Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project Interview with

41 Pages·2007·0.14 MB·English

Antarctic Deep Freeze Oral History Project
Interview with Charles M. Slaton, CMC, USN (Ret.)
conducted on March 28, 1999, by Dian O. Belanger

DOB: Let's start by telling me something briefly about your background. I'm interested in
where you grew up, where you went to school, what you decided to do with your life, and
just any of these pieces that might suggest how it was that you ended up in Antarctica.

CS: Well, it's a long trail, but I started out as a little farm boy on a sharecropping farm in
Alabama. I was born in Georgia, but when I was a year old I wound up in Alabama
through my parents' divorce and that. And I did that till I was eight or nine, maybe ten
years old, and I thought, well, I can do better than this some other place, so I left.

DOB: By yourself.

CS: By myself, and I piddled along for I suppose it might've been about a year, and I wound
up in Georgia where I knew that my dad lived somewhere in Atlanta, Georgia. I
worked for other farmers and I milked cows and plowed cotton and whatever it took to
make forty or fifty cents so I could go a little further, and they always fed me.

I wound up in Atlanta, Georgia, and one way or the other, why I found my father. Well,
he and I didn't hit it off too well together, so I wound up living with my grandmother out
at Brookhaven, Georgia. And we moved from Brookhaven, Georgia, to Hialeah,
Florida, in 1929 it seems to me because there was a terrible hurricane right after we got
there, and I think that was in '29. And then I lived with my grandmother and I did paper
routes and odd jobs for folks and whatever I could make a dollar at and went to school as
much as I could, and wound up getting a job—I was working for a master plumber doing
some little painting maintenance and yard work and that for him. He didn't have a son.

In those days about the only way you could get in the plumbing game was to have a
parent that was a master plumber. So he didn't have a son, and he asked me if I would
like to be a plumber. And I was a little past twelve years old, and I started in working as
an apprentice plumber in his shop. When I was seventeen, I was the youngest person in
Dade County, Florida, in those days that was ever admitted to the union, which the
number of I've forgotten these days, but it was Dade County, Florida, and I was the
youngest person that had got a journeyman license in Dade County, Florida, at that time.

I was pretty good at plumbing, but my main thing was wiping lead, which is a lost art
these days, but in those days all your toilet fixtures had to be wiped on a lead—the lead
stub had to come out of cast iron and then you wiped a flange to it and mounted the water
closet to that. All sink arms had to be lead and so you had to wipe fittings to the lead
that could be caulked into cast iron.

And then about the last year before I got my license, I worked on Miami Beach on a big
building, a big mansion, and all the plumbing was lead. Sewer, water, and everything
was lead, so you had to wipe all those joints. Well, they imported a guy from New York,
Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 2

who was a Scotchman and knew lead inside out, and I finished getting my education on
wiping lead with him.

So when I went to take my test, they had a little written thing, but they were more
interested in what you could do. So the first thing that I had to do was to show them
that I could wipe a lead joint. They took a twelve-inch piece of lead pipe, 4"x12", and a
brass flange to go on one end of it, and you had to wipe that joint. And the thing that
they had it on was a small 6"x10" box with rounded-out ends to hold it in place, and you
had to wipe it in place without moving it.

I wiped the joint and got it finished. There was a man about eighty years old was the
head of the board. He said, "Let me see that thing, son." There was about six guys on
the board that were doing this examining; he was the head of it. So I handed it up to
him, and he looked at it. You had to have it in rags because it was still pretty hot. He
looked at it as it was cooling, and pretty soon he took it and he wiped it alongside his
cheek like that, and it didn't pull a hair on his cheek, I guess. He laid it back down and
he said, "Well, gentlemen, anybody that can wipe lead like that don't need to go any
further with this test. You're a journeyman plumber, son."

DOB: Oh, how fantastic. You must have been very proud.

CS: So then I worked at plumbing for about a year after that, and by then we're into 1936, and
I went down and signed up to join the Navy.

DOB: Why?

