A PROPOSED AIR BASE IN THE GREENLAND SEA
With Iceland given prominence in the public press ever since the pronouncement of the Commander in Chief respecting it last July, it is but natural that increasing interest should be taken in that island. Even without its occupation by our expeditionary force, the sinking of the battle cruiser Hood, the incident of the Greer, the torpedoing of the Montana, the Sessa, the Pink Star, and the Bold Venture would have served to quicken public interest in Iceland.
Aside from that, the order to the Navy to shoot Nazi surface raiders and submarines in Iceland’s waters on sight, disclosed by the Commander in Chief on September 11, and the torpedoing of the Kearney and the Reuben James have focused the eyes of naval men throughout the service on that part of the world. Iceland, Greenland, even the little island of Jan Mayen, are places destined shortly to become part of our naval history and tradition.
Rumors and counterrumors respecting Nazi activity in Greenland have been current ever since the arrangements giving us protective rights in that area were negotiated by our Department of State in Washington. Those rumors have already ripened into fact. The Nazi converted Norwegian ketch Buskö was captured while attempting to establish radio stations on the fjord-fissured Greenland coast. One of the Nazi stations was found and disposed of and its three-man crew evacuated.
There are many books on Iceland and on Greenland, on their histories and their people. Most of them, however, are in Danish. But little has been written, at least lately, in Danish or in any other language, respecting the waters adjoining them, the waters in which the naval operations of the present are taking place.
Those waters were probably better known in the seventeenth century, and certainly in the nineteenth century, than they are now. Yet the very reasons which make Iceland and Greenland strategically important render it necessary that those waters be more clearly understood in the light of present-day shipping and aircraft. The battle of the Atlantic, from our point of view, will be the battle of the North Atlantic, and with hostile aircraft to combat, that means the battle of the bases of those aircraft, wherever they may be.
When the British and Canadians occupied Iceland last year, the occupation was essentially precautionary. With Denmark and Norway overridden by the enemy, it was but natural that the Allies should take steps to prevent an extension of Nazi domination to the north. Invasion of Great Britain itself was considered imminent. The British could not afford to leave vulnerable a northern springboard from which, in conjunction with other springboards, the Nazis might launch an attack. There were springboards enough, from the fjords of Norway south to the Bay of Biscay, without granting the Nazis one more. With Iceland in Nazi hands the circle around the British Isles would be more than three-quarters closed.
We took over protective rights in Greenland largely for the same precautionary reasons. If Germany is to conquer, we do not want Greenland to be used as a springboard to this continent. It is not that we fear immediate Nazi occupation of Greenland. We still have control of the seas. We established certain bases on the south coast of Greenland to augment that control and as a precautionary measure.
However, the Battle of Crete, this last spring, taught many things. It demonstrated the possibility of air-borne invasion of unpopulated areas. Defense measures theretofore considered sufficient for Iceland were strengthened. American troops were added. We strengthened our own bases in south Greenland. The Luftwaffe, not just Nazi surface raiders and submarines, was considered our real enemy.
The British-Canadian-Norwegian Spitzbergen raid of September 9 was more than just another Lofoten Islands raid—a venture for prestige. Though the extent of the Spitzbergen occupation following the raid is not presently known, it must be assumed that the expedition was not merely the hit- and-run affair related by the press. The strategic importance of Spitzbergen in northern warfare has long been recognized. Prime Minister Churchill spoke of it as a valuable sea and air base—a “northern front against Hitler.” Nazi convoys are the more vulnerable with Spitzbergen in the hands of the Allies. It is not likely that the Spitzbergen expeditionary force, led by the Canadian General A. E. Potts, satisfied itself in destroying the radio station at South Cape and burning a few tons of low grade coal. That, it is submitted, was a pictorial smoke screen. Naval strategy certainly required General Potts’ force to remain, though naval tactics may also have required making it appear that it had left.
