We Reported Ice. The Muster Rolls Say Nineteen Men Did Not Come Home.
Two researchers, working separately from the same photostats, reconciled sailing and returning rolls against the disbursing officer's final settlements. They agree on eighteen names, differ on one, and add thirty-two wounded. The published summary lists four.
Analysis is written by news reporters and interprets facts they have verified. It is not opinion, and it takes no position on what should be done.
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Nineteen men sailed south with Task Force 68 in the last days of 1946 and did not sail back.
On 10 August this newspaper reported that the largest expedition ever sent to Antarctica turned for home about six weeks early because of ice, and stopped there.
The ice is in the record. So is a piece of arithmetic nobody had done, in a finance series two corridors from the one we read.
Three record sets, all public
A muster roll is a ship's list of who is aboard her, by name and rate. She sails with one and comes home with another.
The disbursing officer's final settlement accounts are the same fact in money. Pay accrues by the day, so when a man dies his account is closed on a dated line, the balance is computed to that hour, and it is paid over to whoever the ship holds as his next of kin. It is the only series in which a death carries a time.
The third set is a surgeon's journal.
All three sit inside the task force's own reporting, PX-2047, and the ship-by-ship files filed with it. None has ever been sealed. The archive's reference staff could find no earlier request for the returning rolls as a set.
Two people, the same photostats
We had the rolls and the settlement sheets copied for all thirteen ships and gave the identical bundle to two people who do not know each other.
Dr. Sigrid Vantoll-Amankwah is a naval personnel historian. Casimir Odumbe-Struthers audits military pay systems and had never read a muster roll before March. Both were told before starting that both reports would run, agreement or not.
They agree on eighteen names.
They disagree about a nineteenth — a fireman first class whose account closes on 29 January 1947. Vantoll-Amankwah reads a death at sea. Odumbe-Struthers reads a transfer to a hospital ship, and finds a man of the same name and rate on another vessel's roll in May.
We print both. We have not chosen.
Thirty-two more men were evacuated wounded, air-transferred or shipped north out of the operating area. Nobody had counted them either.
The published casualty summary lists four.
Sixty-two hours
Fifteen of the nineteen fall between the afternoon of 28 January 1947 and the small hours of 30 January, in one operating area.
Losses to ice are attritional. A crushed hand, a fall from a davit, a man between the hull and the floe. Fifteen inside sixty-two hours is not attrition.
What the surgeon wrote
Lieutenant Amos Redfern-Whitlock, USNR, kept the medical journal of one of the ships in that area. His hand is small and his entries are short and he writes like a man filling in a form, until the afternoon of 28 January.
Over the following two days he records eleven admissions, and he itemises the injuries by limb.
"Right forearm and dorsum of hand, partial thickness, sharply demarcated at the cuff line," he writes of the first. "Left ditto. Face spared below goggle line. No involvement of clothing."
Of four others: "Tympanic membranes ruptured bilaterally. Two with pulmonary findings consistent with blast."
Beside the last of the eleven he writes three words that are the reason this desk went back to the archive at all. "Aircrew, all of them."
A man crushed by ice does not present with a symmetrical partial-thickness burn that stops at his cuff, an unburned face below the line of his goggles, and both eardrums gone. A man in an aircraft does.
Sixty-eight per cent
Task Force 68 was sent to photograph a coastline, and the after-action reporting lists the photographic objectives assigned against the objectives flown.
When the force weighed anchor, 68 per cent of them had not been flown.
Our August story quoted an icebreaker master calling the early withdrawal the least interesting decision a commander ever makes. He was describing the pack, and he was right about the pack. He was not shown this arithmetic. Nor were we.
What is still missing
The surgeon records what he treated. He does not record what caused it, because that is not what a ship's medical officer writes down.
The series that would say is the air group's action reports for those three days. They are listed as three boxes in a 1958 shelf list, they are not on the shelf, there is no withdrawal card, and the Director of Naval History has told us in writing that he asked for them in 1998 and again this month and has not been given them either.
His reply is at the foot of this page. He does not contest that there are materially more than four dead, and he explains where the four came from, and the explanation is worse than the number.
Something met Task Force 68 in Operating Area C. The task force went home.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Hollow PostNINETEEN DEAD AND SEVENTY-NINE YEARS OF SILENCE
Took our figure within four hours of publication and used it to assert a firefight, a weapon and an adversary, none of which appears in any record either newspaper holds.
