The Coast Guard & the Greenland Patrol
by John A. Tilley
In 1940, most Americans who knew that Greenland
existed thought of it as a nondescript white blob near the tops of their
world maps. That the place might have any military significance to the great
powers had occurred to scarcely anyone - least of all to the people who
lived there. But in the next five years Greenland was to become a small but
significant theater of war, and was to confront the U.S. Coast Guard with
some of the most arduous duties it had ever been called upon to perform.
Greenland is a largely deserted island of about 827,000 square miles, most
of which lies above the Arctic Circle. Scientists believe that the interior
is covered by mountains and steep gorges, but since prehistoric times they
have been buried under a mass of ice that covers 80 percent of the land
area. (If the Greenland ice cap ever melted, the world's oceans would rise
by about 20 feet.) In the winter, the arctic winds blow unimpeded for
hundreds of miles over the ice cap, covering it with snow and driving the
temperature as low as 90 degrees below zero.
The coastline is penetrated by hundreds of narrow fjords, some of them
jutting 90 miles inland. For most of the year Greenland is virtually
surrounded by a 20- to 30-mile-wide belt that the Eskimos call the storis, a
mass of floating icebergs ranging from a few yards to several city blocks
wide. During the winter Greenland is almost isolated from the rest of the
world; only ships equipped for breaking ice can force their way into the
fjords. Few have reason to try.
In the spring and summer the climate of southern Greenland is relatively
congenial, with temperatures warming to the 50s as chunks of glacial ice
rumble down the fjords on their way out to sea. The storis, propelled by the
current, drifts westward around Cape Farewell, the southern tip of the
island, and eventually disappears. As the snow melts and the wind dies the
little settlements take on a pleasantly rustic look, with bright red and
yellow buildings adding color to the rocky landscape. There are few trees,
but enough grass grows along some of the fjords to sustain herds of sheep,
and the combination of warm air and high humidity produces frequent drizzle
and mists. Summer visitors to Greenland are surprised by the swarms of
mosquitoes.
In 1940, most of the 20,000 or so inhabitants lived in villages along the
southwest coast, paying casual homage to a handful of uniformed bureaucrats
representing the foreign ministry of Denmark. The Danes had been governing
Greenland as a colony for several hundred years, supplying the Greenlanders
with manufactured goods and foodstuffs in exchange for seal oil, animal
skins and fish. The Danish government maintained a strict monopoly on
exports and kept visits by foreigners to a minimum. The justification for
that policy was that the Eskimos had no immunity to European diseases, and
were almost totally ignorant of 20th-century business practices.
The principal reason for the modern world's interest in Greenland lay at the
village of Ivigtut, half a mile up Arsuk Fjord just west of Cape Farewell. A
big corrugated iron building and a collection of cranes on Ivigtut's
waterfront sat on top of the world's only known sizeable deposit of cryolite,
a soft, translucent mineral that looks like quartz.
The cryolite mine at Ivgtut, Greenland, summer, 1940 (Yoka donation)
In the 19th century two researchers, one working in
France and the other in Ohio, had discovered simultaneously that molten
cryolite, subjected to an electric charge, could function as an electrolyte
for extracting metallic aluminum from the natural alumina found in bauxite
ore. The Hall-Heroult process became the standard means of producing
industrial aluminum. By the 1920s the mine at Ivigtut was a key element of
the American aircraft industry, and cryolite shipments to the United States
and Canada accounted for 98 percent of Greenland's exports.
On April 9, 1940, Hitler's war machine turned on Denmark. The Danes, utterly
unprepared for war and threatened with an air assault on Copenhagen,
capitulated on the same day. The fall of Denmark precipitated a burst of
nervous activity in the U.S. State Department.
Since the beginning of the war the United States had been playing a delicate
diplomatic game with the nations of Europe, perceiving the danger posed by
Germany and Italy but hoping to keep any of the European powers from
expanding their influence in the western hemisphere. When the British and
Canadian governments hinted at a concern over the defense of Greenland, the
United States responded with grumpy references to the Monroe Doctrine. The
State Department, adopting the position that the Danish ambassador to
Washington, Dr. Henrik de Kauffmann, was still the legitimate representative
of his country, agreed to sell weapons to the Greenland authorities for
protection of the cryolite mine.
On May 20, 1940, the cutter Comanche picked
through the melting storis into the harbor of Ivigtut and discharged the
James K. Penfield, first United States consul in Greenland, and his vice
consul, George L. West. After they inspected the cryolite mine the Comanche
transported Penfield and West up the coast to Godthaab, where the new
American consulate was to be established. Godthaab had no buildings to spare
for the purpose, but the local Danish doctor courteously moved into his
hospital and turned his house over to the Americans.