This brings us to the question of Germany’s efforts in the area in question. Little is known of her present efforts, but much can be surmised. Hitler has vowed destruction of shipping bound for the British Isles, and he has already taken such steps as he can to implement his threat. An examination of the map, coupled with an appreciation of what aircraft can do, indicates that Hitler’s future steps will be directed toward the continent of Greenland. Nor is there much our present forces in Greenland or in Iceland could do to prevent him. The Canadians in Spitzbergen could do much more. So could we, were we properly established in the middle of the Greenland Sea on Jan Mayen.
Obviously, neither the south coast of Greenland nor the west coast on Davis Strait will provide bases from which the Nazis can operate. The ice conditions are wrong, such bases would be too vulnerable, and, so located, they could not readily be served by surface vessels operating from Europe.
Nor is it likely that King Frederick VI Land, and north of that King Christian IX Land, will provide Nazi air bases. Those are inhospitable shores, mist-shrouded and ice-bound most of the year. There are no towering mountain peaks along the southeast coast, and high precipices of inland ice come right down to the water. The breakings from this glacial front form thousands of icebergs every year which are swept southward by the polar current in a never ending stream. That does not make for dependable navigation.
Only north of Egede Land, in the area of Scoresby Sound, where the shore of Greenland turns toward the Pole at 70° N. latitude, is it likely that enemy air bases will be found. Kaiser Franz Joseph Fjord, and Muskox Fjord, and the inlets north of Cape Hold With Hope, near Eskimonaes and the former Norwegian radio and dog-breeding station at Myggbukta, are the most likely places.
There are reasons for this other than ice reasons. The entrance to Scoresby Sound is not much farther from Narvik and the Lofoten Islands in Norway than is New York from Chicago. With Scoresby Sound begin the long winding fjords of East Greenland which continue as far north as Germania Land. Those fjords, mined at the mouth and protected by shore batteries placed on the islands and the high headlands at the entrances, would prove difficult places from which to dislodge enemy bases serving air raiders and reconnaissance planes in the North Atlantic. Land operations, by reason of terrain difficulties, would be practically out of the question. East Greenland would provide a relatively secure nest for hostile air forces.
Recent statements made by returning members of Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Antarctic Expedition refute any contention that the Nazis would not venture to establish bases in such a far part of the world. According to Dr. Paul A. Siple of the Byrd Expedition, the Nazis established a base at Deception Island in the Antarctic, some 600 miles south of Cape Horn, back in 1938. That base, Dr. Siple’s Chilean informant stated, had been used by the German pocket-battleship Graf Spee as a base for its raiding operations. German bases in East Greenland, so far as is known, have not as yet been established. Yet there is more than rumor to substantiate the belief that they are contemplated.
The discovery of the Buskö’s effort to plant Nazi radio stations on Greenland may prove but the forerunner of many such incidents. Apart from their desire to establish air bases close to the North Atlantic shipping lanes for their new Heinkel 115 torpedo bombers, the Nazis have a crying need for meteorological stations in Greenland. The course of the weather over the North Atlantic is from west to east. The British, with their own stations, plus the weather information we and the Canadians supply them, have the weather edge on the Nazis. The British almost always know what the German weather is. The Nazis are never sure what the weather is over Britain. That deficiency is a great handicap. Adverse weather conditions can disrupt flight plans more surely than manmade intervention, and cost more planes and pilots than sky warfare and anti-aircraft fire combined.
The Germans are not the world’s most modest people. But it is generally recognized now, though considered boastful at the time, that Nazi utterances respecting the extent of their armed strength before the present war were remarkable understatements. It has been part of Hitler’s psychology to lull his victims into a sense of false security. He boasts, but he boasts in the hope of being considered a bluffer. And then he strikes.
