Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

On May 9, 1911, outside of Nome, Peterson fired up his single engine and eased the biplane forward. He opened the throttle, but the contraption still only managed to “ease” forward. Even with a push down a hill, the Tingmayuk never got up enough speed to take to the air. Probably, it was just as well. The headline in the Nome Nugget summed it up best: “Peterson Unable to Defy the Law of Gravity.”

World War I stifled domestic aviation for a time, but when it was over, the skills and techniques honed in the skies above France catapulted America into the air age. On July 15, 1920, General Billy Mitchell of the Air Service of the U.S. Army dispatched eight men and four airplanes of the Black Wolf Squadron from New York to Nome on the nation’s first cross-country flight. The exercise was one of Mitchell’s many demonstrations of the potentials of air power. Mitchell, by the way, was no stranger to Alaska, having worked as a young lieutenant on the military telegraph line between Valdez and Eagle in 1901–2.

The airplane changed the face of Alaska and provided outlying communities such as Nome and Barrow with year-round connections. There was still a very high degree of self-sufficiency, but supplies and medical care were now hours away instead of weeks or even months. Mapping, photography, and weather observations were just a few of the things that now began to be done from the air. By the end of the 1930s, one report showed ninety-seven established civilian airfields, although only the bigger fields at Anchorage and Fairbanks had lighted runways.

And, of course, that necessary adjunct quickly came to demand interstate connections. Pan American Airways started service overseas from the States in 1927 and had routes to Latin America by 1931. But not until June 1940 did the airline start clipper service between Seattle and Ketchikan and Juneau. From there, connections were available to Fairbanks, Nome, and Bethel via Pan American’s subsidiary, Pacific-Alaska Airways, which had purchased the equipment and routes of a number of Alaskan operations. This was a major event and Alaska’s first transportation link to the continental United States other than by ship.

Alaska was not the only place where the New Deal tried to resettle the destitute from poverty-stricken rural areas, but thanks in part to Alaska’s special mystique, the proposed project “up north” got considerable press and took center stage. Boosters of the territory were ecstatic. For once the federal government was actually doing something to promote its growth. If these colonies demonstrated that farming could be successful in Alaska, then it could be done on a large scale and many others would stream north. Even Time Magazine wrote, “Many an observer has pointed out that past U.S. depressions were relieved by mass migrations to the frontier, [and] that the present depression is uniquely acute because that safety-valve is gone.” But there was, the magazine asserted, “one last U.S. frontier: Alaska.”44

Considering the hordes of the unprepared that had flocked to Alaska during the gold rush, selection standards were quite rigorous. Families were chosen from active county relief rolls. Those of Scandinavian or at least northern European stock were given preference because again they were deemed better adapted to northern climates. The targeted age group was twenty-five to thirty-five, although this was extended in some special circumstances—usually applicants with younger wives. There could be no record of chronic illness in the family, and adults were required to have at least an elementary school education. High school was desirable. Once past these requirements, selected families were given background checks by the state social services divisions. Imagine if some of these standards had been applied to other Alaskan immigrants over the years! In return, the lucky few were to be provided with forty acres, a house, and transportation from their point of origin to Palmer, Alaska—all on easy thirty-year terms.

Not all were happy. Despite the promises of sunny skies, the spring and early summer of 1935 proved to be unseasonably wet. Dreary overcast and rain, rain, and more rain left the collection of tents a soggy mess. Scarcely had the settlers arrived when about forty disgruntled colonists protested the conditions in telegrams to President Roosevelt and Alaska territorial governor John Troy. Homes were not built, wells not dug, there were no schools, and there was the perennial complaint about high prices at the government commissary—higher even, it was alleged, than those at the private stores in Palmer, Matanuska, and Wasilla.

Many simply gave up. Six families left within a month, and twenty more by the end of that first summer. The government dutifully paid their passages back to the States, where most returned to the welfare rolls. But progress was being made. By October, 140 houses standing among the 200 lots were ready for occupancy. A community center, warehouse, dormitory, and power plant were complete, and work was under way in Palmer for a hospital. Temporary school arrangements with a circuit-rider teacher had been made, and by the following autumn a new central school building was opened in Palmer.

Frequently, such agricultural difficulties were compounded, not eased, by the overriding federal administration. Eventually, this administrative structure evolved from the original Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corporation into a community council that met weekly with the corporation’s general manager and then became the Matanuska Valley Civic Association. All vestiges of colonial administration finally disappeared in 1951, when Palmer became an incorporated town.

