by Ruth Gruber
Citizens' groups, such as the Rotary, learning of the talks to the soldiers, began to ask me to speak to them, too.
On December 2, 1941—five days before we entered the war—I wrote Ickes about the lectures and the low morale among the soldiers and civilian newcomers:
The question of morale, serious enough in the States, is really acute here. There have been a distressing number of suicides and insanities among the soldiers. Civilian morale, especially among the newcomers, is little higher. Evenings hang heavy; new saloons open almost overnight; the red light districts spread and flourish while men and women search desperately for time-killers.
You hardly know there's a war going on [in Europe]. On the one hand, there's a listless apathy toward world events; on the other, a violent hatred for Alaska. Some of the boys look upon the territory as a prison, a place of exile. Their general attitude is: “If the Germans get Alaska, they deserve it.”
It seems to me that these soldiers and civilians need to know what they're defending and what they're fighting for. They need not only military education but political education. They ought to know the importance of Alaska, and of the whole Arctic, in times of peace and war; that Alaska is the springboard to Asia and Europe and that the Arctic is both the crossroads and the weather-kitchen of the world.
Knowing how secretive and careful I had to be not to divulge any military information, such as locations of airfields and numbers of troops, I ended the letter by making sure Ickes approved of my giving these talks. His answer came by air mail in less than three weeks:
THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR WASHINGTON
December 20, 1941
My dear Dr. Gruber:
I can see no reason why you should not speak to meetings of Alaska citizens as the newspaper clippings that you sent with your letter of December 2 indicate that you have been doing. I think that such talks are all to the good.
What you say in your letter about the morale situation indicates a very bad condition. We Americans seem to take the question of morale for granted. For over two years I fought a constantly losing battle in my effort to have the Administration set up a division to handle such matters. I am taking the liberty of sending a copy of your letter to the President.
Sincerely yours,
Harold L. Ickes
Secretary of the Interior
I soon discovered that if Ickes had faith in you, he gave you free rein. In another of my reports, I cabled him that the thousands of Aleuts, living on the Aleutian Islands and the seal-bearing Pribilof Islands, were the most vulnerable targets for the Japanese to attack. The Aleutians were pointed like a sword at Tokyo.
“The Aleuts are in harm's way,” I wrote him. “They should be rescued.”
He cabled back, “We'll do it.”
The Coast Guard then loaded the people onto ships and brought them to Funter Bay, not far from Juneau, where I was able to photograph them settling in.
Of all the native peoples, I most enjoyed photographing the Eskimos. They fascinated me by their serenity, their acceptance of the harsh world in which they lived, and by their love for their children.
By December 7, 1941, the “date of infamy,” tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and civilian construction workers had been flown into Army bases. Alaska took on the beat and rhythm, the excitement and urgency of a boomtown. One of the teenage soldiers, caught up in the war spirit, stopped me on the street in Anchorage one day. “I'm not lonely anymore. I'm beginning to like this place. I might even come back when the war is over.”
One of the most vulnerable targets for the Japanese to attack was Dutch Harbor, where I arranged to spend several weeks. The slim, fortyish commanding Army Air Corps officer met me at the airport. “We're putting you up at my house, and I'm moving over to bachelor quarters.”
“Please don't do that,” I protested. “I don't want to put you out of your house. I can stay wherever you put nurses or women soldiers.”
“No, we want you to be very comfortable. I'm giving you my housekeeper and my two Hawaiian cooks.”
I still protested, but he waved me off.
“We do some drinking,” he said, “but nobody is allowed to drink until 5 p.m. Here, look at this.” He showed me the wristwatch on his left hand. Every number was five.
“We have only one request of you,” he continued. “Give a dinner party every night for the top brass and for the visiting VIPs. We get a lot of them here.”
Now, in Dutch Harbor, as well as in Anchorage, my base town, with the war raging, I wore out more evening gowns than I did in a lifetime at home. I was constantly writing to my mother to air-express more of my gowns and evening shoes.
Though my evenings were social events, with dinner parties and dances held at the officers' club, my days were hectic, taking photos and notes, interviewing people, and sending constant reports to Ickes. The movies I shot around the country were made into a film by the Coast Guard to train cadets for war service.
One day, I arranged with one of Alaska's best bush pilots to fly me from Anchorage to Nome. I was sitting in my office waiting for the pilot with my bags packed when my phone rang.
“This is the Army Signal Corps,” a male voice said. “We have a message for you from Secretary Ickes. We have to decode it.”
All of Ickes's messages to me were in code.
The pilot arrived breathless. “Ready? We have to take off right away!”
I shook my head, “I'm waiting for a message from the Signal Corps.”
“Sorry,” he said, “I've got other passengers rarin' to go.”
He dashed out. The next day the Anchorage Times carried the news. The pilot had flown through an Arctic storm and crashed into a mountain. All aboard were killed. I cabled Ickes, “You saved my life.”
With no hotels in the Eskimo villages, I generally found living space with the schoolteachers or the nurses. But on Kodiak Island the only space available was in the jail. I had a fairly comfortable room and was even given my own cook. The warden was awarded a dollar a day for every prisoner he rounded up. Most of them were arrested for being drunk. Early each morning the warden gave them fishing rods and released them to spend the day fishing. Nobody ever ran away. As in the gulag in Siberia, there was no place to run or hide.
In the evening, the prisoners returned with their catches and cooked their own dinner. The warden and his wife invited me to dine with them for many of my meals.
One of the most important lessons I learned in Alaska was not to fight time but to live inside of time.