Hitler has never boasted of the extent of German knowledge of the east coast of Greenland. Yet a great part of the world’s scientific knowledge of that shore is based on German exploration. Those explorations began with that of Koldewey, who headed the second German North Pole Expedition in 1869. Koldewey wintered at Pendulum Island and made extensive expeditions up and down the East Greenland coast. When the Germania was released from the ice the next spring, Koldewey discovered and entered Franz Joseph Fjord. He was followed by Payer, the Austrian who had discovered Franz Joseph Land in the Tegetthof in 1872, and who desired to see this similarly named fjord.
Payer, in turn, was followed by other German scientists right down to the World War. After that war the German Republic’s destroyer Meteor, limited as she was respecting armament by virtue of the Versailles Treaty, cruised East Greenland waters repeatedly, taking soundings and gathering other data. All that information, and all the information the Danes and the Norwegians had gathered officially in recent years, has been made available to the Nazis. So likewise has been the information gathered by Dr. Otto J. Schmidt, former head of the Soviet Northern Sea Route Department, whose East Greenland expedition, under Commander Papinin, made such interesting newspaper reading back in 1937 and 1938. The world may be in possession of numerous adventurous accounts respecting East Greenland, but the Nazis are in possession of its charts and its scientific data. That the Bismarck hazarded to be in Greenland waters at all should be proof of that.
[MAP-GREENLAND SEA]
Our Navy, having acquired rights in Greenland, is already operating from there. But Greenland is a big place and its protection will take more than the stroke of a pen in Washington. Those potential East Greenland Nazi bases undoubtedly will be established as the battle of the North Atlantic grows hotter. To dislodge them will require more than a North Atlantic patrol. It will require counter-air bases.
Hostile air bases in the protected valleys lying at the head of deep fjords in East Greenland cannot be destroyed by surface vessels alone. The steel ships of our modern Navy could not even reach them. The ice conditions render operation of steel ships extremely hazardous in arctic waters. If our Navy possessed its wooden ships of a century ago the problem would be different. Wooden ships can be calked from the inside. But we no longer possess those wooden ships. The Nazis, on their part, have a wooden navy designed especially for arctic operations. The small wooden sealing and fishing vessels seized by the Nazis in their conquest of Norway give them a very considerable advantage respecting Greenland operations which our naval forces do not at present possess.
The Nazis can, and probably will, establish air bases in East Greenland from which their Luftwaffe can harass North Atlantic shipping. They probably planned East Greenland bases at the same time they planned their Deception Island base in the Antarctic. They undoubtedly planned such bases with a knowledge of conditions based on long observation, checked with meteorological and other data obtained in Oslo and Copenhagen after their conquests of Norway and Denmark.
The character of the Greenland Sea is such as to permit the servicing of those bases from Bergen, Trondheim, Narvik, and Tromso without undue hazard. It was not mere peradventure which permitted the German liner Bremen to slip through the waiting British patrol and reach Murmansk at the outbreak of the war. Nor was it entirely the hide-and-seek character of the Greenland Sea. Mists are effective smoke screens for vessels seeking to avoid detection, and the Greenland Sea is the most mist-shrouded of all the Seven Seas. The work of the German herring fishery patrol, operating out of Reykjavik in Iceland as long ago as 1930, had something to do with the Bremen’s escape. The waters of East Greenland, which are a blank on the British Admiralty charts, were charted minutely by the Nazis long before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. That fact was well known to Norwegians visiting those shores in their sealing vessels, but seemingly it was not given official credence by those governments most interested.
To detect Nazi supply ships servicing Nazi air bases in East Greenland, aircraft will obviously prove more serviceable than surface ships. They can scout a given area in a fraction of the time. Witness the finding of the Bismarck. The tell-tale smoke and, in calm weather, the surface trails of evasive Nazi supply vessels can be detected even through low lying mists from the air. And mist over floe ice is for the most part low lying. While pack-ice and bergs abound in the coastal waters of East Greenland, the ice of the Greenland Sea west of Spitzbergen is principally floe ice from May until November. The winds and currents keep it broken up. The Gulf Stream coursing northward up the east coast of Iceland and the west coast of Norway to Spitzbergen, and bending farther westward to be met by the south-bound polar currents, keep it from packing.
