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Remembering Bluie West One (2)

Nor was the U.S. military the only one to come ashore. On Sept. 12, on the east coast of Greenland, the cutter Northland intercepted a Norwegian trawler. The fishermen explained that they'd just dropped off a 12-man German weather party with a radio transmitter. (Norway too was under German occupation.) The Coasties took up rifles, went ashore, and captured three Germans and a codebook, which they sent back to Boston for examination. For the next four years, a low-grade and frigid war would be fought on the east coast of Greenland: American sled-dog patrols, helped by long-time Danish residents, vs. German landing parties abetted by Norwegian and sometimes Danish hunters and fishermen.

Several hundred miles north of Narsarsuaq, at what is now Kangerlussuaq, another party of Americans began construction of Bluie West Eight as an alternative landing field for days when BW-1 was socked in. A third field, Bluie East Two, would eventually be built on the east coast.

At the end of that first summer of 1941, civilians in the employ of McKinley Dredging Co. arrived to finish the runway at Bluie West One. It would be 5,000 feet long and 145 feet wide, with a base of pea-sized gravel and a surface of pierced-steel planking--perhaps the first use of PSP by the U.S. military. The compass direction is pretty much west to east: 07 and 25. However, the magnetic deviation in south Greenland is 30 degrees, so the direction actually runs from southwest to northeast. At the southwest or fjord end, the altitude is 12 feet above sea level; it rises 100 feet in about half a mile, then levels off as it nears the glacier.

"If you haven't landed at BW-1," writes army pilot George James of his ferry flight in a twin-engined B-26, "you have missed one of life's biggest thrills. We were briefed for hours with talks, movies taken from the nose of an airplane, and a topographical model. The reason for what might seem like overkill is that BW-1 is 52 miles up a fjord with walls several thousand feet high, numerous dead-end offshoots, no room to turn around, and usually an overcast below the tops of the walls. You had to get it right the first time."

Pity those engineers and civilians, marooned on a glacial moraine through Greenland's awful winter! On Dec. 11, when their work was legitimized by Germany's declaration of war on the United States, the sun rose at 9 a.m. and was gone six hours later. There were back-to-back days when the thermometer stuck at that magic figure where Fahrenheit and Celsius agree: 40 degrees below zero. And the wind! The civilians kvetched in one report that the wind funneling down the glacier reached 141 mph, though the military that day recorded gusts of merely 75 mph. I'm willing to believe either figure. On a summer day in Narsarsuaq, I was buffeted by 50-knot gusts, obliging me to take shelter in the lee of the old headquarters building, now a museum. There I found the port landing gear and a Twin Wasp engine from a DC-3 or C-47, which the museum's founder had salvaged from the dump. The Gooney Bird had been picked up by a gust of wind and slammed down so hard that it shattered, not the only plane destroyed by the wind at Bluie West One.

Bluie West One, in a photo probably taken just before the ice went out in the spring of 1942. Landing at Narsarsuaq is always done from west to east, with takeoffs in the other direction, so as to avoid the mountains beyond.

Housed in tarpaper shacks, with no movies or radio programs to divert them--don't even ask about women!--they had the job done soon after the New Year. On Jan. 24, 1942, a Grumman Duck amphibian off the USS Bear made the first landing on Runway 07. And on March 3, a Lockheed Lodestar of the Royal Air Force transport made a test flight from Goose Bay, still being carved out of the Labrador wilderness by U.S. and Canadian engineers; the Lodestar returned to Goose the same day, having proved that Bluie West One was open for business.

Maj. Gen. Carl Spaatz was given command of U.S. air forces in Europe, hence the job of getting them there. On June 10 he flew 353 nautical miles from Washington to Manchester, N.H., probably in a Boeing B-17E Flying Fortress, latest and best in the USAAF inventory. I don't think it was a coincidence that the lads at Bluie West One put in an emergency request that same day. They urgently needed 11 loudspeakers, a 3 kilowatt radio transmitter, a weather forecaster, 5 weather code and cipher clerks, 10 Morse operators, and "12-15 good cooks."

Next day was an easy one for Spaatz, 268nm to Presque Isle in the potato country of northern Maine, but there he was stuck by weather. In a bit of a snit, he radioed Washington: "I recommend that the best airlines communications expert in the U.S.A. be sent here ... immediately." On June 14, he flew 495nm to Goose ("Very poor food at seemingly exorbitant prices"), and next day 676nm of black North Atlantic ocean, salted with icebergs, to land at Bluie West One. He found no fault with "Onoto," as he called it--a code name for a code name! But he did note that "Bodkin [BW-8] not ready with food or bedding." From Narsarsuaq he pushed on to Reyjkavik in Iceland (670nm) and Prestwick in Scotland (734nm), eight days en route from Washington.