CS: Well, I didn't really know anything about the Navy, but I just heard it was a good place
that you could learn a trade, another trade, you know, so I thought that's good enough for
me. So I went in the Navy, and I wound up in the shipfitter gang on the USS Maryland.
In July, I think, of '36 we got a troop transport to the West Coast. I rode a troop
transport around through Panama and up to Long Beach and then got off and got on the
Maryland, which was BB-46. And I was on her till July of 1939.

In the meantime I got married in July of 1938, and then in July of 1939, I had about
three-and-a-half years in the Navy by then and my kiddie cruise was up, so I went out of
the Navy and I went back to Florida and went back into plumbing.

Well, I worked at that until the war started, and December the 8th I'm down on the
recruiter's steps and I want back in the Navy. I got back in the Navy; I had various
experiences.

I first went up to Jacksonville and helped put the Newport Naval Air Station in
commission, which they had just pumped out of the little slough there and made a turning
basin for aircraft carriers, and still a lot of everglades and a lot of swamps there. You
Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 3

had to be careful where you walked. So anyway, I helped put that station in
commission and helped lay the ground field for the rhombic antennas which had to be
grounded. I welded the cables together and that made the grid about an acre or so, and
then it was covered up and then the antennas went up. That was the ground for them.

DOB: I know you had incredible experiences during the war as a diver and all kinds of things.

CS: Then I left Jacksonville. Well, I think one of the reasons that I got to go where I did
was they were rebuilding some old steam engines, reciprocating engines, and there was
bearings on the thing and nobody knew how to wipe those bearings. They had about
twelve or fifteen bearings there, and they was trying to find somebody in town, some
shop that could do them, and I said, "You don't need anyone. I can do those things."
"Oh, you don't know how to mix babbitt and lead, etc. to make a bearing." I said, "I can
do that thing. Let me do one for you."

So I set up the things and I wiped one bearing for them, and they did all their testing on it,
and they said, "Well, yes, that's probably better than we've ever had before." So I wiped
all their bearings for them and scraped them and that and helped them fit them to the
crankshaft. They said that was pretty good.

They had something up in South Brooklyn, New York in the receiving ship there. They
had some problems with putting gun mounts in buses and taking them out to these armed
guards that were on merchant ships. But they were having trouble with their mounts
getting them put in the things so they were secure, you know. I went up there and
worked on that, and we finally figured out a solution and got them so that they could get
them out to the ships. I don't think I had that much to do with it, but anyway, I was a
work hand. So anyway, we took them out to the ships and trained those people in how
to use and maintain forty- and fifty-millimeter guns. We even had a five-inch mount
mounted like their guns for training.

But anyway, then we got that thing done, and by then I was wanting to get to the West
Coast because I wanted to get back on a ship. That's what I wanted. Well, I wound up
in Bremerton, Washington, and they assigned me to the USS Pyro, which was an
ammunition ship they were putting back in commission. I thought man, I am dead now.

So I run across—well, the guy that was running the receiving ship there, his name was
Bulldog Perry or something—I can't remember his last name—but I had known him on
the Maryland when he was a first class bosun mate, and he was a W4 warrant now
running that receiving ship. So I went up to see him, and I said, "Man, I don't want to
get on that there ammo ship. I'm not a coward, but I don't want to kill myself like that."
So he said, "Do you want to go out to the net depot?" He said, "They need somebody
out there to do some diving on the net depot. Do you know anything about diving?" I
said, "Well, I'll learn." So he sent me out to the net depot. I helped put in some nets
Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 4

out there and I did even make three or four or five dives, I suppose. Didn't know what I
was doing, but I'd have done it anyway.

So I thought, well, if I'm going to be a diver, maybe I should go to school. So I put in
for diver school which was being held on Pier 88 in New York, but it was working on the
Normandy. She had sank alongside the pier during a fire, and Navy divers patched her
up and righted her. So I went there and worked on the Normandy and went through
diving school.