It must be borne in mind that land- planes are now and always have been faster and more effective than seaplanes, or those based on aircraft carriers. In the Greenland Sea the role of seaplanes is seriously handicapped by reason of the ice. Furthermore they would be at the mercy of the faster enemy landplanes. The war in Crete has shown that.
Land-based planes are engineered for high landing speeds, while ship-based planes must of necessity be designed very differently. Ship-based aircraft must be set down on the relatively short deck of the aircraft carrier. The hook devices used in carrier landings often cause a severe wrench. Ship-based planes of a consequence sacrifice speed for sturdiness.
Furthermore, ship-based planes cannot take off or land on their carrier unless it be moving at considerable speed. And carriers cannot hazard sufficient speed in ice- choked waters. Even catapulted planes require heavy construction. Otherwise the strain of catapulting would prove too severe. That heavier construction and sturdier design, plus ice conditions and the increased air resistance of sea-based planes, render them inadequate weapons for Greenland operations. That would be particularly true when placed in competition with Nazi Me 110’s or Ju 87’s and 88’s.
Air power, with present-day equipment, constitutes an essential and vital element of sea power. The Nazi invasion of Norway proved that. So did Taranto and Dunkirk. So did the fate of the Bismarck. Coordination between the two is essential for the successful functioning of either. Without a thorough adaptation of aeronautical development to naval uses a surface fleet, no matter how modem, is obsolete. Just as a naval base is worth many ships, an air base, properly located, is worth many more. Had Britain had a suitable air base in the Aegean she need not have lost Crete.
The little island of Jan Mayen in the center of Greenland Sea is not only the logical but the most suitable base from which land-based aircraft engaged in the detection of Nazi supply ships servicing East Greenland could most effectively operate. Bases on the north coast of Iceland would present practical difficulties. Nor are the anchorages of northern Iceland ice free in winter months. Jan Mayen is approachable by sea during most of the year. Air bases in southern Greenland would not only be too far removed and hence less effective, but would be far more hazardous in view of the contemplated Nazi counterbases located in East Greenland. Every Nazi bomber that had failed to find a North Atlantic target would dump its load in South Greenland on its return to its East Greenland base.
The very reason which makes Jan Mayen a suitable land base for aircraft operations against Nazi supply ships in the Greenland Sea and Nazi air bases in East Greenland renders it unsuitable for Nazi needs. In the first place it is too accessible. The Nazis do not have the sea power essential to the protection of accessible bases. Jan Mayen can be served by steel ships since the ice there is far less formidable than that on the east coast of Greenland.
In the second place, Jan Mayen is not strategically located for Nazi purposes. They require air bases which can serve to shelter the eyes of their submarines in the North Atlantic. Jan Mayen lies almost directly north of Scotland. It is too far east. To reach the North Atlantic Nazi planes would have to cross Iceland and subject themselves to detection and to interception by our fighter planes based there. East Greenland, which lies farther west, serves Nazi purposes better. There would be a straight run, down Denmark Strait, to the North Atlantic shipping lanes.
By the same token, Jan Mayen would serve our purposes better than any Iceland base we are now using, at least so far as counterattack against Nazi East Greenland bases is concerned. From Jan Mayen our reconnaissance planes, operating in conjunction with British planes based at Spitzbergen, could detect the wooden Nazi supply ships and converted Norwegian sealers following their well-chosen routes north, where steel ships best not go, to East Greenland. Jan Mayen might well prove the fire brand in the hands of a fearless air force by which the Polyphemus eye of Germany’s submarine and raiding forces in the North Atlantic might be blinded.
Jan Mayen could also supply the missing link in our lease-lend air chain to Russia. We have air bases in south Greenland and Iceland, and England, it must be presumed, is rushing construction of air bases in Spitzbergen. But from Iceland to Spitzbergen is an unnecessarily long hop. With Jan Mayen as a steppings tone, the distance would be shortened by half. If we are to inaugurate a bomber ferry service to the Russians at Archangel, an air base at Jan Mayen would prove invaluable.
