Bernt Balchen

Bernt Balchen (23 October 1899 – 17 October 1973) was a pioneer polar aviator, navigator, aircraft mechanical engineer and military leader. A Norwegian native, he later became a U.S. citizen, and was a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross His service in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II made use of his Arctic exploration expertise to help the Allies over Scandinavia and Northern Europe. After the war, Balchen continued to be an influential leader with the U.S. Air Force, as well as a highly-regarded private consultant in projects involving the Arctic and aviation.

Early years
The son of a country doctor, Balchen was born at the farm Myren in Tveit, just outside of Kristiansand, Norway. After having finished Norwegian middle school in 1916, he attended a Forestry School from 1917–1918, he enrolled in the French Foreign Legion with his unit assigned to the Verdun front in World War I, In 1918, before seeing action, Balchen was called back to Norway, transferring to the Norwegian Army, and was sent to an artillery school, where he graduated shortly after.

Under an assumed name, Balchen fought as a cavalryman with the White Guards in the Finnish Civil War that followed the end of major hostilities. During a cavalry charge, his horse was shot from under him and he was left for dead on the battlefield.

Receiving serious wounds that necessitated a lengthy convalescence, Balchen turned to an early interest in athletics and trained strenuously as a boxer to represent Norway in the 1920 Olympics. Besides being a championship boxer, he was also an expert marksman and an accomplished skier. Balchen was very knowledgeable about wilderness and northern survival, skills that he would later exploit.

While waiting for his acceptance as an Olympian, Balchen received word that he also qualified for flight training, resulting in his decision to become a pilot in the Royal Norwegian Navy Air Service in 1921.

Aviation
Gaining recognition as an accomplished pilot, the Norwegian Defense Department selected Balchen in 1925 to become part of the Amundsen-Ellsworth Relief Expedition, a rescue mission for the missing explorer Roald Amundsen under the command of Flight Lieutenant Lützow-Holm. The expedition consisting of two seaplanes, was sent to Spitsbergen on the Svalbard archipelago. This assignment would make Amundsen, already a family friend, a lifelong friend and confidante. During the next year, Balchen became part of a ground party led by Lieutenant J. Höver, providing technical services for the Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile Arctic Expedition, ultimately a successful attempt to fly the lighter-than-air airship, Norge, over the North Pole from Svalbard to Teller, Alaska. Although he was a highly regarded mechanic, Balchen's main role was to provide survival training to the Italian crew members as well as to teach them to ski. In a last-minute decision by Amundsen, he was not chosen to be on the record-breaking dirigible flight as Nobile was in charge of picking the crew, which already had a complement of 23. After observing the futile efforts and eventual crash of a Fokker trimotor belonging to one of his competitors, Commander Richard E. Byrd of the U.S. Navy, Amundsen asked Balchen to help in preparing the "Josephine Ford" trimotor for a flight to the North Pole. Under his supervision, the damaged aircraft skis were repaired with improvised wooden supports from a ship's oars.

Although Commander Byrd and his pilot, Floyd Bennett claimed to have flown to the North Pole and back on 9 May 1926, historians such as Walter Boyne allege that the first flight over the North Pole was actually carried out three days later by Amundsen, Nobile and their crew on board the Norge. In his autobiography in 1953, Balchen further discounted the Byrd account. He had taken meticulous notes of the activities at Spitsbergen and based his assertion on calculations that he made from Commander Byrd's own written airspeed and navigational data. Later researchers who have studied the data recorded by Byrd and Bennett have decisively confirmed that those aviators could not have made it to the North Pole, due to mechanical breakdowns (including a failed aircraft engine and broken sextant) and that they had carried out a fraud by announcing that they had flown over the North Pole.

In 1926, under the sponsorship of Joseph Wanamaker, Balchen officially joined the Byrd party, as the co-pilot and navigator, with the pilot Floyd Bennett, flying the "Josephine Ford" on a tour to more than 50 American cities, thereby promoting commercial aviation as a safe, reliable and practical means of transportation. Following this tour Balchen was hired by Anthony Fokker as a test pilot for the Fokker Aircraft Company at the Teterboro Airport, New Jersey.

On 29 June 1927, Balchen, as the co-pilot with the chief pilot Bert Acosta; the flight engineer, George Otto Noville and the navigator and air flight organizer, Commander Byrd, flew an U.S. Post Office airmail aircraft, Fokker trimotor America, across the Atlantic Ocean from Roosevelt Field on Long Island. Due to Acosta's reported lack of ability to successfully fly via aircraft instruments, and the foul weather for most of this flight, Balchen did nearly all of the flying. Bad weather and low visibility over France made landing at the Paris airport impractical, despite their repeated attempts. When their aircraft was running low on aviation gasoline, Balchen decided to fly back to the western coast of France, and there he landed the Fokker Trimotor that was not designed to land on the water, on the ocean just off the coast of France, and without any injury to the occupants.