In the end, what saved the colony and eased its transition into a regular settlement was the 1940 construction of nearby Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Air Base in Anchorage, which offered a job market as well as a farm market. Some critics called the Matanuska colony a social experiment gone awry—just another socialist New Deal scheme of that damn Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Others sang FDR’s praises and called it the best thing that ever happened to them. One thing is for certain. The towns of Palmer and Wasilla still stand, and as home to Alaska’s State Fair, the Matanuska Valley is about as much farm country as one is apt to find in the far north.

Shortly before midnight on the evening of February 8, 1904, ten Japanese destroyers quietly slipped into the Russian naval base at Port Arthur (now Lüshun, China) and unleashed a devastating torpedo attack on battleships and cruisers of the Russian fleet. It was a stunning Japanese victory. It was also the result of a surprise attack. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were strained and in the process of being terminated, but no state of war yet existed. Shortly afterward, Alaska’s chief game warden, Alfred H. Dunham, speculated on the ensuing Russo-Japanese War in an article about the development of Nome. Dunham wondered “what Alaska would be if it had remained in Russia’s hands to the present day. Would Japanese fleets now be bombarding Sitka, Nome, and other Alaskan ports?”

Nothing altered the face of Alaska more than the Second World War. One may argue that the arrival of the Excelsior in San Francisco in July 1897 unleashed the Klondike stampede, and that Atlantic Richfield’s announcement of oil and gas discoveries at Prudhoe Bay in June 1968 opened the floodgates of another. But the buildup of population, transportation networks, and concomitant infrastructure—all of which remained and was infused with returning GIs at war’s end—made December 7, 1941, and the period that followed, the most pivotal in Alaska’s history.

Prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there were only about 2,500 miles of roads in Alaska, and only one major highway, the Richardson, between Valdez and Fairbanks. Ties to the United States amounted to ship service from Pacific Northwest ports and a few Pan American Airways clipper flights. Alaska was, by all accounts, still very isolated from the rest of America. But it had not been caught totally unawares by Japan’s aggression.

This national defense mind-set brought to the forefront the issue of linking Alaska with the United States via a road. It was not a new idea. As early as 1929, the United States and Canada had each formed its own International Highway Association. Headquartered respectively in Fairbanks and Dawson, Yukon Territory, their mutual goal was a highway through Canada connecting Alaska with the lower forty-eight and stimulating commerce along the way. By the American association’s optimistic estimate, such a 1,350-mile, sixteen-foot-wide gravel thoroughfare from Prince George, British Columbia, to Fairbanks could be built for just over $14 million, provided that ferries and not bridges were employed to cross the Yukon and Pelly Rivers.

The Americans favored what came to be called Route A, which ran north from Prince George between the Coast Mountains and the Canadian Rockies, because they envisioned feeder routes linking it to Alaska’s southeastern towns. The Canadians championed Route B, which also ran north from Prince George but stayed east of the Rockies to better serve the development of northern British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. Cost estimates for either route had almost doubled since 1929, and when Congressman Magnuson cited national defense considerations as one of the rationales for an appropriation, Secretary of War Henry Stimson replied that the value of the proposed highway as a defense measure was negligible.4

The board’s first report was submitted to both governments on October 4, 1940, just as General Arnold’s part-travelogue, part-military briefing was hitting the streets in National Geographic Magazine. The PJBD report dealt primarily with improvements to the Atlantic coastal defenses of both countries, but it also recommended that a chain of landing fields capable of handling military aircraft, including heavy bombers, be established on a route across northwest Canada between the United States and Alaska. Further elaborated six weeks later, this recommendation called for a series of bases in both Canada and Alaska with cleared approaches, 5,000-foot runways, and facilities for refueling, maintenance, and crew rest.

The recent show of Japanese naval power throughout the Pacific, and the belief still held by some senior U.S. Navy officers that America’s only hope of defense now lay in shambles along Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor, heightened fears that the entire Pacific would soon be a Japanese lake. If that happened, all sea routes to Alaska would be cut. It was in this atmosphere that Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes suggested at a cabinet meeting on January 16, 1942, that the various alternatives for the long-proposed highway to Alaska be reexamined for a safer and more reliable route to getting men and supplies to Alaska. FDR agreed and ordered Ickes to work with War Secretary Stimson and Navy Secretary Frank Knox to develop a recommendation. Stimson, no doubt, was having second thoughts about his earlier comments regarding the military importance of such a route.