The feasibility of such a service was recently demonstrated by Major A. Harvey, U. S. Army, flying a 4-motored Consolidated B-24 army bomber. Major Harvey flew from America to Moscow via Archangel. If medium range bombers are to be ferried on that route, one of the problems to be solved is that of gasoline supply at the ferry stops. Jan Mayen could readily be equipped with gasoline storage facilities. If the Nazis take Rostov and push east to Astrakhan, cutting the Caucasus route to Russia, the Archangel route will become increasingly important. And Jan Mayen is an important link in the Archangel ferry stop chain.
Jan Mayen, since it is a terra nullius, is certainly available. Though recognized to' be within the sphere of influence of Norway, that fact presents no greater difficulty than did our acquisition of protector status over Greenland. The Norwegian Government, unlike the Danish, is in exile. A stroke of the pen could grant us full legal rights in Jan Mayen.
Were such a pen stroke executed, and activity again visited upon this little island, history would indeed be repeated. For Jan Mayen and its surrounding waters were once the scene of very considerable activity. Whaling, not war, was the source of that earlier animation.
Henry Hudson discovered Jan Mayen in 1607 and named it Touches. Though claimed by the Dutch as a result of this discovery, the little island had probably long been known by the Norsemen, and was continually being rediscovered and renamed for several years thereafter. As early as 1616, Dutch whalers began using this sea-swept bit of volcanic wasteland as a base for their whaling activities. By that time, the island was known on the charts of the period as Jan Mayen, after the Dutch whaler Jan Jacobsy May. It was he who first definitely located it at 75°~04' North and 7°-36' West.
In those days before petroleum, when whale oil was considered a necessity for the comfort of mankind, the newly discovered Greenland Sea whale fisheries proved fabulously profitable. With this wealth in whales abounding in its coastal waters it is not surprising that cookery stations, those first of the oil towns, sprang into being on Jan Mayen with Oklahomian rapidity. They were scattered all along the north coast. On the shore of North Bay a town, not only of whalers but also of land laborers and camp followers, grew in the summer of 1622 to be twice the size of that other Dutch outpost, founded the year previous, at the mouth of the Hudson River—New Amsterdam. Scores of ships and hundreds of men visited there annually. There were shops and bakeries, drinking booths, a church, fortifications, and, of course, the cookeries and warehouses. At Mary Muss Bay there was another town of considerable size. A painting, dated 1629, and to be found in the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, shows the activities that once were visited upon this desolate and solitary island.
But the feverish activity on this island was short-lived. Jan Mayen’s reign was scarcely more than that of a nine-day wonder. The wealth of stored oil invited the attacks of sea rovers. Usually those attacks were successfully beaten off, but in 1634 a whole fleet of Biscayan whaling pirates swooped down upon North Bay Station bent upon booty. The Dutch ships were absent. The garrison was soon overpowered. In vain did the cookers rush reinforcements from other stations along the coast, Rooberg, Mary Muss Bay, and South Bay. The attackers were too powerful. After a prolonged pitched battle the surviving defenders fired their warehouses and fled to the rocky fastness of the interior.
What happened to the pirates no one knows. But their depredations marked a turning point. The capture and demolition of North Bay Station presaged the rapid decay of Jan Mayen as a center for man’s effort. The cookeries were never rebuilt, for there followed an abrupt decline in the fisheries. Whales, once numerous to a nearly Munchausian extent, were depleted very considerably by the score or more of years of furious onslaught made upon them by the avid whalers. Jan Mayen was snatched back into its former cold oblivion. The oil men made no further efforts. The game was not worth the candle. There being no more whales, what good was a tiny strip of desolate volcanic wasteland far away in the northern sea? The island became a terra nullius.
