Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with Charles A. Bevilacqua, CWO4, CEC USN (Ret.) conducted on August 3, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger DOB: Today is the 3rd of August, 1999. I'm Dian Belanger. I'm speaking with Charles Bevilacqua about his experiences during Deep Freeze I. Good morning, Charlie. Thanks so much for talking with me. CB: Good morning to you, Dian, and I certainly welcome you to Meredith, New Hampshire, and especially to my home here on beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee. I've been looking forward to this interview for a long time and I'm glad you're here and on such a beautiful day. DOB: Thank you, Charlie. Start by telling me just real briefly, Charlie, a little bit about your background: where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, and in particular anything that might suggest you'd end up in a place like Antarctica. CB: Okay! I was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, on the 8th of June, 1930, and went to the schools in Woburn, Massachusetts, graduating in 1948. Immediately after graduating, I joined the United States Navy Seabees and went right into training. Immediately after my training I went overseas to the island of Guam, then into Korea as a youngster ill- trained for a war in Korea, but there I was. I then did a year tour with a Seabee detachment on Moen Island, Truk Atoll, Eastern Caroline Islands. My next Seabee deployment was to Subic Bay, Philippines, July 1951 to August 1952. By now I was a builder second class (BU2) with a lot of building experience and Quonset hut erection. The next Seabee tour was back to Guam, Mariana Islands, more construction and promotion to builder first class (BU1). In high school my training was in the vocational trade in the carpentry business and I did a little carpentry before I went into the Seabees, so the Seabees was the natural service to go into. I wanted to be a Seabee rather than a sailor on a ship. And I pretty well thought I knew I was going to stay in for at least twenty years, anyway. I didn't think I'd stay in thirty years, but anyway, I'm glad for the experience. My father was tragically murdered in 1933, leaving my wonderful mother with me three years old and brother Albert two years old. We grew up on welfare with less than nothing during the Depression years in cold winter, rat-infested homes in Woburn, Mass. We both enlisted in the U.S. Navy Seabees and both retired as commissioned officers— my brother as a full commander, and I as a chief warrant officer (W4). DOB: How did you learn about opportunities for you in Antarctica? CB: I started hearing about this in 1955 through Navy papers and really wasn't too interested in it until I started seeing more and more articles. And then the men assigned to Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 2 Antarctica began coming to Davisville . . . I was at Davisville, Rhode Island, the Seabee base, and getting ready to go on another deployment when I really rated shore duty, and I was now a first class petty officer. The Korean War was over, and I was looking for something further to enhance my career. I knew that an expedition going to Antarctica would certainly help my career. I started inquiring about it, and when I started inquiring about it I started reading all the books I could on Antarctica and reading about Admiral Byrd, Amundsen, and Scott and the different other expeditions. The more I read the more I became interested. Up to that point in time, most of my deployments had been into the warmer climates, into the South Pacific, the islands of Truk and Guam and the Philippines were all warm climates. But I grew up in Massachusetts and skied in New Hampshire and I figured well, it may be a little bit colder in Antarctica, so I can tolerate it down there. But I was very disappointed to find out when I really started getting interested that they were all filled up and they did not need another first class petty officer builder type. But I persisted. I kept going up to the MCB (Special) headquarters and keep inquiring around until I finally talked with a Lieutenant Dan Slosser who was really a line officer. He wasn't a Seabee, but I found out that they were going to build Quonset huts at McMurdo Sound. I really wanted to go to Little America because that's where Admiral Byrd had been and all the history was there and didn't want to really go to McMurdo, but the Quonset huts were going to be built at McMurdo. And I came to find out that nobody really knew much about how to build Quonset huts and I was sort of, for a youngster, pretty much an expert on Quonset hut erection. DOB: How did you get to be an expert building Quonset huts? CB: By building Quonset huts in the South Pacific on the islands of Guam and Korea and down in Truk in the Caroline Islands. It seemed