A competing but equally odd theory says that the name Greenland was bestowed by the native Inuit people, formerly called Eskimos by outsiders. Their sporadic presence on Greenland traces back some four thousand years, starting with travelers believed to have crossed the narrow straits from North America. The Inuit clustered near the rocky coastline and in the words of one medieval historian, Adam of Bremen, had “lived there long enough to have acquired a greenish tinge from the seawater beside which they dwelt.” Under this theory, anyone who looked vaguely green must have come from Greenland.
If Greenland had to be named for a color, white seems the obvious choice. But blue was viable, as well. Although white at the surface, glacier ice on much of Greenland comes in translucent shades of blue, ranging from faint aquamarine and turquoise just below the surface to indigo in the depths of crevasses. The phenomenon is caused by countless years of snow being compacted into ice. Snow contains oxygen, which scatters light across the visible spectrum, making it appear white. Compacting squeezes out the oxygen, and the compacted ice crystals that remain absorb long light waves and reflect short waves. The shortest light waves are violet and blue. And so, the ice at the cold heart of Greenland is blue.
GREENLAND’S STRANGENESS IS compounded by its great but politically inconsequential size; its almost complete emptiness; and its unconscionable weather.
In a world where size generally matters, Greenland’s doesn’t. The island is globally overlooked despite being enormous: more than sixteen hundred miles from north to south, and eight hundred miles at its widest point. Greenland could swallow Texas and California and still have room for a dessert of New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and all of New England. It’s three times the size of France, and it occupies more than twice the area of the planet’s second-largest island, New Guinea.
Yet Greenland is the world’s loneliest place. With fifty-eight thousand residents, it has the lowest population density of any country or dependent territory. Only Antarctica, with no permanent residents, makes Greenland seem crowded. If Manhattan had the same population density as Greenland, its population would be two.
One way to picture Greenland is to look at a world map and find the blank white spot to the northeast of North America. Another way is to imagine an immense bowl filled with ice. At the outer edge of the island, jagged mountains that rise as high as twelve thousand feet create the bowl’s rim. The land between the coastal mountains, the bowl’s concave middle, is filled with ice that built up over tens of thousands of years, as yearly snowfall exceeded melting. The more the ice accumulated, the more the land in the central part of the island became depressed from the weight. Hence the ice-filled bowl that is Greenland.
A closer look reveals that the bowl’s rim has cracks—spaces between the mountains. Driven by gravity, large bodies of ice called glaciers flow toward the sea like slow-moving rivers. When a glacier’s leading edge runs out of land, it fulfills its destiny by hurling itself piece by piece into the water. The process, called calving, is loud and violent and magnificent. Big pieces of glaciers are reborn as icebergs, some big enough to sink an unsinkable ship. In summer 2012, a glacier in northwest Greenland gave birth to an iceberg the size of Boston. The smallest icebergs are known to Coast Guardsmen as “growlers” because they make sounds like snarling animals when trapped air escapes from inside.
Most photographs of Greenland’s glaciers and their iceberg offspring fail to capture their grandeur. They look on film like frothy meringue in a cookbook. In reality, they are unstoppable giants that have conquered the world multiple times, and they wouldn’t hesitate to unleash a new ice age if given the chance.
Although the bowl-of-ice analogy is useful, it overlooks an important feature of Greenland. Unlike the smooth, rounded rim of a bowl, the coastline is a ragged, sawtooth affair, with innumerable fjords cutting as deep as ninety miles into the land. As a result, Greenland’s coast is more than twenty-seven thousand miles long, a distance greater than the circumference of the earth at the equator.
Even more than its size, Greenland’s most defining feature is its climate. Temperatures vary along a spectrum of discomfort, ranging from bone-rattling to instant frostbite. In many places, temperatures regularly reach the only place on the thermometer where Celsius and Fahrenheit agree: 40 degrees below zero. To be fair, at the more habitable southern coastline, the average yearly temperature is about 30 degrees Fahrenheit—habitable, but not necessarily reachable by sea. For much of the year the north of Greenland is ringed by solid pack ice, and the waters to the south are beset by the storis, a twenty-mile belt of floating icebergs.
