Operation Highjump and Base 211

A United States Navy operation of 1946-47 to set up Little America IV, a research base in Antarctica. A story that Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching call a myth recast it as an Allied attack on a secret German base, Base 211, in Queen Maud Land.

Wikipedia says the United States Navy ran Operation Highjump, known too as Task Force 68, to set up Little America IV, a research base in Antarctica; Brian Dunning of Skeptoid places the base at the Ross Ice Shelf. Richard E. Byrd Jr., a rear admiral, organised it, and Ethan Erik Larson, also a rear admiral, commanded it. It ran from 26 August 1946 to late February 1947 and involved 13 ships, 33 aircraft and 4,700 men. The Army observers' report of 1947 lists its main aims: to map from the air as much unexplored interior and poorly charted coast as it could, to test cold-weather flying from an airstrip on the ice cap using ordinary wheeled landing gear, and to find out whether air bases could be built and run on ice.

Four men died during the operation. On 30 December 1946 a Martin PBM-5 named George 1 went down on Thurston Island. The crash killed Ensign Maxwell A. Lopez, ARM1 Frederick W. Williams and ARM1 Wendell K. Henderson; six others on board were picked up 13 days afterward. Vance N. Woodall died on 21 January 1947. Wikipedia lists these four as the only deaths of Operation Highjump.

Matt Soniak of Mental Floss summarised the Base 211 story in 2012. In it, the Nazis sent a big expedition of scientists, soldiers and builders, carried on warships and submarines, to Antarctica's Queen Maud Land in 1938, and while mapping it found a network of warm underground rivers and caves. One cave ran 20 to 30 miles deep and held a large geothermal lake. Builders were sent in and raised a base the size of a city, called New Berlin or Base 211, housing occultists, the Thule Society, the SS and other groups. Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching, writing in Polar Record in 2007, explain how the myth took shape. Little was known at first about various real operations, so some people linked them into a pattern, accused governments of hiding the truth, and built a tale of a big German base in Antarctica that the Allies set out to destroy. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid (2017) says Highjump was never an attack. He gives its aims as a science mission, training for military operations on ice, and strengthening the American presence in Antarctica, which is why journalists came along. He adds that one aircraft crashed, where the story has four, and that nobody reported Nazi flying saucers.