed navigator for the proposed transpolar flight of the Navy's dirigible "Shenandoah" from Alaska to Spitzbergen in When the flight was canceled by Pres. Coolidge, Byrd began to organize his own Navy flight expedition to the Arctic.

He ultimately joined forces with the MacMillan Expedition to northwest Greenland, which was sponsored by the National Geographic Society, in He completed the first flights over Ellsmere Island and the interior of Greenland. Byrd was a gifted aviator and an explorer at heart. Hi there! Share Alamy images with your team and customers. All images All images. Live news. Search by image.

Search for images Search for stock images, vectors and videos. Congress promoted Byrd to rear admiral, and on 21 June the commonwealth of Virginia awarded him a partially gilded sterling silver presentation sword. In January Byrd returned to Little America with a larger expedition. The one-year project featured a larger scientific program and included eight motorized vehicles.

While Byrd manned a solitary meteorological outpost miles from Little America, he became so ill from carbon monoxide poisoning that a tractor party had to make an epic winter journey to rescue him.

He never fully recovered from this ordeal. Byrd started to form a third private Antarctic expedition but merged his enterprise with the new United States Antarctic Service. He led the expedition through its year in the Antarctic, from January to January During World War II Byrd served in several staff roles, his principal mission being to survey potential air bases in the Pacific, for which he was awarded the Legion of Merit and a Gold Star.

After the war he headed two more navy expeditions, Operation Highjump in and Operation Deep Freeze in , which established a permanent Antarctic base. Byrd was in the Antarctic only briefly during the postwar expeditions. Disdained by the regular navy because of his political promotions, Byrd had little independent authority in the government's expeditions and was little more than a figurehead in their later operations. World Renown Byrd became one of the most famous explorers of his generation.

His lecture tours were, however, never as profitable as he had anticipated. As the essays by Eugene Rodgers and Lisle Rose demonstrate, this accomplishment—attended by none of the controversy that marked the North Pole venture—was made possible by the largest expedition yet organized in the history of polar exploration and the effective use of new technologies including the airplane and radio.

The South Pole flight was, arguably, the apex of Byrd's career. His second expedition to the Antarctic, , was devoted strictly to exploration and science. Lacking any single dramatic venture to fix public attention and financial support on his endeavors, Byrd elected to man an isolated weather station by himself during the long and grueling Antarctic winter.

Robert Matuozzi and other authors in this issue explore the course and consequences of this ill-fated enterprise in detail, but it ended in disaster for Byrd who, poisoned by a poorly vented stove and faulty gasoline-powered generator, had to be rescued by his own men. The blow to his self-esteem and the damage to his health haunted the remainder of his days, but the frank assessment he gave his situation and its spiritual lessons in his book,Alone, earned him new honors in the history of polar literature.

Byrd then devoted himself to an integrated philosophy of personal and world peace he had formulated in the icy loneliness of his weather hut. His ideas would have a profound impact on the internationalization of Antarctica in decades to come, but in the late s he poured himself into a new role as honorary chairman of the No-Foreign-War Crusade and appealed to European nations for peace as late as The paradoxical relationship in which he then found himself with President Franklin D.

Roosevelt, the architect of America as arsenal of world democracy as well as a proponent of Byrd's proposals for Antarctic colonization, is examined in this issue's final essay by Noel Broadbent and Lisle Rose. For the two decades or so left to Byrd, his name remained synonymous with the Antarctic, but his later role in massive navy-led expeditions was as a figurehead. He spent the war years in active duty, most notably selecting sites for naval air stations in the Pacific.

By the war's end Byrd was in his late fifties, retirement age for many military officers. But his interest in the Antarctic remained strong, and so was the navy's. In the postwar world of competition between the U. Although he was named officer in charge, active command flowed through established naval channels. From late to early , four thousand men and a small fleet of ships and planes mapped more than fifteen hundred miles of coastline. Byrd joined a flight to the South Pole and navigated with his old sun compass, but it was just a gesture.

