Remembering Robert Johnson, And The Age Of Polar Explorers

Johnson passed away in April at 102--the last living link to an age gone by

The Endurance set sail for the South Pole Aug. 1, 1914, the very day the German kaiser declared war on his cousin the tsar. Ernest Shackleton and his men expected the latest European dust-up to be over in a few short months; in the meantime, they planned to be the first to cross the entirety of Antarctica.

He never made it. Trapped by acres of crushing ice and leagues of frigid ocean, he would eventually survive a nearly one thousand mile journey by life raft, overcoming incredible hardships to get his crew safely home to a world they no longer recognized.

The Dying Sun depicts Shackleton’s boat The Endurance stuck in the ice. Photograph by Frank Hurley/public domain/Wikimedia Commons.

In those two years of adventure and toil, everything they knew had changed. The ongoing war had shattered mainland Europe and fractured Western Civilization itself. A public that had followed the exploits of men like Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen had since seen its youth and their impossible dreams shattered under shellfire and drowned in trenches. 

Shortly before leaving contact range with the world, Shackleton had offered the assistance of his three-mast, wooden ship to the British Navy. Now for the first time, biographer and fellow Polar explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes writes, he and his horrified crew were hearing “talk of… poisonous gas, tanks and U-boats, all reaping carnage.”

No one was waiting to greet his return to England. The heroic age of Antarctic exploration was over; the mechanical age had begun, and far from Britain’s sullen shores, the American people were awakening to the new world. Into this new age stepped Robert Johnson, a 19-year-old boy from California.

Johnson was born July 7, 1920, in Hollywood, California, just twenty months after the end of World War I–and eighteen months before Shackleton died of a heart attack on his final journey to the South Pole. The son of a chief warrant officer whose naval duties took him away for years on end, Johnson was raised by his grandparents and took to the sea at a young age, becoming a Sea Scout and even spending sixty-seven days stranded on the Pacific at just 16-years-old. Three years later as a Navy sailor, his experience caught Admiral Richard Byrd’s eye, who recruited the teenaged sailor to become the youngest member of his third Antarctic expedition.

A crew roster for the U.S.S. Bear’s 1939 journey shows Johnson and his age. Astronerd, CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons.

Byrd was an icon of the new age of post-war exploration, leveraging technological developments to reach farther faster, and from new heights. While Johnson’s first trip with Byrd was aboard the U.S.S. Bear, a 19th-century wooden ship powered by sails and steam; the expedition also brought with it three aircraft, two Army tanks, and a soon-to-be-infamous mobile command post, the Antarctic Snow Cruiser.

When Johnson arrived in Boston in the autumn of 1939, he and a skeleton crew set to work cleaning and repairing their antiquated ship, which had been in service long enough to have rescued Adm. Adolphus Greeley and his surviving crewmembers from the Arctic ice nearly sixty years prior. It took the men several weeks to replace the rusted boiler and install a new diesel engine for navigating ice floes, but by late November, they were sailing down the Charles River and out into the Atlantic, Antarctic-bound.

“As we were leaving Boston, it was snowing,” Johnson remembered, “and as we went down the river out to the open sea all the factories were blowing their whistles and all the cars were blowing their horns, giving us a grand send off.”

The excitement was justified: Byrd had already received national acclaim for his privately-funded expeditions–including being the first man to fly to both the North and South Poles (though whether he ever reached the North Pole is disputed). On this, his first official U.S. government trip, he intended to stake America’s claim to the resource-rich Antarctic at a record pace, using the thirty-seven-ton Snow Cruiser.

Unfortunately for Byrd, the boundless optimism of the new mechanical age didn’t always match the tech, and the “over-designed and under-tested” machine proved useless on the ice, and was abandoned in favor of plane exploration and old-fashioned dog sleds. “From what I remember,” Johnson chuckled, “the Marines used [the broken-down cruiser] as a bunk house.”

Johnson at the wheel on his 1939 journey. From his personal collection.

But Byrd didn’t let the technical difficulties stop him; Nazi Germany had recently claimed Antarctic land, and it was his mission to scout and claim land for the United States by surveying the shoreline and measuring the depths. The expedition established a western base not far from where Amundsen and Scott had set out on their hunts for glory, and an eastern base in Marguerite Bay (where just a few years ago, an island point was named for Johnson).

Meanwhile, rising hostilities in Europe cut the mission short, calling both Johnson and Byrd to the war effort, where Byrd served as an adviser to the U.S. Navy’s most senior officer and helped his country survey and map defenses and routes. Johnson, still just a young sailor, served aboard an fuel transport supplying the European Theater. One moonlit night on a return voyage, he was smoking on deck when he watched a German torpedo pass directly under the tanker. Had it still been weighed down with the oil it had unloaded the night before, sitting much lower in the water, everyone on board would have been killed.

The two men survived the war and would reunite on the other end of peace in 1946 for Operation Highjump–the largest polar expedition that had ever been launched, mapping thousands of square miles never before explored by men.

Johnson returned for his final polar adventure in 1948, but would keep more personal mementos of his travels–including his friend, a stuffed penguin named Polar Pete–with him the rest of his long life. He passed away April 9 in Jacksonville, Florida, at 102–the last member of Admiral Byrd’s pre-war expeditions, and the final link to an age gone by.

Johnson, second from the right in the back of the forward group. From his personal collection.

“You hit like a ton of bricks,” Johnson told a local reporter on his 90th birthday, reflecting on the day more than sixty years prior he had parachuted onto the Antarctic continent. "That was the quietest place I've ever been in my life."