Operation Highjump

On January 1, 1947, Lieutenant Commander Thompson and Chief Petty Officer John Marion Dickison [4] utilized "Jack Browne" masks and DESCO oxygen rebreathers to log the first dive by Americans under the Antarctic.

[8] Naval ships and personnel were withdrawn back to the United States in late February 1947, and the expedition was terminated due to the early approach of winter and worsening weather conditions.

[9] Byrd discussed the lessons learned from the operation in an interview with Lee van Atta of International News Service held aboard the expedition's command ship, the USS Mount Olympus.

The interview appeared in the Wednesday, March 5, 1947, edition of the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio and read in part as follows: Admiral Richard E. Byrd warned today that the United States should adopt measures of protection against the possibility of an invasion of the country by hostile planes coming from the polar regions.

[11] As with other U.S. Antarctic expeditions, interested persons were allowed to send letters with enclosed envelopes to the base, where commemorative cachets were added to their enclosures, which were then returned to the senders.

Clifford M. Campbell, USN, Commanding On December 30, 1946, aviation radiomen Wendell K. Henderson, Fredrick W. Williams, and Ensign Maxwell A. Lopez were killed when their plane crashed (named George 1—a Martin PBM Mariner) during a blizzard.

[14] In 2007 a group called the George One Recovery Team was unsuccessful in trying to get direct military involvement and raise extensive funds from the United States Congress to try to find the bodies of the three men killed in the crash.

The film re-enacted scenes of critical events, such as shipboard damage control and Admiral Byrd throwing items out of an airplane to lighten it to avoid crashing into a mountain.