When I finished, I went to the Mediterranean. I started in Algiers. Really I landed in
Oran, but we went over to Algiers. And they had a ship there that they were trying to
get off the ground, and it was the LS Stone. I went down with the other crew members
and we put some patches on the thing, but as it wound up we never did float the thing.
They just used it as a receiving ship there because there was too much damage to really
use it again.

So then I went up to Delles. It was a former yacht basin for the Mediterranean rich, you
know. We were still in North Africa up a little ways above Algiers. There was a
couple of PTs grounded up there and we got them off the rocks and got them patched up
so they could take them to a dry dock in Bizerte. Well as it happened, the dry dock in
Bizerte had got torpedoed and bombed and all that stuff, and the river was full of ships
that they had blown up. Some sank and others grounded. And the caisson in the dry
dock well—they had put it in place and then shot holes in it and even put booby traps
down in the thing.

So we left that little old place and went up there to clear up that mess and open up the
Ferryville River again. When we got up there, we had to work on PT boats, and I'd had
a little bit of experience back in Jacksonville with them when I was doing my bearing
wiping. So we did repair work on them so they could go to sea and do their thing.
This was before the Seabees got there. We worked on them and did our diving. And
then at night we'd go up and stow ammunition as they were beginning to haul
ammunition in there. We got a couple of berths open and the first thing they brought in
was a load of ammunition, so we had to go up there and unload that.

In the mornings, we'd have to get up about four thirty or five o'clock and go out and
sweep the airstrip because those Germans would come over and drop them crows feet on
the airstrip which punctured tires, so our fighters couldn't get off and get after them.
We'd have to get out there whenever they'd come down and do their thing, then we'd run
out—two or three hundred people, I was amongst the group, you know—and we'd sweep
the things off so our aircraft could get up and try to get a few of them.
DOB: You must've been learning a lot.

CS: I was learning a lot of things.
Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 5

DOB: I want to move on to the Antarctic, so . . . okay, keep going.

CS: So anyway, after the war was over—that's enough about diving. I don't want to go any
further with that.

DOB: Well, I know you won a Bronze Star for an incredible experience.

CS: Anyway, after that we did other things. We went to Sicily and did work—went up and
done some things there. And on the way to Italy, we broke a shaft on the ARS I was on.
So in the Strait of Messina, two of us had to go down and get that shaft out of that thing
and then send it over to they called it Charley Town where there was a machine shop
down in the boot of Italy right across from Messina—well, it was Messina Strait it was in.
I don't know what the island's name was on the side. But anyway, it took them about
four or five days to turn out a new shaft, and they brought it back and we installed it and
put the prop back on, and then we went on up to Naples.

We went from that thing to the air shelter about four times a day for a while, and finally
one day Todd and I decided we weren't going to go anymore. We had about twenty-five
ton of dynamite on this ship, you know, and we were sleeping right on top of it. We got
tired of running down to the air raid shelter, so we decided we're not going down there
anymore so we just laid there and slept. Pretty soon, the Germans came over and they
bombed the hospital ship right at our bow. Before the smoke cleared, we were in the air
raid shelter.

Then we went to Palermo, Sicily, did a lot of work there—harbor clearance of sunken
ships, etc. We were then sent to southern France, to Port De Bouc, France, down on the
Rhone River. There we were doing harbor clearance work, diving in mined waters.
When a ship struck a mine down river from our location, I was down about thirty feet and
was blown out of the water. Kind of knocked me silly for a while, but I recovered okay.
Two of my shipmates perished. I was awarded the Bronze Star medal, with Combat
"V."

After Port De Bouc, we moved to Toulon, France, where the French had scuttled part of
their fleet. We did what we could to clear the port so Allied ships could enter and
offload. A ten-man team from our unit was detached to the Azores to move a merchant
ship that had blown ashore while offloading at one of the islands. When this was
completed, I returned to the States.