On 28–29 November 1929, flying a modified Ford 4-AT Trimotor, Balchen became one of the first four men to fly over the South Pole. Balchen was the chief pilot, and he was accompanied by Harold June, his co-pilot and radio operator; Ashley McKinley, the flight's photographer; and Commander Byrd, the navigator and organizer of the Antarctic expedition.

Due to his reputation as a polar, transatlantic and aviation expert, Balchen was hired in 1931 by Amelia Earhart as a technical adviser for a planned solo transatlantic flight. In an attempt to throw off the press, Earhart turned over her repaired Lockheed Vega to Balchen who was assumed to be planning an Antarctic flight. Balchen flew the Vega to the Fokker Aircraft Company plant at Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. There, he and the mechanics Frank Nagle and Eddie Gorski reconditioned the Vega for the upcoming record flight. Its fuselage was strengthened to carry extra fuel tanks that were added to provide a 420-gallon capacity, and some additional flight instruments were also installed. After modifications had been made, Earhart flew this Lockheed Vega across the Atlantic Ocean on 20 May 1932, landing in Ireland.

In the mid-1930s, Balchen returned to Norway to work with the Norwegian Airlines. Later, he was part of a team to create a Nordic Postal Union, and as war seemed inevitable in Europe, Balchen helped negotiate an aviation treaty with the United States.

World War II
In 1939, Balchen was in Helsinki, working on a contract to provide U.S. fighter aircraft to Finland, when the Soviet attack on Finland took place. Enlisting with the Norwegian Air Force, he made his way to the United States on a crucial mission to negotiate "matters pertaining to aircraft ordnance and ammunition with the question of the Norwegian Government's possible purchase of such materials in the United States of America." With his status of holding dual Norwegian and American citizenship and his extensive contacts in the aviation industry, his instruction from the Norwegian Government-in-exile in London changed to a new directive: to set up a training camp and school for expatriate Norwegian airmen and soldiers in Canada. Balchen negotiated directly with Canadian government officials to obtain an agreement to use available airport facilities at the Toronto Island airport on Lake Ontario known as "Little Norway". During the war, over 2,500 Norwegian aviators of all categories: pilots, navigators and mechanics, were trained in the various bases of "Little Norway".

During 1940, with the "Little Norway" facilities under construction and his administrative duties taken over by others, Balchen requested permission from the Norwegian Air Force to fly ferrying missions for the British, teaming with Clyde Pangborn, a contemporary record-breaking pilot of the era. In early 1941, while engaged in a ferrying mission, and on a layover in the Philippines, a representative of General Henry "Hap" Arnold sought out Balchen. Arnold asked Balchen to join the US Army Air Corps as a colonel to oversee the establishment of the USAAF polar airfields at Qaanaaq, and Sondre Stromfjord Greenland. These highly secretive bases would serve to ferry fighter aircraft across the Atlantic by air, rather than having to disassemble them and send them overseas by cargo ship. The airfields also served as bases from which long-range Consolidated B-24 Liberator patrol aircraft could fly far out over the North Atlantic Ocean in search of the German Kriegsmarine U-boats that were menacing American, British, and Canadian ships taking war supplies and troops across the ocean in preparation for the then undecided location of the cross-channel invasion of Europe. This latter air base had the code name "Bluie West Eight" during its operational life.

Between September 1941 and November 1943, Balchen trained his personnel in cold weather survival skills and rescue techniques which enabled them to carry out many rescues of downed airmen on the Greenland icecap. On 25 May 1943, flying in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, Balchen led a bombing raid that destroyed the only German outpost remaining on Greenland, a forward station at Sabine Island on the eastern coast of that island. This destruction hindered the ability of the German armed forces to maintain a presence on Greenland that not only had been used to send deceptive radio messages to Allied aircraft as well as establishing a weather station required to provide accurate weather reports for the German forces operating in the North Atlantic.

Balchen then was posted to the European Theatre to run "Operation Where and When", based at Luleå-Kallax Air Base in northern Sweden. The base was set up for harassing and denying air superiority to Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe over Finland and occupied Norway. Balchen commanded a clandestine air transport operation, using 10 Douglas C-47s and helped to set up an escape route between the United Kingdom and Sweden that enabled numerous important diplomats and others to flee the Nazis. From March to December 1944, Balchen's "Operation Balder" using six B-24s manned with OSS crews, safely evacuated at least 2,000 Norwegians, 900 American internees and 150 internees of other nationalities from Sweden. Police troops (Norwegian refugees trained in Sweden) were also airlifted from Sweden to Finnmark.