After the decline of the coastal fisheries it was not until 1817 that Jan Mayen again received recognition from mankind. In that year it was visited by that remarkable scientist, whaler, and literateur, William Scoresby, Jr. His description of it is contained in his Account of the Arctic Regions.
Lord Dufferin, who visited Jan Mayen in 1856 in the adventurous little schooner Foam, describes it charmingly in his Letters from High Latitudes. His account of his first glimpse of this little, out-of-the-way island is so beautifully written that it is recommended to those who would know more of Jan Mayen.
Apart from these descriptions, an important step in the history of the island was its occupation in 1882 by the Austrian naval scientist von Wohlgemuth. Through the efforts of Lieutenant Charles Weyprecht, of the Austrian Navy, whose experiences in the Tegetlhof on a Novaya Zemlya expedition had convinced him of the desirability of concerted scientific action in arctic exploration, an International Polar Conference convened at Hamburg in 1879. It was sponsored by Bismarck and attended by the representatives of 11 nations. As a result of this conference 15 arctic stations were occupied for the purpose of accumulating scientific data. Austria-Hungary was assigned Jan Mayen as a base for its operations. Its expedition proceeded in the Pola to Mary Muss Bay, where observations were made. The island was surveyed and charted and other very valuable scientific work was done until late in 1883. In the light of present developments it should be borne in mind that all that information became available to Hitler when his legions marched into Vienna.
Since the turn of the century, Jan Mayen has been periodically visited by Norwegian seal hunters. In 1922, largely as a result of the scientific information obtained by the previously mentioned Austrian expedition, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, a government bureau, set up a wireless station on the island. Its personnel reported daily by radio to Norway the meteorological conditions which rendered it possible to forecast the violent storms which, coming from the northwest, so often lash the Norwegian coast. For this reason, though still a terra nullius, Jan Mayen was considered by Norway to be within her sphere of interest. In 1927, she notified the foreign powers concerned to that effect. All that information became available to the Nazis when they overran Norway last year.
Since it is readily approachable from the sea in nearly all weather, Nazi occupation of Jan Mayen would be untenable. They could be blasted or starved out in a relatively short time. That would not be true of our occupation. Our fleet’s operations in surrounding waters would assure our occupation force security from all but airborne molestation. Sea power would afford to us what lack of it denies the Nazis.
However, it would not be as a naval base, but as an air base, that Jan Mayen would serve us most effectively. Not that arctic wastelands make natural airports. They do not. But Jan Mayen presents a phenomenon in that respect. It has an airport, on which no airplane has ever set wheels, built by nature after man had first attained flight. That airport lies in what William Scoresby, Jr., charted as the strait between his Egg or Bird Island and the main island of Jan Mayen, but what, since that chart was made, has become a flat lava field.
In his account of his second visit to Jan Mayen in 1818, Scoresby recited circumstances which may explain this change:
On the 29th of April, 1818, we made the island of Jan Mayen, bearing north, in the ship Fame; and having the wind from the eastward, weathered it the next day. We stretched up to the northward among bay-ice, until we came abreast of Jameson Bay, and could see distinctly Egg Island, and the three icebergs, and other objects of magnitude. From about the north side of Egg Island, near Esk Mount, we were surprised with the sight of considerable jets of smoke discharged from the earth, at intervals of every three or four minutes. At first we imagined the smoke was raised by some sailors having suffered the calamity of shipwreck; but after personally examining the phenomenon from the mast-head, for upwards of an hour, I was convinced that it could be nothing else than the feeble action of a volcano. The smoke was projected with great velocity, and seemed to rise to twice the height of the land, or almost 4,000 feet. On mentioning this circumstance to Captain Gilyott of the Richard of Hull, he informed me, that, while employed in killing seals in the neighborhood of this island, in the same month of the year 1818, he observed a similar appearance. The smoke he saw frequently; and once he noticed a shining redness resembling the embers of an immense fire. He called his officers to observe it, and humorously intimated that the moon had landed on Jan Mayen!