With a few stops in between, I was transferred to the amphibious base in Coronado,
California. I was assigned to a branch of the R/M division. My job was maintenance
repair, overhaul and operate tractors, cranes, Jahimas, and other equipment that was used
retrieving amphibious boats used in beach landings during amphibious operations. The
Amphibious Fleet was a great experience for me. A world of education about
Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 6

equipment, repair, and maintenance, plus operating all equipment assigned to this
operation. I was there about three years.

In the meantime, in 1948, why they changed the rating structure in the Navy, and me
being a shipfitter I was going to have to change over to metalsmith, but I didn't want to
be a tin bender. So my commander talked to me about this. I told him, "I don't want to
be a tin bender." He says, "Do you see this here? They have group eight rates and
they're mechanics and carpenters" and this and this and this, and I said, "Well, how about
that mechanic? I've been doing mechanics." "Yes," he says, "you're a better mechanic
than most mechanics are already." He said, "Do you want to change to that?" And I
said, "Yes, I'd like that."

So they gave me a test down at the CB base. Well, there was eighteen of us in the shop,
and I was a shipfitter and everybody else was motor mechs and enginemen. And we
went over and took the test and I passed it. I was first class. So I changed over from
shipfitter to construction mechanic (CM1), and that's how I got in the Seabees. In
August 1948, or thereabout, I was assigned to the 104th MCB in Coronado, California,
and started my career as a Seabee.

Sometime in 1949, there was a bulletin about an opening in Pt. Barrow, Alaska, Arctic
Test Station. So I put in for that. It was a one year billet, but it took two years to
complete our test projects and complete the projects assigned to my division.

And I learned about cold weather. We did work in tractor trains—PET-4 used to haul
food and supplies to the oil drilling sites. We had a tractor or two in the trains, and even
if we didn't have a tractor, we still had oils and different lubricants, etc. that we were
getting to them to use on some of their equipment, and we were testing the results.
Some tests required disassembly and recording measurements of all moving parts at the
start, then reassembly to do the test operation. Take it apart again and compare
measurements for wear and breakage. We also tested batteries, hoses, fan belts,
antifreeze, and other items related to tractor weight, lifting, hauling, and transportation.
Vehicles were used for cold weather operation and snow removal, and we even built a
fairly large sea-ice base.

I was transferred to Port Hueneme, California, after Pt. Barrow, Alaska, and was in
Maintenance. I made CMC and had the maintenance crew at MCB Training Schools,
Port Hueneme, California. Here we repaired and maintained all equipment used in
training mechanics and equipment operators at the schools where all above Class "A" and
"B" students were trained in those days. They consisted of earth-moving, weight-lifting,
drilling machines, autos, and trucks, etc.

I was at Port Hueneme for four years, and then it was time to go to the islands. I had a
set of orders to MCB-7. I said, "Man, I don't want to go to the islands. That's not my
cup of tea."
Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 7

DOB: Which islands?

CS: Well, Guam and Tinian, and all those islands out in the Pacific. So I don't want any of
that. I saw a bulletin that they wanted men to go to Deep Freeze. I put in for that, and
I got picked up [snap] just like that.

So I went to Davisville, Rhode Island, where MCB (Special) was being assembled. I
moved my family to Rhode Island, and started running into problems that we were going
to have with equipment. It didn't take too long to figure out some of the things that
needed changing. And one of the things, they just had rollers to carry the tracks across
the frame on the D-8. They just had rollers instead of the board. So with a little
persuasion, like, "Well, if we can't put oak in there, I'm not going with you because I'm a
volunteer." So we got the oak put in there, and that saved us a world of trouble. The
oak board replaced the top carrier for the tracks. (In cold weather rollers tend to freeze
up and then won't roll well.) We also cut a square hole in each track-pad that would let
the snow and mud pass through, thereby saving the front idler and the bottom rollers. I
learned this in Pt. Barrow a few years back.

And then they discovered that the blade trunnions were too wide on the little tractor to
get it in the airplane much less drop it out, so then I had to go out to Peterson Tractor
Company and get that changed.