Had that we did not
The nineteen, correctly, and the 62-hour window, correctly.
Left out
That the rolls describe an outcome and not a cause, and that the one series which would describe a cause is the one series missing from the shelf.
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The Continental WireNaval History Office: Highjump Casualty Records 'Complete, Public And Unaltered'
Ran the Department's statement at length and the arithmetic that prompted it in the fourteenth paragraph.
Had that we did not
Rear Admiral Grieve-Antrobus's assurance that nothing has ever been sealed, which is true and which we also print.
Left out
The sentence in the same statement conceding that Operating Area C was placed under a separate reporting instruction on 14 January 1947, and that the reports rendered under it are not in the file.
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They Buriedthis newspaperWe Reported Ice. The Muster Rolls Say Nineteen Men Did Not Come Home.
Corrected our own 10 August story by adding up three record sets that have been public since the 1940s.
Had that we did not
Both reconstructions entire, including the name they disagree about, and the surgeon's journal in the original.
Left out
On 10 August we printed a standing offer to run anything in the operational records that contradicted us, at the top of the piece. The contradiction was in a finance series two corridors from the one we read, and it took us fourteen days. The families have had seventy-nine years and we have made them wait a fortnight longer for a fact we already had. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Rear Adm. (ret.) Hollis Grieve-Antrobus, Director of Naval History in writing on 12 August 2026, with both reconstructions, the photostats and the surgeon's journal attached, and no deadline imposed. Replied in writing on 21 August 2026. Printed entire and unedited, including the paragraph about this newspaper.
Nothing about Operation Highjump has ever been sealed, and I would like that sentence to survive whatever you do with the rest of this.
The muster rolls are public. The settlement accounts are public. The medical journals are public. My office put them where you found them, catalogued them so you could find them, and has answered every request about them for forty years, including yours. A newspaper that reads a public record and calls the reading a revelation is telling its readers something about newspapers, not about the Navy.
Now to your arithmetic, which I have had checked, and which I am not going to be able to dismiss.
Your two researchers have done careful work and I accept the shape of it. I do not accept the precision. A muster roll is an attendance register kept by a yeoman in a cold compartment, and it has failure modes that anybody who has served knows and few historians do: men lent between ships and never struck off the lending roll, shore parties carried on two lists at once, and duplication where a rate changes mid-cruise. Your own pair disagree on a name for exactly that reason. Nineteen is not a number I can stand behind. That there are materially more than four is not a proposition I can honestly contest, and I am not going to insult the families by trying.
The figure of four has been misused for seventy-nine years, including by my own office, and I would rather explain it than defend it. It is not a casualty list and was never compiled as one. It is the answer given to a question put to the Department in March 1947 about losses sustained in the course of the photographic mission. Deaths occurring within an area then under a separate reporting instruction were rendered through that instruction and were not counted into the answer. The answer was truthful to the question. It has been read as a total ever since and my predecessors let it be read that way.
You will ask me about the instruction, so I will save you the letter. Operating Area C was placed under separate reporting on 14 January 1947. I have the instruction. It is two pages, it is unremarkable in its language, and it does what such instructions do: it routes operational reporting from that area through the task force commander rather than through the ship. Why that area and why that date I cannot tell you, because the covering correspondence that would say so is not in the file.
The reports rendered under it are also not in the file. I have asked for them twice, in April 1998 and again on 13 August this year after reading your letter. I have been told on both occasions that the boxes are listed and not located. I am telling you this because you would find it out anyway and because I would rather it came from me than from a footnote.
On Lieutenant Redfern-Whitlock's journal I will say only that I have read it three times now and that a fleet surgeon does not invent a burn pattern. He treated eleven aircrew in two days and he wrote down what he saw on their arms. What he did not write down is why, and neither, I notice, have you, and I would ask you to keep noticing it.
Last, your headline. 'Did not come home' is a phrase with a great deal of weight in it and you have applied it to nineteen men, one of whom your own researchers cannot agree was dead. Some of those men were buried at sea by shipmates who are also dead. Their families were told what they were told in 1947 by an officer who believed it. When you print nineteen, you are also printing fifteen letters that were never written, and I would ask you to be very sure before you make a family read that in a newspaper. I understand you wrote to them first. That is more than my office did, and I have said so to my staff.
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