Sometime thereafter the volcano which was formerly Egg Island again erupted, probably in conjunction with Mount Esk and Beerenberg to the north on the main island itself. The scant recorded history of Jan Mayen does not disclose when, though it was after von Wohlgemuth’s expedition in the Pola in 1883. The charts prepared by that expedition show Egg Island to be an island just as does Scoresby’s chart. Not until the Norwegians charted the island in 1922 did Egg Island show as the point of a peninsula, bound to the main island by a neck of smooth level surface.
That surface, which provides a natural air field on the south shore of Jan Mayen, lies on the point between what Scoresby called Great Wood Bay and Jameson Bay. It is well over a mile in width, running east and west, and from the blunt, truncated half-mound that was the volcano of Egg Island, northward to the precipitous approaches to Mount Esk, is nearly a mile deep. It consists for the most part of flat, unbroken lava, slightly rough in spots, and in others sandy with a rough and very heavy black sand.
An excerpt from an account of this phenomenon, written by the author and submitted to the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1933, but not published, is pertinent:
While the old charts show an island off the point between Great Wood and Jameson Bays, usually called Egg Island though sometimes designated Bird Island, the map at the Wireless Station showed none. And none was apparent as I walked up the flat under the midnight sun. Instead, at the point beyond which the island should have been there was a blunt, truncated, strange half-mound, projecting out from the shore. The half-side was seaward, sheer and precipitous. The shore side was rounded and separated from the slag bench along which I walked by a flat expanse of unbroken lava nearly a mile wide. The lava extended down the shore for upwards of a mile. What the old charts showed as shoal water between Egg Island and Jan Mayen had been filled in by a flat expanse of lava.
The volcanic eruption on Jan Mayen sometime between 1883 and 1922 did more than form a natural lava airport. It formed underground hangars as well. Whether or not the subterranean caverns located under the south slope of Mount Esk would provide accessible bomb-proof storage space for aircraft, the steep ascents at the north side of the lava field would provide sites from which underground hangars might be hollowed, readily accessible to the field. Lava, being hard and of considerable tensile strength, constitutes good cave material. Properly arched, no supports would be needed. And if the tunnels were made long enough they would connect with the spacious caverns deep under Mount Esk. Such caverns would provide indestructible subterranean hangars.
As to defenses, the crater of the former Egg Island would provide an admirable gun placement for protection against naval operations and air raiders from the south. Protected gun placements are also readily available in the crater of Mount Esk and its satellite crater to the east. The escarpment or high rugged backbone of the island affords amply protected gun sites for protection from the north and west. And Beerenberg, that remarkable snow-covered mountain, rising 8,000 feet from the sea, overtops and dominates the entire situation, defilading the airport from sea bombardment from the north or east and rendering even dive-bombing operations from those directions difficult. Beerenberg is a natural fortification second to none.
Since military operations by air of necessity involve provision for an alternative landing field, the kindly forces of nature which created a landing field on what was formerly the strait between Egg Island and the main island of Jan Mayen likewise supplied that essential. Though not so protected from the north and west, and though less extensive in its natural state, an alternative air field does exist on Jan Mayen. It is the sand spit which separates the only fresh water lake on the island from the sea.
This fresh water lake, lying on the northern shore of the island, to the east of Mary Muss Bay, is approximately a mile long, north and south, by half a mile wide. Though its fresh water freezes at higher temperature than does sea water, it is more protected than any of Jan Mayen’s bays, and even in high winds is relatively calm. For the most part, it is shallow, particularly on the side nearest the sea. In summer it would provide an ideal landing place for such seaplanes as might be operated uses from Jan Mayen.
The sand spit separating the lake from Mary Muss Bay is approachable from all sides and is approximately a mile long. Unfortunately it is scarcely over 100 yards wide. Hence only north and south landings and take-offs are possible. Even with that as the direction of the prevailing wind, that leaves much to be desired.