as though everywhere I went we had to build those damn Quonset huts. And I say "damn" Quonset huts because they were beautiful, great buildings, strong and durable, but they were very difficult to build, and I wished I'd never, ever see another Quonset hut in my life to have to build. It was not so hard to erect the framework, but to nail on the metal corrugated sheeting was very hard on hands and fingers. I still cringe at the thought. But talking to Dan Slosser, I mentioned that I knew how to build Quonset huts, and he was immediately interested in this because nobody knew much about these metal Quonset huts—not many on active duty had built them. So he started questioning me, and he got out a set of prints and I said, "I don't even need a set of prints. You can ask me anything about those Quonset huts you want to. I don't need a set of prints to build one of them." So he started asking me questions off the print, and I had all the answers for him. They passed the word and they said, "Hey. We've got a Seabee who knows how to build Quonset huts. But if you go, you're going to go to McMurdo and not Little America." I said, "Well, okay. That's fine with me. I'll go to McMurdo." Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 3 And then I became especially interested in going to McMurdo when I found out that the contingent that was at McMurdo and wintered over were going to be the ones that went to the South Pole. And I really wanted to go to the geographic South Pole. So everything was falling into place, and before I knew it MCB (Special) saw to it that I got my orders changed to MCB (Special) to go to Antarctica and I was going to be the great Quonset hut builder expert. Damn! DOB: Okay. Did you know much about Antarctica before you started reading about it in the 1950s? CB: No, I did not. As I say, I was a youngster right out of high school, joined the Navy, entered the Seabees, and had very little inkling about Antarctica. Operation Highjump had gone on before I went in the service. That was in '47, and I knew very little about that. I was more interested in sports and girls than I was in what the U.S. Navy was doing in Antarctica. DOB: So you were in Davisville in the summer of 1955. What did you do there to prepare you for this experience? CB: Other than going up and being a pest of myself to MCB (Special) and anybody that I could talk to, really not very much because I was getting ready to go on another deployment elsewhere. I was going to go back to Cuba or someplace. I don't remember where I was going to go. DOB: So you didn't have an assignment as part of the preparations for Operation Deep Freeze. CB: Oh. After I got assigned to it, then I got in with the training, and my particular job there, my big job there, was to build maplewood wooden sleds. I was a carpenter and I was really good in the woodworking shop, and this was another good trade that I had. So I was assigned to the public works carpenter shop to build the sleds that were going to be towed behind the Weasels. Not the dog sleds or the big heavy sleds that were going to be towed behind the tractors, but they wanted some sleds that were going to be made out of beautiful maple lumber and lashed together with rawhide. This was no problem for me. I was just a natural in the woodworking shop, so I was a natural and a good asset to MCB (Special) in that case. I hadn't even gotten to the Quonset huts yet. But I was a natural, and the sleds came out beautiful and I just wish that I could've found some and had one today. They were great tow sleds to put behind the Weasels. DOB: Did you have any cold weather survival training? Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 4 CB: I did not have any cold weather survival training other than what I knew from New Hampshire and Massachusetts in my previous skiing as a youngster. No, I had no cold weather training, but I loved alpine skiing and still do. DOB: So you went to Antarctica to do building. Did you have enough building supplies and all of the materials that you needed? Did you get there and say, oh, we forgot something? CB: Prior to going to Antarctica, I had been in the Seabees. I was in the Seabees since like I say '48, so I guess I was in for about seven years. And at that time, those were the lean years as far as supplies and tools were concerned, so I had to do . . . my training before that was a lot of make do with what you had. Improper tools, improper material to do a job and expected to do a good job with not the right stuff. So when we went to Antarctica, we really had a lot of tools, a lot of equipment. We were missing some things, but we had the old spirit of CAN-DO! And you just made do with what you had. DOB: Can you think of an example? CB: Can I think of an example? Right now I can't think of an example. Yes, I can, I think. In the building of the