Then I got to the Weasels and found out they had ten sets of spare tracks for about fifteen
or twenty Weasels. That ain't going to work. I went down to a war surplus place in
Connecticut and made a deal to buy a hundred sets of tracks. We never did use them all
up because I had strict regulations about how you used a Weasel. I don't know how
they did in Little America, but we didn't lose many tracks in McMurdo because I was on
their case every minute about those things. If you broke a track—which they did once
in a while—the operator had to replace it, so everyone was very careful.

DOB: So you had a lot to do with what kind of mechanical equipment was brought to Deep
Freeze.

CS: Well, not to begin with. Someone had decided the mix we were going to take.
Somebody that had a lot of brains had already picked all of that out except they just didn't
look at the details. So then when it got to Rhode Island, I did my tests on the things and
put heaters in them and put radio equipment in them and this kind of stuff. And we did
a lot of modifying as much as we could. We didn't have much time because it was time
to get them things on a ship. We got them late.

In fact, one of them, I was off over in some little old town in Rhode Island there and we
was missing a tractor, and I was just driving along. Me and the wife went to the grocery
store and then looked down on a railroad and there was our missing tractor. The D-8
Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 8

that we had missing was sitting down there on the side track. And nobody knew where
it was, so I went back and I told the skipper—well, I usually talked to the skipper anyway.
He was that kind of a guy, you know. He wanted to know all the details first, then you
could tell the junior officers about it, I guess. In fact I didn't know Mr. Bowers hardly at
all anytime we was in Rhode Island. I didn't really know him until I got to Antarctica.
I'd seen him a time or two, but he was left out of a lot of things because I think he was
still in his duty station. He was an assistant public works officer, and I think he was still
working between both groups for a while or something. Anyway, it wasn't easy for him.

But anyway, everything I'd done I just went—most of the time I went to either Slosser,
who was the executive officer, or the old man and told him the problems we had with the
thing and what I felt we had to do about it. So whenever I discovered about the
trunnions, why he told me to get a plane and go out to Peterson Tractor Company and
straighten it out, which was out in San Leandro, near San Francisco. So we got that
straightened out.

DOB: Were you able to check out all the equipment?

CS: What?

DOB: Did you have time to check out all of the equipment?

CS: I got it where I was fairly satisfied with it. I knew that we could handle whatever else
happened as it happened. The crew was pretty well checked out. I had a pretty
gung ho crew.

DOB: How big was your crew?

CS: I had about twelve or fourteen men. And of course they were split up between
McMurdo and Little America when we went to the ice. I didn't really get the cream of
the crop because Commander Whitney chose the ones that went over there, and I got to
choose the ones that was left to go to McMurdo. But that was all right. We made out
really good.

DOB: Who would you have taken if you had the choice?

CS: Well, I had a guy that I come all the way out here to Port Hueneme, Bill Burleson, to
recruit him to go to Antarctica because I really wanted him there for my gasoline work.
We had a lot of gasoline equipment—the Weasels, APUs, etc. and pumps—so I wanted
Bill Burleson for that. I finally conned him into it and got him a set of orders to
Davisville, and then Commander Whitney took him away from me. Took him to Little
America with him, and then almost killed him in an airplane. He sent him off with
some of them dudes going out doing some recon work or something for that Byrd Land
thing, and they got the airplane off course, landed, and then they were walking back. I
Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 9

wasn't there so I'm just telling you hearsay stuff, so I won't elaborate on it. Anyway, it
was a snafu job.

DOB: Tell me how you got to Antarctica. Were you on one of the ships?

CS: I rode down on the Wyandot. It was a cargo ship.

DOB: And what's it like when you go down—I mean you've gone through the warm climates
and every day you wake up and it's colder and colder and colder.

CS: Then when you hit the ice it gets scary, too. You start hitting that ice several days
before you get where you're going, you know. What do they call that? Lily-pad ice or
flake ice or slush ice? I forget those names. But anyway, it takes several days to get
through that till you get down to the shelf ice. And then it took a while to get on in
where we were going to go because the icebreakers was having a terrible time. In fact,
they only got within forty miles of McMurdo when we started offloading.