However, the defect is not irremediable. The lake is slightly above sea level with no outlet to the sea. It could readily be drained, at least sufficiently to increase the width of the sand spit considerably. Since the lake bed, particularly on the west or sea side, is largely sand, such draining, coupled with sand sucking and proper retaining walls, could be made to produce adequate cross runways.
While not by any means an airport in its present natural state, this lake shore stretch of sand presents distinct possibilities as an alternate to the natural lava airfield directly across the island to the south. The overhanging cliffs at the north end of the spit, ranging along the north shore of the lake nearly to its east shore, would afford sites for protected cave hangars. Those same cliffs would afford suitable protected gun placements.
To facilitate the use of airports so located on Jan Mayen, standard instrument landing equipment, such as is used in advanced military avigation, could be used- Radio markers could be located at strategic points around the area. Ultra-high frequency stations of the course marker type now commercially available could be readily installed. Such avigation aids, so essential where fogs and mists often obscure natural markers, would not, because of their limited range, unduly betray the fields to enemy action. Directional antenna arrays could be located at Birellish Tower, on the point between North Bay and Mary Muss Bay, giving unobstructed contact on the medium-high communications frequencies with our Greenland and Iceland bases. So placed, such arrays would be readily accessible for service even in the winter months.
In 1916, Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary advised that we purchase Greenland, since geographically Greenland belonged to the Western Hemisphere. He called attention to the cryolite mines at Ivigtut, the abundance of native coal, the potentialities of hydro-electric energy and, particularly, the strategic value of Greenland as a piece of our defensive armor. Peary predicted that “with the rapid shrinking of distance in this age of speed and invention, Greenland may be of crucial importance to us in the future. In the hands of a hostile interest it can be a serious menace.”
Twenty-five years after it was given, Peary’s advice has been followed. While we have not purchased Greenland outright, we have taken steps that in all probability will lead to that. For the present we have full military rights there. While not a Gibraltar or a Panama Canal, Greenland is but 30 hours steaming from the transatlantic lanes midway between New York and the British Isles. It is but reasonable to assume that the fjords of southern Greenland, which can hold our entire Navy in their deep, narrow, impregnable confines, will not be relinquished no matter what the future holds.
If that be true, every reason which exists for our acquisition of bases in the Caribbean for the protection of the Panama Canal, or in the Pacific for the protection of Hawaii, Alaska, and our west coast, prompts our acquisition of a permanent base in the Greenland Sea for our protection of Greenland. If our naval bases in Greenland are to serve as protection for the North American Continent, why should not Jan Mayen serve as our air protection for those Greenland bases?
As for the present emergency, no time should be lost respecting our occupation of this little island. Arrangements could readily be made with the Norwegian government in exile. As a counter base for the protection of lease-lend aid to Britain, and as a primary base for the delivery of bomber planes to Russia, Jan Mayen is the strategic counterpart of Iceland.
Toward the close of the last war we sent an expeditionary force to Russia via Archangel and Murmansk. It numbered some 4,500 officers and men, taken from the 85th Division and placed under the command of General F. C. Poole, the British ranking officer at Archangel. The entire Allied expeditionary force to Russia numbered nearly 12,000. If our aid to Russia in the present war takes a similar turn, Jan Mayen would prove a valuable scouting and protection post for the necessary convoys and supply lines.
In London, recently, Mr. Laurence Cadbury, member of the British mission which met in Moscow with our mission under Mr. Harriman in September, stated that he hoped Russian icebreakers could keep Archangel open all the year round. Thereafter, Senator Wallgren called for American acquisition of Russian bases. General George Brett, Chief of the U. S. Army Air Corps, inspected the two air bases under construction by American technicians in northern Ireland and western Scotland. Reports from London hint that we are going to take them over. If talk of those British and Russian bases indicates aid to Russia via Archangel, the missing link in the air route there should be forged. We have Newfoundland, South Greenland, and Iceland, and England has Spitzbergen. All that is lacking is Jan Mayen.