Quonset huts, we didn't have the proper squares, but I knew of the triangulation of the three-four-five. That was three foot by four foot by five foot, the five being the hypotenuse of a right triangle which made a real big right triangle, so I used that method in laying out the Quonset huts that we had to build and the other buildings also. Rather than trying to use a square, I used the three-four-five rule to lay out the buildings and the criss-cross method, using a long tape measure. I wasn't the senior builder, I was the second in line. A Chief Wise was senior to me. He was already a chief. I was a first class petty officer on the chief's promotion list. But Chief Wise was the senior builder and a good builder. But that's a story for a little bit later on what happened to him to make me the senior builder at McMurdo and Pole Station. DOB: Tell it. CB: That story is the loss of Petty Officer Richard T. Williams, construction driver third class, for whom Williams (Willie) Field, one of the air landing strips at McMurdo, is named after. DOB: I will get back to that. Okay. I want to talk just a moment about the trip. You were on the USS Wyandot AKA-92 and I'm curious about what you were seeing and hearing and feeling as you approached the high latitudes on this ship. CB: I wrote a diary, and my diary is pretty comprehensive about it. But it was all a great experience for me. I always enjoyed traveling, and although I was really due for shore duty, I took on this deployment to Antarctica. I was really delighted to make the trip Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 5 down there and to see all these things that hardly anybody else had seen before. This was a great adventure for me. DOB: What did you see that stands out in your mind? CB: Besides the girls in New Zealand? DOB: South of New Zealand. CB: South of New Zealand. Okay. We'll skip the part of New Zealand. But anyway, of course starting to see the first ice pack, the first icebergs, was something that I had never seen before other than in pictures and studying in school. They didn't have that much interest to me because they were so far away that I thought I'd never see one in my whole life. And then I started to see these icebergs and then realizing that 85 percent of that berg was under the water and I was only seeing a very small part of it. And that that ice that I was looking at was tens of thousands of years old, and it was finally calving off from the continent of snow that fell jillions of years ago. So the further south I got, the more intrigued I became, and I spent a great deal of time outside on the deck of the ship just waiting for anything else. But even the seagulls or the seabirds flying over, the direction of the waves intrigued me, and the other ships on the horizon that were sailing down with us. Anything that was going on I tried to find out as much as I could about it. I was just intrigued by the whole experience, a great adventure. DOB: Was there anything about it that surprised you? CB: The extension of the trip down and the roughness of the water. I heard that the trip was going to be a rough one. I had sailed across the Pacific a number of times on Navy ships because we didn't travel by air in those days. When we went on deployment we went everywhere by ship, and we were on ships for a long time. So I was on this ship for a long time, but these were definitely the roughest waters for sure, and the ship rolled and rolled. However, I was very pleased that the rougher it got, the better I got. It seemed like the calmer the water was, the queasier I got. That was interesting. It seemed like the rougher the seas, and if the ship was heading into the seas, I got better. And of course the splitting of the bamboo that we had to split on the way down—I don't know if anybody's ever brought that up—but we picked up a load of bamboo in Panama. On the trip down, we had to go through the Panama Canal out of Norfolk, Virginia. And the splitting of a jillion trail . . . bamboo splits for the trail flags, and we just split and split and split. Of course we'd come to a real crooked one and a hard one, we'd toss it over the side. Today I wonder if scientists find a piece of bamboo on one of those southern islands and say, oh my gosh, this was a tropical paradise just a few hundred Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 6 years ago, and it was the bamboo we tossed over the side of the ship that was too crooked for us to split into trail markers. But I sure remember that part of it. And I remember some of the entertainment that the chaplain put on. He was just an exceptional . . . you probably heard about Father John Condit, and we were privileged to have him on the ship. He was forever entertaining us, and we just got to know him all the more and to fall in love with the guy. He was our buddy. He was