And about the last load that we hauled in, that very same day the icebreaker almost sunk
a sled by breaking in front of it, then they had to go about two miles—maybe it wasn't
that far but it seemed like two miles to go—around the icebreaker to get back around on
the side with the base. Whenever they found out they could break the ice, they broke
ice. A good thing we weren't building an airstrip or the airstrip would've left us the way
they broke that ice up that year. But that was after we was all finished with our work.

And we had some terrible times with our equipment. We'd break treads of tracks off
because they only had 5/8ths bolts in them and they only had four of them in each one of
them big old pads, and if a guy overdone it, you know, trying to climb or something or
other with too much load back there, why it would just start spinning pads off of it.
That was the biggest thing I did while we were hauling; I was out there bolting pads back
on them things. We used all the bolts that we had, and we had a world of spare ones. I
had to go to New Zealand. When the first planes come in, I rode back up to
New Zealand and I must've got two ton of track bolts and brought back from the
Caterpillar dealer in New Zealand.

DOB: Did they fit?
CS: Oh yes. They use the same—it's a Caterpillar tractor company, and they use the same
thing. Caterpillar don't go to that metric stuff and that. You get standard or SAE, they
call it. But anyway you get standard stuff if you're buying for Caterpillar equipment.

DOB: So when you got to McMurdo, the first job is to unload the ship.

CS: Right.

DOB: And it sounds like it must've been awfully chaotic.
Charles Slaton Interview, March 28, 1999 10

CS: It was. It was a mess. They had a bunch of them dog drivers that come down there,
you know. One of them was Captain Black and one of them was Commander Bursey,
who was a Coast Guard Reserve officer. Several of them dog people were there, several
of Byrd's old hands and that, you know, and they wanted to do it like they did it with
dogsleds. And this captain wanted us to drive a tractor up there about a hundred and
fifty foot from the ship and then use a line to clutch it up near to the ship. Well, we tried
that a little while, but I said, "I'm not messing with that garbage."

So anyway, Admiral Dufek, whenever we lost a tractor in the ice—that was one of the
first things we done. We had to go across a bridge across a crack in the ice, and they
knew there was no way around it because it run all the way across the bay as far as I
know. So we had a Bailey bridge that we used. You used the thing about three or four
times in a spot and then you had to move it to another spot, because the ice sheared off or
rotted after a few crossings and would become only two or three feet thick which was too
thin for our loads.

Well, I'd been out there on the ice about twenty-four, maybe thirty hours erecting that
kind of stuff and putting pads on the little tractors that was popping off. And so there
was another person in charge there and I had been there and told him before I left—you
know, I took the last tractor across and then I told him before I left, "Move the bridge
down about fifty or a hundred feet." Of course he was a lot smarter than me (had
already been on the ice an hour) and had used these bridges across creeks many times and
we've heard of such thing. We lost a driver and a very dear tractor plus the cargo, about
twenty tons.

Well, on the way back to the ship to lay down and sleep a little while, why I met
Williams coming out with the tractor, and I stopped him and I talked to him. I said,
"There's no need to hurry up there because they're going to move the bridge." Well, it
wound up was they didn't move the bridge and Williams got up there. And when he
went up on the bridge—I taught every one of them, you know, I showed every one of
them about driving up on the bridge and then letting the tractor ease down. Don't just
drive up and let it flop down, you know, because that thing's thirty-nine ton. Thirty-nine
ton with about twenty or thirty or forty ton of material back there in back of it makes that
thing heavy. It goes up like that and then it slams down, and that's a whole lot of
weight.

Well, that ice was shelving off underneath, you know. It might look pretty good on the
surface because you can see the first two or three feet of it, it might look pretty good.
But two or three feet is not much ice whenever you're doing things like that. Anyway, it
broke and down he went. And that was due to an unwise decision as mentioned above.

DOB: That was a terrible experience.