The admiral returned to the icy continent again with Operation Deepfreeze during the Antarctic summer of , but the experience must have been sad for the old leader approaching his seventies because initiative in Antarctic science and exploration had clearly passed out of his hands, and he was often embarrassed by the indifference and occasional insults of younger men.

Nonetheless, it was partly through his vision and hard work that the International Geophysical Year of developed as a peaceful effort of scientific cooperation in the midst of a worldwide Cold War. During his last years Byrd spent much of his time writing and lecturing on his Antarctic experiences. He also directed his still considerable energies toward promoting world peace as he had envisioned it during his long and troubled stay at Advance Base in His efforts led to the founding of the Iron Curtain Refugee Campaign of the International Rescue Committee, on whose board of directors he served as honorary chairman from until his death.

Within weeks of receiving a medal of freedom from the Department of Defense, Richard Byrd died on 11 March It would be a mistake to describe—as many biographers have—the last two decades of Byrd's life as a period of decline and incapacity, a period in which the force of his immense ambition and ability had been spent. It is true that Byrd never again matched his most notable triumphs—he failed to equal the flights over the poles or the Atlantic, his leadership in the huge Antarctic expeditions of the s and s was only nominal, and there were no more ticker-tape parades down Broadway.

He may have never fully recovered from damage he did to his health at Advance Base. But emphasizing the decline of Richard E. Byrd distorts his legacy. During the late s and s this explorer and adventurer was one of America's most visible men.

His fame was forged in the crucible of the new media of his age and its ability to create a mass culture. The image of Byrd, the man, and what he accomplished, had a life of its own in the mind of the public. Such men, however, are vulnerable—vulnerable to accusations of disability and growing irrelevance when public attention shifts to new concerns, new heroes, and new arenas. And by the s the world was changing around Byrd. The Great Depression and the New Deal transformed many aspects of American life by bringing into the public sector important matters that Byrd's generation would have kept strictly private.

Men and women tumbled into the economic disaster of the depression blaming themselves for what happened. But new government agencies soon assumed responsibility for their lives, putting them to work, controlling farm production, managing labor relations, and regulating banks. Antarctic exploration became institutionalized in new government programs as well.

The great white South became less and less an unknown continent ripe for adventure and conquest by free spirits such as Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, or Richard E.

The times recast Antarctica as the subject of national interest, and exploration became a tool in a global struggle for strategic advantage with the forces first of fascism and then of communism. No man could stand astride the continent in the way Byrd had during the late s and early s.

Science was changing too. The kinds of studies that scientists accompanying Byrd conducted in Antarctica became increasingly costly and complex, often involving teams of specialists, huge budgets, and years of sustained work. They simply could not be pursued in the episodic pattern of Byrd's expeditions, supported only by the vagaries of private funding. During World War II and the Cold War, science, too, became increasingly a matter of national interest subsumed under federal programs and budgets.

Changes in the worlds of exploration and science, however, signaled much deeper movements in the nature of American life during the course of Byrd's career. The Ballyhoo Years of his greatest success were about individual achievement in tension with mass culture—about who could hit the most home runs, dance the longest, or had more of "it" on the silver screen.

Lindbergh was a phenomenon because he flew the Atlantic alone. Byrd, of course, sought to master the Antarctic winter night alone. Americans, however, could not confront the Great Depression alone. They joined huge collective efforts such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, in which they lived in barracks, wore uniforms, and worked under military discipline to improve the nation's natural resources.

Other New Deal programs planned the economies of massive regions such as the Tennessee Valley or resettled people from unproductive, high plains homesteads and Georgia dirt farms. The conflict had its heroes, but everyone knew that the outcome depended not on individual acts of bravery but on integrated effort and national purpose.

Social conformity then became the watchword of the nation during the Cold War and the affluent age of s consumerism. Americans were no longer searching for the kind of hero Byrd had been in an earlier era.