STRATEGY: Fortifying Alaska

When harried President Andrew Johnson and his Secretary of State William H. Seward laid out $7,200,000 to buy Alaska from Russia in 1867, the only question seriously raised was whether the U. S. got its money’s worth. Apparently it did because since then Alaska has ex ported more than $1,250,000,000 in fish, furs, gold and other metals. And Alaska’s 70,000 inhabitants (half of them Indians) have not yet scratched its natural resources, which include water power, lumber, oil, iron, zinc, copper, chromite, antimony, nickel, platinum, tungsten. But Johnson also got his money’s worth in natural defense, for today Alaska is one of the U. S.’s two most important outposts against invasion from the Pacific (the other: Hawaii). Today Army and Navy are rushing to spend more than six times what Alaska cost in order to fortify the U. S.’s northwest outpost.

Up the Strait of Juan de Fuca and into Puget Sound the slim-hulled Coast Guard cutter Perseus pushed her nose last week. She tied up at Seattle and sent her crew ashore on liberty. Some of her seamen were less than judicious in what they had to tell friends and newspaper reporters. The Perseus had been on patrol in Bering Strait where only 54 miles of water separates Continental Alaska from Continental Siberia. Out in the Strait, the Perseus had stopped at U. S.-owned Little Diomede Island with a mission: to find out what was afoot on Soviet-owned Big Diomede just one and a half miles away and across the International Date Line (see map). The crew said that Russian workmen were building an airplane hangar on Big Diomede, replacing its radio station with a bigger one, that Big Diomede with its smooth ice runways ten months of the Arctic year, was being made into an advance weather, communications and flying station.

There seemed to be grounds for keeping an eye on Russia as well as on Japan as a possible invader of Alaska. Russia’s submarine base on the Komandorskie Islands off the Kamchatka coast (280 miles north of the Aleutians’ tip) and its submarine and air base at Petropavlovsk, farther south, might still be regarded as defenses against Japan. And Pravda’s recent sound-off against Alexander II’s sale of Alaska for a “few paltry millions” might be so much wind & fury. But the Soviets have a flying base at East Cape on the North Siberian mainland, are building a new station on Big Diomede and both are guns that point at Alaska.

In spite of Alaska’s strategic position, the U. S. never wasted money on Alaskan defenses because until recently Alaska was never threatened. From gold rush days in 1898 until a few months ago, its military garrison never consisted of more than 400 infantry soldiers at Chilkoot Barracks not far from the Skagway. One of their main jobs was to increase the Army’s knowledge of cold-weather living and maneuvering. Then the U. S. found out that the U. S. S. R. was extending its bases north along the Siberian coast, and that Japan had built a naval base at Paramosmiri Island, just south of Kamchatka. These bases threaten each other. They also threaten Alaska.

Attack. Lying in flank of the sea routes from Yokohama and the far Pacific Islands to continental U. S., Alaska is much more likely to be attacked by an Oriental invader than the U. S.’s great sea fortress at Hawaii. If an enemy reduced the $400,000,000 defenses of Hawaii—a man-sized job for any Navy—he would still be 2,400 miles from San Francisco, would face serious obstacles to supply in an attack on the Pacific Coast. But a success ful attack on Alaska would bring him closer to his goal. Sitka is only 800 miles from Seattle, and an enemy once positioned in the fjords and deep bays of the Inland Passage would be a tough customer for the U. S. Navy to dislodge. Now that the U. S. has made a start by putting $45,000,000 into Alaskan defenses, Alaskans are talking hopefully of the possibility of ten or 20 times as much.

Fortnight ago Major General Henry H. Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, left Washington in his Lockheed, landed at Fairbanks in 39 hours (including a twelve-hour rest at Spokane), for Seattle is already closer by air to Alaska than to St. Louis or Chicago. Along the Inland Passage Pan American Airways operates a twice-weekly passenger service, and a few days before General Arnold’s arrival Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt of the Fourth Army had dropped in at Anchorage from his San Francisco headquarters as easily as he might have dropped in on Minneapolis.

“Hap” Arnold’s mission was to see how the Army’s new defenses were getting along. At Fairbanks he saw the work of ruddy, grey-templed Major Edward M. George of the Quartermaster Corps, whose crew had plugged through the Arctic winter, readying the frozen ground for spring building, whipping the Army’s great base into shape. Hangars were already springing up and General DeWitt’s two big B-18s had landed on the field with no more trouble than “Hap” Arnold’s smaller Lockheed. Laid out for the Army’s biggest ships, Fairbanks’ Ladd Field will have 10,000-foot runways, will be garrisoned this winter by Army airmen learning Arctic flying. Farther south in Anchorage another field is being built, and there fortnight ago landed 700 U. S. troops, first big detachment sent to Alaska in 40 years.

Operating from Fairbanks and Anchlorage Army airmen will need more and bigger fields than the lines of Pacific Alaska Airways (Pan Am subsidiary) can supply. Last week they were busy laying them out. Below Point Barrow emergency fields (against the possibility of a transPolar invasion from Europe) will be set up on the tundra, to be used as advance fields for the Anchorage and Fairbanks commands. Other advance fields will dot the Seward Peninsula back of Nome against a thrust from Siberia, still others in southwest Alaska for operations against invasion from the south.

The Navy’s Alaskan program is still greater, likely to cost more, for the Navy’s job is to range far to sea and it needs bases for submarines, destroyers, capital ships as well as bases for aircraft. Its big establishment will be at Kodiak which Alaskans hope will eventually be made as strong as Hawaii, 2,600 miles directly south. Far west of Kodiak (and about 900 miles farther west than Hawaii) lies the Navy’s outmost listening post, Kiska Island, which can be used as an advance base for air and submarine operations. Closer in toward Kodiak is a bigger station, Dutch Harbor, famed as landing place for naval patrol boat flights on Arctic training.

The Navy is no less hard at work at its inner defenses along the Inland Passage. For if Kodiak and Dutch Harbor are well defended an invader is likely to make his first thrust there. With a toe hold in Alaska’s Panhandle he might end the supply lines of the northern bases while he strengthened his position for raiding against northwest U. S. Big Navy base in the Panhandle will be at Sitka, but other U. S. bases are being set up at Juneau and Ketchikan. A few weeks ago the Indian inhabitants of Metlakatla, on U. S.-owned Annette Island, descendants of refugees from religious persecution in Canada in the ’80s, voted permission for the U. S. to set up a base on their reservation, too.

Arctic weather has a bag of tricks that cannot be learned in occasional nights to Alaska or midwinter operations in Minnesota. This winter, many a service pilot and mechanic who has worked at San Diego and Shreveport will head north to beat new enemies—sudden fogs, icing weather, sub-zero temperatures that make engine-starting tough. New hangar and field equipment will have to be designed and tested, new cold-weather clothing tried out. From now on, Alaska becomes a permanent station of U. S. defense.