When the line of the Northwest Staging Route was overlaid atop the proposed highway routes, the obvious came into focus. Building generally along proposed Route C for 600-plus miles from Dawson Creek to Watson Lake would link the airfields at St. John, Fort Nelson, and Watson Lake. Building generally along proposed Route A another 500 miles from Whitehorse to Fairbanks via the Northway airfield on the Alaska-Canadian border would link up with Big Delta on the Richardson Highway. A 300-mile line was then drawn across the Cassiar Mountains between Whitehorse and Watson Lake to join the two pieces.

The U.S. Army now moved rapidly to spearhead the construction of the Alaska Highway. A scant twenty-six days had passed between Secretary Ickes’s first suggestion to review the various road plans and FDR’s decision to build it. It just goes to show how quickly things could happen given the exigencies of war. Initial operational plans called for four 1,300-man army engineer regiments, each augmented by a light pontoon company to effect river crossings, to scratch out some semblance of a road along the entire 1,500-mile route—what came to be known as the pioneer trail.

Meanwhile, units were pushing to close the gap between Whitehorse and Big Delta. Among the regiments sent to reinforce the initial four units along the route were the 93rd, 95th, and 97th Engineers. In the parlance of the still largely segregated U.S. armed forces, these were “Negro,” or “colored,” units, whose effectiveness was still questioned by many in the army’s officer corps. The 93rd deployed out of Skagway and the 95th out of Dawson Creek, while the 97th blazed the trail eastward up the Tanana for the following PRA civilian crews. When the 97th linked up with the 18th Engineers working west from Whitehorse near Beaver Creek about twenty miles east of the Alaska-Canadian border, it was not only the completion of the highway’s pioneer trail but also a symbolic step. By carving the most miles in the final stretch, the 97th had done as much on the ground to silence generations of prejudice as the famed Tuskegee airmen were about to do in the air.

On October 29, 1942, Secretary Stimson announced that the highway was open and that trucks were rolling along its length. It was a little premature. In truth, there was much that remained to be done. This was, after all, only the pioneer trail. But the road link between Alaska and the lower forty-eight—no matter how tenuous in places—had been made. On November 20, with, as historian Heath Twichell, Jr., wrote, “brass hats and brass bands at fifteen below,” Canadian and American representatives braved the cold at Soldier’s Summit 162 miles west of Whitehorse above the shores of Kluane Lake and officially opened the road. The ceremony had been delayed several days by unseasonably warm Chinook winds that caused ice jams to take out portions of the Peace River Bridge and the span over the Smith River east of Watson Lake. The weather was nature’s bluff, however. The winter of 1942–43 proved to be the coldest in Alaska and the Yukon since 1917.16

Whatever criticism the Alaska Highway was receiving in some quarters for its construction costs, it was getting nothing but praise from pilots ferrying aircraft along the Northwest Staging Route. Inexperienced pilots, frequently unfamiliar with the aircraft they were flying, were all too happy to do a little IFR flying of the I-Follow-Roads type. When mechanical problems forced a pilot either to bail out or to make an emergency landing, the road was a lifeline and afforded ready rescue. In due course, equipment for all-weather navigational aids, maintenance facilities, and auxiliary runways was transported over the road to improve the airfields at Fort Nelson, Watson Lake, and Northway.

At Great Falls, the aircraft were painted with the red star insignia of the Soviet Union, and pilots of the all-male Seventh Ferry Group flew them north to Fairbanks. There, Soviet pilots took over and flew first to Nome for refueling and then on to Siberia.

ALSIB also provided a relatively safe avenue over which to shuttle Russian and American diplomats and military personnel between Moscow and Washington. American vice president Henry Wallace, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, and Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko were among those who traveled the ALSIB route. Ironically, a few short years later, it would be the fear that Soviet bombers might reverse this course of Allied supply that precipitated a network of early warning stations across Alaska.18

In addition to the Northwest Staging Route and the Alaska Highway, there was a third leg to this overall project to better access and defend Alaska. In April 1942, Harold Ickes, who was the petroleum administrator for war as well as the secretary of the interior, told a cabinet meeting that concerted efforts should be undertaken immediately to explore for oil within Alaska in order to ensure a secure source for the territory. Once again, the army was charged with implementing this goal, and, once again, the big map of northwest Canada and Alaska brought the obvious into focus. Suddenly, the Canadian oil field at Norman Wells, which had been discussed in connection with proposed Route D of the highway, swelled in importance. The solution to decreasing Alaska’s dependence on oil arriving by ship, as well as providing fuel for both aircraft on the ALSIB and trucks on the Alaska Highway, was Project CANOL.

