Quote:
Originally Posted by Alfamemnon
Once there, he would sail his ship to Perons Argentina where he would, to his surprise, meet other IJN and Kriegsmarine personnel who refused to surrender and make it clear they intend to go to an extremely secret Axis base. However the game would end there, not letting the Japanese captain and his crew sail to their new home in Antarctica.
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I know it's off topic, but I've never understood the persistence of this fantasy of a secret Axis base lingering on somewhere in the Antarctic. Maybe it has it's origins in the brief German expedition to Queen Maud Land in 1938. An expedition concerned mainly with establishing a whaling base, and which never spent more than a day on the ice shelf. But then, polar myth-making has gone on for centuries. The Greeks and medieval Europeans imagined Thule, a land off the northern edge of the map. Off the top of my head, I can think of Dr. Frankenstein pursuing his monster to the Arctic, Edgar Allan Poe's
Gordon Pym, Superman's Arctic fortress of solitude, and the secret alien Antarctic bases in the
X-Files movie and
Alien vs Predator. The list is as long as the polar winters.
Perhaps it's because the empty ice becomes a convenient stage on which to project lurid imaginings or wishes. If you can imagine Amundsen's expedition eating their huskies at 40 degrees below, it's not such a stretch to picture Adolf, Dr. Mengele and Eva chipping ice from the walls of their lair to chill their gin and tonics. I suppose such extreme regions are a particularly good spot to hatch a conspiracy theory. Until recently, the people that went there had a habit of not coming back. And when they did, they told stories of unimaginable cold and wind, freezing deserts, strange creatures and mind-boggling hardship.
Many of the world's pollutants concentrate in the polar regions, carried there by wind and ocean currents. For some reason something similar seems to happen with our fantasies.