Canada: NORTHWEST TERRITORIES: Fishing Trip

The fishing up around the Alaska Highway was just about the finest in the country. So Major General Frederick Franklin (“Fighting Frank”) Worthington assured newsmen. Why didn’t they bring their tackle and their sleeping bags and come along? He was going up that way with about 100 officers and men. What for? Why, just to look the country over. There was nothing official about the trip, he said. It was “just one of old Worthington’s ideas.”

But reporters knew that the General had more on his mind than fishing. As chief of the Canadian Army’s Western Command, embracing British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon and Northwest Territories, he has stated bluntly that he considers the area “vulnerable.” Among its military assets: the deteriorating Canol pipeline, 120 bridges on the highway between Dawson Creek and Whitehorse, a lot of abandoned Army camps, at least four big airports, a latticework of communications. Liabilities: long winter nights, frozen lakes and ground inviting airborne invasion. Perhaps a quick run over the area might uncover some fresh viewpoints on defense.

Last week, as “Operation North” rolled out of Dawson Creek on the first lap of its 2,000-mile Alcan tour, General Worthington said: “We are not pointing the finger at any nation . . . but we have to consider if any enemy exists, just where he would come and why.”* At week’s end, as the caravan rolled north in trucks and autos, the only enemies encountered were dust and mosquitoes.

*In Tokyo this week, U.S. Congressman Dewey Short, member of a six-man House Military Committee touring Pacific occupation zones, declared there was “imminent danger of another Pearl Harbor in Korea . . . or Alaska. . . . We cannot risk being caught unprepared again.”