And then there were the Aleuts. They were scattered in tiny villages about the Aleutians from Unalaska to Attu and in the Pribilofs on St. George and St. Paul. Few questioned their American patriotism, but the Aleuts were clearly in the way of the buildup of military bases around Dutch Harbor and any future military operations throughout the Aleutian chain. Many in the military looked upon the Aleuts as a nuisance to be eliminated—from villages impeding the construction of airstrips and other facilities to the complications of social interaction with military personnel. Overlying these concerns was the same decided tone of racism that was being applied to Americans of Japanese ancestry. After much indecision between Alaska’s military and civilian authorities, 881 Aleuts were evacuated from the Pribilofs and the villages of Akutan, Biorka, Kashega, Makushin, Nikolski, and Unalaska during June and July of 1942.24

Both sides were critically aware that the great circle route put San Francisco 1,000 miles closer to Tokyo via the Aleutians than through Hawaii. In fact, the great circle route between Seattle and Tokyo lay just forty miles north of Dutch Harbor, a protected anchorage on the north shores of Unalaska Island. So when Yamamoto devised a massive assault against Midway, he also planned a coordinated thrust against the Aleutians.

As this second wave of Japanese aircraft was halfway to its target, Admirals Hosogaya and Kakuta both received urgent messages from Admiral Yamamoto that they should break off the entire attack on the Aleutians and steam south to support the main Japanese fleet off Midway. Kakuta had no choice but to wait and recover his planes, and by that time—despite reports that things had not gone well at Midway—Hosogaya had convinced Yamamoto that some face could be saved by continuing the Aleutian invasion. Yamamoto begrudgingly agreed, but Hosogaya chose to occupy only the western two islands of Attu and Kiska. He feared that Adak lay too close to the newly discovered airfield on Umnak—especially now that its pilots were done playing poker. So after the skies cleared of aircraft over Dutch Harbor on the evening of June 4, Kakuta’s carriers picked their way westward into the fog, having lost fifteen men and less than a dozen planes.33

When the sun set in the North Pacific on June 4, 1942, Yorktown was crippled for good, but four Japanese carriers, 332 planes, one-third of Japan’s combat pilots, and over 3,500 men were on the bottom. It was, as historian Walter Lord characterized it, an “incredible victory” for the United States. Might the outcome have been different had Kakuta’s carriers turned south on June 3 to threaten the American flank rather than attacking Dutch Harbor? Captain Hideo Hiraide, chief of the naval press section at Japanese Imperial Headquarters, put a different spin on the entire outcome. “The enormous success in the Aleutians,” he reported to the Japanese people, “had been made possible by the diversion at Midway.”34

As the brief Arctic summer drew to a close, it soon became more apparent than ever that both sides were fighting the weather as much as each other. Against both sides, the weather usually won. Witness the score. During the fall of 1942 in the Aleutians, the United States lost only nine planes in combat, but sixty-three planes went down due to weather and mechanical troubles.

The battle lasted for over three and a half hours and became the longest continuous gunnery duel between surface ships in modern naval warfare. Finally, the Salt Lake City signaled McMorris on the Richmond, “My speed zero.” Salt water in the main fuel line from numerous near misses had flowed into the Salt Lake City’s burners and extinguished them. As the Japanese closed in for the kill, McMorris ordered one destroyer to lay smoke around the crippled ship, and the other three to launch a last-ditch torpedo attack against the oncoming Japanese cruisers.

The tiny destroyers had one-tenth of the displacement of the onrushing cruisers, but they gamely steamed forward to close within range and fire a spread of torpedoes. The opposing ships were still five miles apart when McMorris received a surprise query from the destroyers: “The enemy is retiring to the west. Shall I follow them?”

Ironically, although airpower played no direct role in the battle, the possibility of its appearance had decided the outcome. In the confusion of the battle and smokescreen, Hosogaya did not realize that the Salt Lake City was sitting dead in the water. Moments before, the big cruiser had run out of armor-piercing shells and started shooting high explosives, whose white phosphor trails looked somewhat like bombs falling from the sky. Hosogaya orde...