Then there’s the wind. In fall and winter, devastating blizzards known as piteraq storms race more than a hundred miles per hour across the unbroken landscape. The wind blows glacial dust that can scour glass or blind eyes left unprotected. Soldiers stationed at an American base in Greenland during World War II sometimes crawled from one building to the next to avoid violent winds. An officer who stepped blithely out of his hut was thrown twenty feet into a wall, breaking both arms.
ALTHOUGH GREENLAND’S NATURAL defenses discouraged settlement, some hardy souls insisted. In 1721, two centuries after Erik the Red’s colony vanished, Europeans returned to Greenland, led by a Danish-Norwegian missionary named Hans Egede. Hoping to discover Viking descendants, Egede instead found Inuit people, so he stayed to spread the gospel. Colonization followed, though few Danes saw the point of the place. Unlike the native North Americans, the native Inuit people of Greenland never surrendered their majority status to outsiders, though they did embrace Christianity.
Soon the Danish monarchy claimed Greenland as its own. But in contrast to typical colonial relationships, the Danes did so with a benign hand and heavy subsidies. They brought the Inuit people food and manufactured goods, accepting in return animal skins, seal oil, and fish. Overall, Denmark kept Greenland isolated. The Danes’ benevolent motives were to preserve the traditional Inuit way of life and to protect the natives from diseases against which they had no defenses. The Danes also feared that outsiders would exploit the natives in trade deals; think beads and trinkets for Manhattan. The world respected the Danish rules, mostly because no one saw much value in Greenland. To this day, the island remains politically attached to Denmark, but Greenlanders have begun transitioning to self-rule.
For the most part, then, Greenland passed the millennia as a giant afterthought. The world’s attention did turn to the island in 1888, when Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen led a six-man team across the ice cap, the first such crossing in recorded history. In the early part of the twentieth century, the biggest news about Greenland was a 1933 survey flight over the island by Charles and Anne Lindbergh on behalf of Pan American Airlines.
All of that changed on April 9, 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded Denmark. American leaders suddenly looked with fear upon the big island so close to North America. They shuddered at the thought of Hitler building air bases and ports in Greenland, from which they imagined he might strike at Allied planes and ships in the North Atlantic. Even more frightening, Greenland was then six hours by air from New York, well within the range of German bombers. Worst of all was a doomsday scenario under which the island would be used as a Nazi staging area and springboard for a blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” with a ground invasion of the United States and Canada.
More immediately, American officials worried that Germany would establish elaborate weather stations in Greenland. The weather in Europe is “made” in Greenland; winds and currents that flow eastward over the island give birth to storms heading toward Great Britain, Norway, and beyond. Whoever knows today’s weather in Greenland knows tomorrow’s weather in Europe. Allied planners feared that German weather stations in Greenland could guide Luftwaffe bombing runs over Great Britain and the Continent. The battle to control Greenland wasn’t a war for territory, one American official said—it was “a war for weather.”
Concern about Greenland also reflected the
fact that some wars are lost not in the field but in the factory. If the Nazis ruled Greenland, Germany would gain control of a rare and unique resource that could help determine the outcome of the war. A mine at Greenland’s southwestern coast, in a place called Ivigtut, was the world’s only reliable natural source of a milky white mineral called cryolite.
Cryolite, a name derived from Greek words meaning “frost stone,” was essential to the production of aluminum, and aluminum was essential to the production of warplanes. The malleable, lightweight metal sheathed bombers and fighters, cargo haulers and transport planes. Aluminum skins encased Flying Fortresses and Lightnings, Skytrains and Helldivers, Thunderbolts and Ducks.
