HOME > BLUIE > REMEMBERING

Remembering Bluie West One

I have a ball cap with the legend: Greenland: coolest place on earth. It is indeed a fabulous country, except that it's not a country but a Danish colony. It's a European possession that, geographically speaking, belongs to North America. If it were a nation, it would be one of the smallest--smaller than Andorra, and a lot smaller than Luxembourg. At the same time, Greenland is the world's largest island, one of its oldest landscapes, and the site of the first European settlement in the New World.

Site of Erik the Red's longhouse at Brattahlid. The photograph looks down Eriksfjord toward the sea. American bomber and transport pilots flew up that fjord to Bluie West One, off to the left of this picture. (Photo by Hamish Laird)

I've read dozens of stories by American airmen, soldiers, and sailors who passed through Greenland during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. A few mention the "Eskimo" settlement across the Eriksfjord from Narsarsuaq, practically under the final approach to Runway 07. But not one seemed aware that this was the site of Brattahlid, where Erik the Red built a longhouse toward the end of the 10th century, and where his descendants lived for longer than any European family has been in the U.S. They disappeared toward the end of the 15th century, the victims most likely of climate change: global cooling!

So the island was Bluie to the U.S. military, and a Danish colony, when the German army marched into Copenhagen on April 9, 1940. That not only left Greenland an orphan, but Iceland as well; worse, it left Germany in a position to assert some sort of step-fatherly interest (perhaps abusive boyfriend is a better term) in both islands. If you lay a string on a globe, in search of the shortest route between the U.S. and Britain, it runs from northern Maine to the western isles of Scotland. En route, meanwhile skimming the shores of Labrador, Greenland, and Iceland. If planes were to fly from American factories to British airfields, this was the route they must take; and for them to refuel, there must be airfields in all these places.

In addition to its potential as an Arctic aircraft carrier, Greenland had two other attractions for countries at war. Ivigtut, not far from Narsarsuaq, boasted a cryolite mine, and cryolite was needed to make aluminum. Finally, Greenland was a weather breeder for Europe: observers there would be of immense value to the combatants, both British and German.

So it was that British marines seized control of Iceland in May 1940, and that a month later the U.S. Coast Guard began a survey of Greenland. The cutter Duane carried a Curtiss SOC Seagull and two pilots, Julius Lacey of the Army Air Corps and W. D. "Doc" Shields of the Navy. As Capt. Lacey's son-in-law, Guy LaValley of College Park, Md., explained his assignment in an email: "He was chosen due to the fact that he had a master's degree in meteorology [from MIT in 1936] and was qualified to fly seaplanes. Apparently this was a rather rare combination of skills at the time. The mission was so secret that even his commanding officer was not notified of his whereabouts and he was declared AWOL."

While the Coasties charted Greenland, Lacey and Shields took turns flying their biplane with its big central float and 600 hp Wasp engine, a combination that gave the Seagull a cruising speed of 133 mph and a range of 675 miles. Scouting from Disko Bay above the Arctic Circle to Cape Farewell in the south, they found eight sites for military bases on the comparatively hospitable west coast. Navy codemeisters would designate them Bluie West One through Eight. Meanwhile, the cutter Northland did similar duty along the eastern shore, finding three sites worth exploiting.

Of them all, BW-1 at Narsarsuaq was the standout. In the Inuit language, the name means "Great Plain," which by Greenlandic standards it is: a glacial moraine two miles long and half a mile wide, conveniently surfaced with gravel. (I spent four days in Narsarsuaq in August 2005 but never got the hang of pronouncing the town's name. Most of the locals seemed to stress the second syllable, while nearly skipping the third: nar-SAR-s'wauk. The spelling likewise varies, and in the 1940s it was usually rendered Narsarssuak)

Diplomatic cover for an American intervention was provided by Henrik Kauffman, the Danish minister to Washington. On April 9, 1941--the first anniversary of his homeland's invasion--he signed an agreement making Greenland a U.S. protectorate. Less than three months later, the freighter Siboney landed construction materials and a few army airways specialists at Narsarsuaq. The troopships Munargo and Chateau Thierry brought in the 21st Aviation Engineer battalion, the 62nd Coast Artillery battery, and service troops, to a total of 469 officers and men. Not long after, at a hemispheric conference in Cuba, President Roosevelt put the world on notice that American interests did not stop at the continental shelf: "The U.S.A. will hold itself responsible for the defense of the Western Hemisphere, and the transfer of any territory ... from one European state to another will not be tolerated." In other words, Germany's occupation of Denmark gave it no rights to a weather station in Greenland, regardless of what Copenhagen might agree to.