As the Japanese fleet, including the three transports, retired to the west, the crew of the Salt Lake City got steam back up and fired its remaining salvos. Miraculously, in this last gunnery duel of surface vessels where aircraft played no direct role, casualties were only seven Americans and fourteen Japanese killed. Despite a number of hits on each side, no ships were sunk or permanently damaged. It had been a wild contest, but it was decisive in its outcome. The Battle of the Komandorskies broke the Japanese supply line to Attu and Kiska and put the Japanese navy on the defensive in the North Pacific. And Admiral Hosogaya...

Rather than assign the Thirty-fifth Infantry to the Attu landings, planners in Washington gave the job to the Seventh Motorized Division. Until then, the Seventh Division had been training in the California desert for deployment against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Scrap the tanks, they were told. Instead of a desert-warfare tank division, the Seventh was going to become an Arctic infantry force.

This might work, after all. Japanese troops swept up Engineer Hill toward the howitzers but then encountered heavy hand-to-hand fighting on the ridgeline. Incredibly, as Yamasaki’s forces fell back down the slopes and dispersed, about 500 Japanese soldiers committed mass suicide by pulling the pins on their grenades and holding them to their chests. Yamasaki himself took a bullet while leading one last charge. The Americans were stunned.

By Sunday morning, May 30, the Battle of Attu was over except for some mop-up operations. Of the 2,650 Japanese on the island when the fighting started, only 28—none of them officers—remained alive to be taken prisoner. Five hundred and forty-nine Americans were dead. In proportion to the number of Americans engaged in the operation, it was the most costly American battle in the Pacific during the entire Second World War, save for Iwo Jima. Among the thousands of wounded and injured were numerous cases of severe frostbite, exposure, and trench foot.42

After Attu finally fell, General Buckner and Admiral Kinkaid were eager to make plans for the invasion of Japan from the Aleutians, perhaps as early as the fall of 1943. The Joint Chiefs of Staff balanced the global picture and were more cautious. They set a tentative date of early 1945 for an invasion of Japan’s northern islands and told the Alaskan commanders that their first priority remained the capture of Kiska. Given the experience on Attu, everyone knew that the task was not to be taken lightly.

The airfield there was built to accommodate long-range B-29 Superfortresses, then still in the experimental stage but soon capable of carrying destruction directly to Tokyo’s doorstep. The Japanese got a taste of what to expect from the new Aleutian bases when B-24 Liberator bombers, replacements for the aging B-17s, refueled at Attu and flew several raids against the major Japanese naval base at Paramushiro. It was the first attack on Japanese soil since the Doolittle raid and the first ever flown from an American land base.44

Not willing to face another Attu, the Japanese Imperial Staff finally decided once and for all to abandon Kiska. It ordered Vice Admiral Shiro Kawase, Admiral Hosogaya’s replacement after the Battle of the Komandorskies, to make it happen. As with so many operations in war, particularly war in the Aleutians, it was far easier said than done.

Brian Garfield, writing in 1995 in a new edition of his classic, The Thousand-Mile War, suggested, however, that there may be another explanation. Buller’s shearwaters are gull-sized seabirds that annually migrate between New Zealand and Alaska. They fly in massed flights and congregate on the surface at night in large groups to feed on plankton. Their mass might have been large enough to reflect a radar image, and doubtless they would have dispersed, or “disappeared,” after a few rounds of fourteen-inch shells came crashing in. Who is to say for certain what the target was, but the U.S. Navy won what came to be called the “Battle of the Pips.” To paraphrase Robert Service, the Arctic nights have seen strange sights. The Battle of the Pips was one of the strangest, but it was about to have major ramifications.

Because of their dash west of Attu after the first PBY report and their ensuing maneuvers, the American ships were now low on fuel. They retired eastward en masse to rendezvous with the oil tanker Pecos to refuel. Meanwhile, Admiral Kawase found his fog bank and followed it northward toward Kiska, right into the area in which the American ships would have been had they not turned east to refuel.

When these forces splashed ashore on Kiska on August 15, a half dozen dogs rushed up to greet the advance elements. Ensign William C. Jones recognized one dog as Explosion, a mutt he had given to the ten-man Kiska weather team some fifteen months before. Somehow Explosion had survived the endless air and naval bombardments. The lonely dogs turned out to be the island’s only inhabitants. As the troops moved inland, it slowly became obvious that the Japanese were gone. There were booby traps that claimed casualties, and, regrettably, in the clouds and fog there were casualties from friendly fire—a total of 21 dead and 50 wounded. The destroyer Abner Read struck a mine offshore and went down with 71 men. In all, there were a total of 306 killed, wounded, and otherwise injured in the occupation of a deserted island.49