THE CRYOLITE MINE AT IVIGTUT. (U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)
German factories used a synthetic version of cryolite, but American and Canadian airplane makers relied on the real thing. At less than a mile from the water, the Ivigtut mine was vulnerable to sabotage or attack. A few well-placed shells from a German battleship, or a bomb placed by Nazi saboteurs, would destroy the mine. Without a reliable supply of cryolite, North American airplane factories would go idle at the worst possible time. The official Coast Guard history of World War II puts it bluntly: “Had the Nazis succeeded in preventing the production and shipment of cryolite, they could have dealt a crippling blow to the Allies.”
Greenland, ignored for most of human history, suddenly mattered.
WITH GREENLAND LOOMING over North America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ignored the Nazi invasion of Denmark, diplomatically speaking. The United States continued to recognize the Danish ambassador to Washington as the legitimate representative of his country and its territories. A deal was reached to send well-armed former U.S. Coast Guardsmen to Ivigtut to guard the cryolite mine and prevent possible sabotage by mine workers of dubious loyalties. Five Coast Guard ships were also dispatched to the Greenland coast, where they put weapons ashore to defend the mine. Canada and Britain made their own secret preparations to safeguard Ivigtut. But those were temporary solutions.
In April 1941, while the United States was still neutral in the war, it reached an agreement with Denmark’s government-in-exile under which American forces would protect Greenland against German aggression by building U.S. air bases and military installations on the island. Germany was none too happy, but the Nazis limited their response to a propaganda campaign that accused America of plotting “the enslavement, miscegenation and ultimate extinction of the native population.” Ironic, considering the Nazis’ own policy on “ultimate extinction” of certain peoples.
By the summer of 1941 the United States had assembled a small fleet of Coast Guard ships and converted fishing trawlers into what it called the Greenland Patrol. A large part of the patrol’s job was to help the U.S. Army establish bases for ferrying planes to Britain and to defend Greenland against German operations. The patrol, which included the cutter Northland and its Grumman Duck biplane, also protected U.S. ships loaded with food destined for England, to foil Hitler’s plan to starve the British Isles into submission. Among the ships’ other jobs was to monitor icebergs in shipping lanes, extending a role the Coast Guard had performed flawlessly since joining the International Ice Patrol in 1912, after the sinking of the Titanic. Leading the Greenland Patrol was Rear Admiral Edward “Iceberg” Smith, a veteran commander who had a PhD in oceanography from Harvard.
By the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, its Greenland air bases were well under construction. Greenland was known in U.S. military code as “Bluie,” so the most important island base was called Bluie West One, built on the southwestern coast near where Erik the Red had first settled. Men stationed there adopted an unofficial motto, “Phooey on Bluie,” complete with an eleven-stanza poem by the same name. Among the lines: “The mountains of Greenland rise into the sky; at a field on the fjord where the ice drifts by. The worst of it is, with its infinite trials, there isn’t a woman for one thousand miles.”
Also important was Bluie West Eight, located in remote west-central Greenland some thirty-five miles north of the Arctic Circle. A key base on the southeast coast, still being built, was Bluie East Two, with the upbeat radio code name “Optimist.” In time, the military would have fourteen Bluie sites, some little more than heated wooden shacks, nine on the west coast and five on the east.
Upon entering the war after Pearl Harbor, the United States began a massive buildup of the U.S. Eighth Air Force in Britain. During the summer of 1942, the military began Operation Bolero, in which warplanes flew the “Snowball Route” to Britain, hopscotching from Maine to Newfoundland to Greenland to Iceland to Scotland, refueling along the way. Before the winter of 1942–1943, some nine hundred planes would join the war effort via the Snowball Route. Greenland’s Bluie bases, built along the route’s main street, were transformed from quiet, remote outposts to hectic, remote outposts.