Over the next few weeks three larger cutters, the 327-foot cutters Campbell
and Duane and the 250-foot Cayuga, turned up in Davis
Strait and Baffin Bay, taking soundings and making preliminary charts of the
coastline. (Most of the extant charts of Greenland were in German-occupied
Copenhagen.) The Campbell landed a 3-inch gun and an assortment of
smaller weapons at Ivigtut; 14 Coast Guardsmen accepted discharges to
provide the nucleus of a civilian armed guard at the mine.
Orders went out to the Northland, which had
spent the past several years in Alaskan waters, to transit the Panama Canal
and proceed to New York for duty off Greenland. The Northland,
built in 1927, was an odd-looking vessel with a diesel engine, a
cork-insulated steel hull and a cutaway bow that was intended to break ice.
The original equipment had included a towering two-masted sail rig, but the
unusual bow configuration had made the ship almost impossible to steer when
under sail. By 1940, the masts had been cut down to accommodate modern radio
gear and a hefty boom to handle an SOC-4 "Seagull" aircraft. The Northland
had not proven particularly successful, but was the only vessel in American
service specifically designed for operations in the arctic.
On arriving at New York, the Northland was placed under the command
of CDR Edward H. Smith, who was something of a legend in the Coast Guard.
"Iceberg Smith," holder of a Ph.D. in oceanography from Harvard,
had considerable experience in Greenland waters; he had made several cruises
with the International Ice Patrol, and had commanded the Marion
during an extensive study of water temperatures and currents off Greenland
and northeastern Canada in 1926. Smith took the Northland on a
four-month cruise along the western and eastern coasts of Greenland,
compiling enough data to publish a set of detailed sailing directions.
(Left: CAPT Edward "Iceberg" Smith)
Greenland in Allied Strategy
Early in 1941, under intensifying pressure from the British and the
Canadians, a meeting of representatives from the State, War and Navy
Departments decided that the United States should participate actively in
the defense of Greenland. Geography had given it a significant role to play
in the war that was taking form in Europe.
American factories were about to disgorge a stream of aircraft to be sent to
Britain under the Lend-Lease Act, and the fastest way for an airplane to get
to England was under its own power. The Army Air Forces worked out a route
that aircraft could fly in short hops; the great circle track from Nova
Scotia to Scotland ran over southern Greenland. Another strategic
factor was the value of Greenland as a site for weather stations. Data
collected in Greenland helped meteorologists predict the weather for western
Europe.
In March 1941, the South Greenland Survey Expedition, consisting of
diplomats, naval and army officers, and an observer from the Royal Canadian
Air Force, sailed from Boston in the Cayuga to locate suitable
sites for air bases, weather stations, and other military installations.
The Americans were ordered to avoid any unpleasant confrontations with the
Greenlanders. The secretary of state, Cordell Hull, warned the Secretary of
the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, that "German propaganda has already
made much of the assertion that the contact of Greenlanders with Americans
will result in the enslavement, miscegenation and ultimate extinction of the
native population." On April 9, Hull and the Danish ambassador signed
the Hull-Kauffmann Agreement, giving the United States the authority to
build and operate air bases and other defensive facilities in Greenland.
The survey expedition spent several months in Greenland, assisted by the Cayuga,
the Northland and the latter vessel's lone airplane, that proved
invaluable in scouting the terrain and the movements of the ice. In May, the
Northland was ordered back to Boston for a refit, to be relieved by
the 240-foot Modoc, which had just made a trip to Ivigtut bearing
Mr. Charles Davies, a representative of the Pennsylvania firm that imported
cryolite.
On May 18 the two cutters rendezvoused at sea for an exchange of mail bags
and a conference between Iceberg Smith and the Modoc's commanding
officer, LCDR Harold G. Belford. A few hours later they received an urgent
radio message that a convoy had been attacked by a German wolfpack off Cape
Farewell, with the loss of several merchant ships. The Coast Guard cutters
were ordered to look for survivors, though the frigid water and stormy
weather offered little cause for optimism.
'More or Less On a Hair Trigger'
The Northland, announcing the humanitarian nature of its mission
with lights, oversized flags and hourly radio broadcasts, proceeded to the
site of the convoy fight, but found only a collection of floating debris and
empty rafts. The Modoc, with Smith's approval, ran down a weak
radio signal identified as coming from the lifeboats of a steamer named the Marconi,
which had been torpedoed about a hundred miles to the south. The smaller General
Greene, diverted from an oceanographic survey off Newfoundland, joined
in the search.