a great, great person. Wish he were still here for you to meet. He would have so much to tell you about this Antarctica . . . so many things that we're not privy to that people told him that he could probably tell today. And he was a great storyteller. DOB: You liked him. CB: I—for a man to say about another man—I adored our commanding officer, David Canham. I thought the world of our chaplain, Father John Condit, and our doctor, Dr. Taylor. These three people, to me, just get more important, and I just miss them all the more every day I think about them because they just get bigger and bigger in life, those three people. They enhanced my life. They made me a far better man today through my association with them. They all added certain different things to me. Commander Canham taught me leadership. I saw so much leadership in that man in a quiet, subtle way, and I think I just wanted to be like him. As a leader, when I became a chief and a warrant officer, I look back on many commanding officers, but Canham stands out and I said I've got to try to be like him because he was just inspiring. Forty-five years later, that man still stands out in my admiration and respect. DOB: Did you ever figure out what there was about his example that made him special? CB: Well, one thing, his size and his good looks. I mean his size and his good looks just commanded respect, but his quiet, demure way and his smile and he just never seemed to get rattled and always had a pleasant air about him, and his knowledge and his concern for us. We were all very special to him. Bob Chaudoin, his yeoman, would best describe Canham. I can always remember a conversation I had with him, and everybody was talking to this young lieutenant commander. "You take care of my son," and "You take care of my husband." And one day he was talking to me and he says, "Who's going to take care of me? I'm younger than some of these guys." Well, I guess we all saw to it that . . . we respected him so much that we saw to it that we were going to take care of him by just trying to do as good a job as we could. The chaplain . . . an entertainer and a great person. The religion was good and he never pushed it on anybody. He let everybody take what they could out of what he preached. Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 7 And just his natural ability to play so many musical instruments and to walk into a hut and organize a show. He'd put on these shows you probably heard about. Just by walking in, and I remember him coming into the chief's hut—I was a chief then—and coming in and having a few beers with us and talking and laughing and then, "By the way, chiefs, you're going to put on a show in three weeks." "Get outta here, Father. We're not putting on one of those shows. Let the enlisted men, let the officers do that. The chiefs aren't going to do that." Well, he talked us into putting on a great Saturday night show, and just because of his manner and all the paraphernalia that he had brought to McMurdo just to put on shows with. Nobody understood what he had in all those boxes that were painted green on the corner, or whatever color that the chaplain had. Why has the chaplain got so many of these boxes? Well, they were just full of paraphernalia that he needed for his shows and his musical instruments, dresses, skirts, hats, dolls and what have you. And then Doc Taylor was just a marvelous person. He was actually . . . I don't know if this story has ever come out. One of the last people to come into the battalion was our doctor. We just couldn't seem to get a doctor assigned and we're always wondering, when is our doctor going to come? Little America had their doctor, but the ones going to McMurdo, we didn't have our doctor yet. Finally, just before we left, our doctor showed up and it was Doc Taylor. He was bald-headed, kind of stooped over and he walked with a little bit of a gait. He was probably only eight or ten years older than some of the chiefs, but I remember looking at him and saying, "My gosh. Why are they sending this old doctor down to Antarctica? He's going to die on us. How is he going to survive down there?" Well, Doc Taylor turned out to be not only a marvelous doctor, a wonderful person of great leadership, but he also turned out to be the most virile of all of us. I don't know if you've heard this before. He actually fathered the last three children of any of us, and here's a guy we thought was going to die on us in Antarctica, and he fathered the last three kids. Doc Taylor was the father of singer/entertainers James Taylor and Livingston Taylor. He had divorced their mother and married a younger woman (Suzanne) and fathered three children with her in 1983, 1986, and 1989. Doc Taylor and his new family lived in Boston in the 1980s. My friend, Jim Rooney, and I occasionally visited with them in their home in Boston. DOB: Well, we're way ahead of ourselves. I want to go back to the early days at McMurdo Sound. The ice was far farther north than had been anticipated. And there was just a lot of difficulty and delay in getting to Ross Island and getting construction started and the offloading completed and so on, and of course that's always a problem because the summer season is very short. And until the icebreaker Glacier came back to break you in closer, you were hauling supplies from a great distance. Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 8 CB: The ice was about—maybe other people would know more than I do—but I think we were about forty miles out from Hut Point. We were held out by the ice. And of course now we're getting into . . . we arrived in late December, but now it's early January and the little icebreakers, the smaller ones—the Eastwind and the Northwind and the Edisto— couldn't seem to break in. And it was past the halfway point for the construction season. Now, they fly down in September and October and start the construction season. Here we're into January, ninety-three of us are going to winter over, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has been built. Not even a tent is up. And we're still forty miles out. Well, we got a channel broken in about ten miles, and most of us were ill-experienced on ice. I had never operated off of ice. Only a few had any ice experience, but the push was on because nothing had been built. And wow, we're way, way behind on construction and the ships are going to be leaving in a few weeks. The ships are going to leave out of there the end of February or early March at the latest. So the push was on to get some supplies to Hut Point, so they put some sleds over the side of the USS Wyandot and some tractors to start hauling supplies across this improper ice, this rotten ice, this cracked ice that was completely unsafe for heavy tractors, let alone the lighter vehicles, the Weasels. But it was certainly not conducive to the D-4s and the D-8s, tractors that weighed ten and thirty tons. DOB: Who would've known that that ice was poor or could you just tell? CB: We really didn't know. We lacked the experience of operating on ice. We didn't have any way of measuring the thickness. They put a tractor over the side and it held up. The planes were on the ice. The R4s, the R5, and the P2Vs were on the ice, and I don't know why they never fell through the ice and went down because they were even heavier, but they were further in than we were. But the push was on. We just had to get going and take chances. So it was the 3rd or 4th of January 1956 when we started hauling supplies in, and then they decided that Cape Armitage, Hut Point, was just too far to go and we're going to change the site to Cape Royds. DOB: Cape Evans? CB: Cape Evans. Yes. Change the site to Cape Evans which was closer by about twenty miles, I believe. Dick Bowers would have the right answer to that. So we were headed there, and we were hauling supplies across the ice and we came to a big crack. We went across a lot of smaller cracks, water came up, and we still didn't know. We should've realized then that this was just completely unsafe, but you're trying to do a job. You're trying to get on with the expedition. You don't want to be the one that goes back and says, "Hey, look. We don't belong on the ice. It's unsafe, somebody's going to get killed, we're going to lose a tractor and we're going to lose some people, we're going to lose supplies. We just can't make it across." Nobody wanted to take that responsibility to Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 9 stop what was already too late getting started. So I can't really put the blame on anybody. It was just the rush of the things, the inexperience. And I guess the experienced people that maybe would have known didn't seem to be with us. They were off at Little America, which was a historical site for the Americans up to that point in time. We didn't have Captain Black, and Admiral Dufek wasn't here. I don't know where Admiral Byrd was, I don't know where Paul Siple was. These are people . . . I think they were over at Little America. But they're the ones that could've said, "Hey, this ice is unsafe, and we've got thirty miles of this stuff? We'll never make it. Load the tractors and sleds back aboard until ice conditions improve." But anyway, we found this bigger crack which we didn't even dare go across. It was about three or four foot wide with water in it and seals lying about. So we went back and complained about this. A decision was made to build a big, heavy, wood timber bridge. So we got some heavy timbers, some telephone poles and some heavy planking off of the ship, and we built a big, substantial, heavy bridge and dragged that back to the big crack. It was about ten miles away from the