But as soon as American planes began flying over Greenland, they began crashing into Greenland. Three B-17s ditched on the very first day of flights, in June 1942. The next month, in July 1942, a squadron of six P-38 Lightning fighters and two B-17 Flying Fortress bombers encountered bad weather between Greenland and Iceland. They tried to fly under the storm, through it, above it, and around it, with no luck. Next they tried to turn back to Greenland, to land at Bluie West Eight. But their fuel ran low, and they lost their bearings. With no other options, the pilots of “The Lost Squadron,” as it became known, crash-landed on the ice cap near Greenland’s east coast.
The first plane, a P-38, tried to land with its wheels down. It was a mistake that caused the nose wheel to dig into the surface snow, flipping the fighter onto its back. The rest of the pilots took note and landed wheels up and belly down, treating their warplanes like giant sleds. Incredibly, all twenty-five men aboard the eight planes survived, with only a few minor injuries.
Three days later, American radio operators picked up their distress signals and dispatched cargo planes to drop supplies. Summertime conditions were so good that the men joked about their situation. “Don’t send any more toilet paper,” they radioed. “Send women.” A week later, rescuers reached them by dogsled and led them to the coast. After a seventeen-mile hike, the men of the Lost Squadron were taken aboard the Coast Guard cutter Northland to recuperate.
For more than forty years, the eight planes sat abandoned. As snow and ice piled up atop the planes, warplane enthusiasts dreamed of recovering the Lost Squadron. In 1992, a team found the planes buried under 268 feet of ice. They dug and melted three vertical shafts down to one of the P-38s and used water cannons to carve a two-thousand-square-foot cavern around it. After hauling it to the surface piece by piece, they reassembled it and restored it to flight. They named the rebuilt fighter Glacier Girl and sent it touring at air shows.
Other crash landings in Greenland during World War II ended far worse.
A B-17 FLYING FORTRESS BOMBER AND ITS CREW, FROM THE LOST SQUADRON, ON THE GREENLAND ICE CAP. (U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES PHOTOGRAPH.)
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“A MOTHER THAT DEVOURS HER CHILDREN”
NOVEMBER 1942
ON THE MORNING of November 5, 1942, a pudgy twin-engine plane called a C-53 Skytrooper took flight from an American air base in Reykjavík, Iceland. Five American airmen were aboard, with Captain Homer McDowell Jr. at the controls. McDowell and his crew had been on a routine cargo mission, a “milk run,” and now they were headed west, back to the crew’s home base on the far side of Greenland.
Their destination was the airfield at Bluie West One, where McDowell intended to touch down on a treacherous landing strip carved between two mountains. As one pilot put it, the base was “fifty-two 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.” Yet as wartime assignments went, it was safer than flying over Germany.
The C-53 Skytrooper’s name was more impressive than its l
ooks. Compared with the fighters and bombers crowding the skies, the Skytrooper was like a station wagon in a showroom filled with Jaguars. Modified from the civilian DC-3 passenger plane, the C-53 Skytrooper was a good craft to use when there was a job to do, but not necessarily an urgent or high-profile one.
This day, McDowell’s C-53 was one of eighteen American planes making the six-hour trip from Iceland to Greenland’s west coast. The preflight briefing was uneventful, though the weather report included a few trouble spots: patches of snow, overcast, with fog along the route.
McDowell, who had celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday four days earlier, flew the C-53 uneventfully during the first two-plus hours of the trip. The weather held clear as the plane passed over the Denmark Strait and reached Greenland’s eastern coastline. Because they made it that far without incident, the men aboard the C-53 had the good fortune of being over land, rather than water, when their luck changed.
A C-53 SKYTROOPER DURING WORLD WAR II. (U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES PHOTOGRAPH.)
Shortly after the plane reached the southeast coast of Greenland, a location that defined the edge of nowhere, disaster struck: McDowell’s Skytrooper went down on the ice cap. By some accounts, the crash occurred when one of the plane’s two engines failed, but other reports were silent on why the C-53 experienced what the military called a “forced landing.” The official crash report declared the cause “unknown and no reason given in radio contacts.” A handwritten notation added, “100 percent undetermined.”
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