The air operation also shipped strategic freight; from July to October 1944, 64 tons of operational supplies such as ammunition were transported from Scotland to the underground in occupied Norway. Life necessities like bales of hay and fodder for livestock were brought to areas in the north of Sweden and Norway, once even paradropping a hospital complete with a doctor and nurse. Between November 1944 and April 1945, Balchen also transported 200 tons of Arctic equipment and operational supplies from England to Sweden that were used to make secret overland transport from Sweden to Norway possible. During winter 1945, Balchen shipped communications equipment into northern Norway that was of inestimable value to the Allied Expeditionary Force's intelligence operations. The leading Norwegian wartime ace Sven Heglund was acting military attaché and served with Balchen, later writing about his time at Kallax. Another Norwegian at Kallax during the same period, who became a good friend, was marine biologist and explorer-to-be Thor Heyerdahl, later of Ra I and II and Kon-Tiki fame.

Postwar activities
From November 1948 to January 1951, Balchen commanded the 10th Rescue Squadron of the U.S. Air Force, which was located in southern Alaska but which operated across all of Alaska and northern Canada rescuing crashed airmen. Balchen led this squadron in the development of the techniques that became widely used in cold weather search and rescues. He was also directly responsible for persuading the U.S. Air Force to purchase the de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver bush aircraft, one that became an important search and rescue aircraft for the Arctic. In May 1949, while commanding the 10th Rescue Squadron, Balchen flew a Douglas C-54 Skymaster from Fairbanks, Alaska, via the North Pole to Thule Air Base, Greenland, and hence he became the first man to pilot an aircraft over both geographic poles of the Earth.

Balchen was primarily responsible for the pioneering and development of the strategic air base at Thule, Greenland, built secretly on his recommendation, in 1951 under severe weather conditions which, by extending the range of the Strategic Air Command, increased the capabilities that made the SAC a significant deterrent to Soviet aggression during the Cold War.

After retiring from the U.S. Air Force in 1956, Col. Balchen continued to serve the Air Force on special assignments and aviation and energy industries as a consultant. He joined General Precision Laboratories as a consultant in 1959, as well as working with a host of other companies including Hughes Aircraft, General Dynamics, Canadair and the Electric Boat Company. Working for Canadair in 1966, then the parent company, General Dynamics, from 1966–1971, Balchen had authority over projects as diverse as ice-breakers, tankers, new epoxy materials for submarine construction, seagoing electronic weather systems and over-snow vehicles. In 1962, he also worked with the USAF presenting a proposal on the Apogee Intercept Defense System (AIDS) in 1962 and later, was the leading advocate for "Project Iceman", a proposed system of intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) stationed in Greenland.

As one of the world's foremost Arctic experts, Balchen was sought out by numerous companies and government agencies including Canada and Norway. Balchen was hired as a consultant by Hercules Oil, then Phillips Petroleum and Moran Towing on plans to extract oil from Alaska using pipelines. According to a 1972 article in the Christian Science Monitor, Belchen asserted that "a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000."

In his native Norway, Balchen was a driving force in the establishment of Det Norske Luftfartselskap (D.N.L.) ("The Norwegian Airline Company"), with which he pioneered commercial Europe–US airline flights across the North Pole. D.N.L. later merged with Danish and Swedish airlines into the major carrier Scandinavian Airlines.

Balchen continued to work in consultancy until his death. In his final year, he was diagnosed with bone cancer, and he died at Mount Kisco, New York in 1973.

Honors and tributes
Balchen was a winner of the Harmon Trophy in aviation, as well as a recipient of the following military decorations:

Following his death, Balchen was buried at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. He is buried in Section 2, grave 4969, next to Richard E. Byrd.
 * Air Force Distinguished Service ribbon.svg U.S. Air Force Distinguished Service Medal
 * Legion of Merit ribbon.svg Legion of Merit
 * Distinguished Flying Cross ribbon.svg U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross
 * Air Medal ribbon.svg U.S. Air Medal (for all services)
 * American Campaign Medal ribbon.svg American Campaign Medal
 * European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign ribbon.svg European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal
 * World War II Victory Medal ribbon.svg World War II Victory Medal
 * National Defense Service Medal ribbon.svg National Defense Service Medal
 * Ord.St.Olav.jpg  Knighthood of The Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav (Norway's highest honor)