Now the question was, where to from Kiska? In September 1943, the Joint Chiefs of Staff pondered the next move. A strike against Paramushiro and the Kuriles was tempting, particularly given the forces now massed in the Aleutians. Ultimately, however, such an attack never came to pass for a number of reasons. First, there was the perpetual enigma of what the Soviet Union was planning. The Soviets all too gladly picked up Lend-Lease airplanes in Fairbanks and flew them westward, but Stalin dragged his feet in declaring war on Japan until the final month of the war. Operations against Paramushiro and the Kuriles without Soviet support from neighboring Kamchatka would have been dicey at best. Then there were the lifelines of Japan’s war effort. They ran south to the rubber, rice, oil, and strategic minerals of the East Indies. Attacking Paramushiro would do nothing to disrupt them. Finally, of course, there was that other enemy of the Aleutian front: the weather. One could be better prepared for it, but one could not prevail against it. Few relished the idea of more major operations in such conditions of uncertainty. Ironically, of course, the war against the weather continued even in the balmy Central Pacific, where typhoons would wreak major havoc with the 1945 landings at Okinawa.

Gruening, of course, wasn’t the only one to beckon the swarm of servicemen who would soon call Alaska their home. Later in 1944, the Department of the Interior, which still had nonmilitary responsibility for Alaska in its Division of Territories and Island Possessions, published a guide for those interested in Alaska that dealt mostly with land settlement issues. This was followed in 1945 by a general information bulletin on the territory. The publication was supposed to sort fact from fiction, but to those who had spent time in muddy foxholes or stoking coal boilers on angry seas, its warnings about difficulties sounded more like calls to adventure. In its foreword, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes came across almost like a newspaper editor in some mining boomtown when he went on and on about the opportunities of “our last big land frontier.” Early in 1946, Ickes even raised the issue of settling refugees from wartorn Europe in Alaska in an article titled “Let’s Open Up Alaska!”4

But opportunity, wrote Gruening, “is not lacking,” even if “Alaska’s opportunities are primarily potential rather than actual.” But indeed that potential opportunity was indisputable if for no other reason than Sundborg’s statement of the obvious: “Opened by the war, the North is going to stay open.”6

Perhaps the most ludicrous example of timber restrictions choking local commerce, or at the very least inflating the cost of local goods, occurred at a salmon cannery at Klawock in 1886. The cannery built its own small sawmill for the limited purpose of producing wooden barrels and boxes in which to ship its fish products. The federal government forbid it to do so and ordered the cannery to import its containers from Seattle and other points in the Pacific Northwest, much to the delight and profit of businessmen there.

The creation of the Chugach and Tongass National Forests in 1907 and 1909 were the first steps in changing this ratio. The National Forest Act of 1897 and the Weeks Act of 1911 both explicitly emphasized wood production as the U.S. Forest Service’s main responsibility. Slowly, permits were issued and local sawmills erected. By 1939, twenty-four sawmills mostly in the southeast cut almost 26 million board feet, the largest of those being in Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka, Wrangell, and Whittier. Fed by wartime demands, production from these operations peaked in 1943 at 62.6 million board feet.11 Some of this production was clear-grained Sitka spruce that was exported and found its way into the noses and wings of British De Havilland Mosquito bombers.

Meanwhile, a consortium of nineteen pulp and paper makers, thirteen rayon producers, and two timber companies—nearly all based in Japan—proposed a similar mill near Sitka. The aftermath of World War II had interrupted Japan’s traditional timber sources from Manchuria and Sakhalin Island (both now occupied by the Soviet Union), and in the rush to rebuild it turned to other sources. Given the recent war with Japan, there was considerable apprehension in the United States about such a large foreign investment in Alaska. Eventually, the State Department blessed the deal as good not only for Japan’s economic recovery but also for “the economic development of a self-sustaining economy in the Territory of Alaska.”

Back in 1935, airpower champion Billy Mitchell had testified before Congress that Alaska was the most central place in the world for aircraft. “He who holds Alaska will hold the world,” the unconventional general proclaimed. “I think it is the most important strategic place in the world.”19 Mitchell assumed that he was speaking with regard to the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the coming Second World War, but his prediction would prove even more prescient with regard to the confrontation looming in the postwar era. What William Mungen had predicted on the floor of Congress upon the 1867 purchase of Alaska had come true. Russia, now called the Soviet Union, and the United States were the two great powers on Earth. But they were no longer friends.