ship, and we pushed that across the crack, all without sleep. You just worked, hardly ate, and did not sleep. I don't know how we ever worked. The only thing was we were young. I was twenty- five years old and wanted to do a good job and wanted to work as much as I could. And the guys next to me were my age or even younger that were working for me, and we were working for Chief Wise who was the senior person on this particular trip that we're making on the ice, hauling in building and food supplies. So we pushed the bridge across, and then we went back and got the heavier tractors and came back out with a sled. Then Al Hisey, one of my builders, a second class petty officer or a third at the time, drove a smaller tractor (D-4) up onto this bridge spanning this big crack, and a little bit of water came up but it was okay. The bridge held, the crack held. He went across the bridge and went about forty or sixty feet or so, turned around and came back, then stopped up on the bridge. Everything seemed to be okay. A little settling, but that little settling should've told us that the ice is not safe. But we were young. We were inexperienced and we wanted to proceed ahead. Hisey then drove off the bridge and parked the D-4 tractor. Then Williams got in the bigger, heavier D-8 tractor. We unhooked the sled and Williams started to drive across the open crack, over the bridge. I was walking alongside of the D-8 with Chief Wise. We were watching as things were going along. We were walking right alongside the tractor. I think Chief Wise was on one side and I was on the other. Williams got up on the bridge and that was fine and it held, but more water came up than the smaller tractor. But again, we didn't see the signs. We wanted to just keep going. DOB: So how did you get across? Did you walk on the bridge? Charles Bevilacqua Interview, August 3, 1999 10 CB: Yes, I walked up on the bridge right alongside the tractor, I went across the bridge. I think Willie stopped briefly but I'm not sure. But he was leaning out the door, the door was locked open and the top was off the tractor cab housing. He was inside the cab. Then he proceeded on and we says, "Everything looks okay. A little water coming up." But the first things on our mind was jump—the word "jump." That was we were just ready to say jump because now we're getting scared. But I feel now, as I look back, nobody wanted to admit that they were concerned or scared. You wanted to get on with the job. You didn't want to be the one that says, "Stop the tractor. Go back," and then somebody say, "Well, Bevilacqua said it was unsafe." "Well, who is Bevilacqua to say the ice is unsafe" or "Who is Chief Wise to say stop!" So anyway, we went off the bridge— DOB: That violates the can-do spirit, doesn't it? CB: Very well put. I didn't think of that but I'll remember that from here on out. So we proceeded on. Now Williams is my friend. We had been on liberty together and I kind of knew him for a short time. I lent him my car back in Rhode Island to go home for his last trip home because he was going to get married when we came back. We had a short time off, just before we left Davisville, so I let him take my car home. But anyway, this is my friend. Willie went about forty or sixty feet beyond the bridge, and then all of a sudden the tractor just broke through the ice. And I'm yelling at him, "Jump!" And he's yelling at me, "Jump!" Everybody's just yelling "Jump!" Chief Wise was on the other side of the D-8. The D-8 toppled over, hit me, dragged me down under the water with Williams. He was leaning out the door when I saw him, heading out the door, because I was looking at him yelling "Jump!" I went under the ice and now the tractor is gone because the water is very deep, something like 600 fathoms, 3,600 feet deep, but we didn't know that at the time. I ended up under the ice and struggled to get through. Well, my clothes buoyed me up right away, and I was a good swimmer anyway. So I struggled to the surface, and as soon as I struggled to the surface, I said, "Where's Willie?" Immediately up came an empty gas can that was inside the tractor. A red five-gallon metal can—we didn't have plastic in those days. Up came a red metal gas can, and I remember grabbing that and flinging that, just throwing it to get it out of the way because I was pushing ice out of the way to make a hole for Willie and trying to find him under the ice. Now at this point my clothes are now starting to get wet and I started to sink, so the guys hauled me out. I immediately took my clothes off. This is my buddy. He's right there. My friend is right there. I was right there, he had to be right there. I took my heavy outer clothes off and my boots and I jumped back in again into the water and broken ice. I started pushing ice away. I'm all shook up, I'm all excited, the adrenaline's going like