Before Alaska, I was always restless. If the train from Kosciusko Street in Brooklyn was late taking me to New York University, I would pace the platform, cussing under my breath like a longshoreman. But in Alaska, what good did it do to cuss, get angry, or send my blood pressure spiking? The only way I could get in and out of a place like Kodiak Island was by ship. Instead of bashing my head against the wall of the jail, I learned to calm my restless brain and surround myself in a kind of golden bubble. It liberated me. Especially in the Eskimo villages, I had more time to live among my Eskimo friends. More time to take photos, especially of happy children wrapped around their mothers' necks and backs. More time to send reports to Ickes and letters home, and more time to read books outdoors in the twenty-hour-long days of dazzling, clear, unobstructed sunlight.
I left Kodiak for Point Hope and from there decided to move on to Point Barrow, the northernmost village in Alaska. I cabled a small airline in Anchorage to send a pilot to fly me. Weeks passed as messages dribbled in: Bad weather. Engine broken. Planes all booked. Pilot indisposed (meaning drunk).
Finally, more specific answers arrived: “See you Tuesday, weapers.” “Weapers” meant “weather permitting.” Tuesday came. No pilot. The next Tuesday came. No pilot. The third Tuesday came. Still no pilot.
Then, unannounced, a pilot appeared in a small black plane. Point Hope had a fairly good dirt airfield, but Herb Hager, a disheveled, dust-covered pilot, made a dramatic
landing on the beach. The entire village came to drag his plane up to the airfield and to say good-bye to me. Ida Susak, who cooked for me, handed me a box of emergency rations. Hager pushed the box aside.
“What kind of pilot do you think I am, traveling without rations?” he demanded.
Concerned lest I should hurt his feelings, I handed the box of food back to Ida. I looked at it longingly. It was overflowing with sandwiches. But I managed to sneak a Hershey's chocolate bar out of the box and hide it in my purse.
Next, I tried to slip the winterized sleeping bag a colonel had loaned me through the plane's door.
“Leave that junk here,” Herb said. “What kind of pilot do you think I am, traveling without a sleeping bag? I've got one right here.”
Maybe he's afraid of overloading the plane, I thought, asking Ida to return the sleeping bag to the colonel.
Finally we took off, waving good-bye. A small thermometer in his plane read eighty degrees Fahrenheit. I was happy to be wearing a light blouse and thin Army trousers. The plane was so tiny that I was forced to sit close to the pilot. We were in the air a short time when he asked me if I had a map.
“You mean you've flown this route so often you don't need a map?”
“I've never flown this route before.”
After a while, he said, “We're getting close.”
The plane began to shake. “Hold on,” he said, “we're coming down.”
The thermometer showed that the temperature had fallen to twenty degrees. He carefully landed the plane on a beach covered with snow.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“I don't know,” he said, “and I don't know where we are, but we can't be too far from Point Barrow.”
“Should we walk there?” I suggested.
“We can't. I'm wearing bedroom slippers.”
I tried to move far away from him, though there was little space. The night was interminable. I shared my bar of chocolate with him. In the morning, I decided to take a walk. I came upon a monument dedicated to Wiley Post and Will Rogers. Their plane had crashed in a fog right on this lagoon. A shiver ran down my spine.
Herb decided to try to take off again. He lightened our plane by unloading a few gadgets, took off, and made a safe landing in Point Barrow.
“The Lord sure had His arms around us,” he sang.
In Point Barrow, a group of hunters took me on a small white whaleboat to hunt walruses. The thought of killing a walrus sickened me. But I realized that these beautiful creatures provided the Eskimos with food, and oil, and with protective covering for their bodies and their tents. They were hunting not for profit but for survival. I began photographing them with my movie camera.
We were maneuvering around the ice floes when the first walrus's head emerged out of the ocean. Abraham Kippy, the leader of the group, fired a bullet, then shook his head and smiled benignly at his failure. “Missed him.”
A few minutes later, still smiling, he called out, “Another one!” He had spotted a walrus sleeping on an ice floe. One of the hunters on the boat whispered, “No noise.” They stopped the outboard engine and quickly donned white parkas to blend in with the ice. I was filming the scene while the men paddled softly. The walrus woke.
“Shoot!” Abraham ordered in a soft voice. Two hunters raised their guns. The ice floe turned red with blood. The walrus dove into the sea. One of the men called out, “He's hit!”
Another one started the motor while we chased the creature.
“Shoot again,” Abraham commanded, “but don't hit him in the head or he'll sink immediately.”
Slowly, the wounded walrus rose out of the sea. “Don't shoot,” Abraham whispered. He flung his harpoon into the walrus's body, and with a rope pulled the dying creature toward us. I was so caught up in the excitement that I continued filming long after my movie camera ran out of film. I kept reminding myself this was not killing for profit. The hunters were shouting with joy.
We towed the body to a large ice floe, stopped the boat, and climbed out. Two men with sharp knives cut through the skin and removed the blubber, then handed pieces of it to each of us. I took a few bites. It was like sinking my teeth into a chunk of fat. I worked desperately to keep it down.
After a year and a half of traveling and sending reports to Ickes, I decided it was time to go home. Back in Washington in 1942, I went to say good-bye to the secretary, thinking my assignment as a government official was over.
“Oh no,” Ickes said. “You're staying right here as my special assistant.”
He then began to drop different assignments into my lap. I grew to know his style of writing better as he asked me to draft letters for him to send and speeches for him to give concerning Alaska. Hundreds of letters flooded the department each day, most of them now from soldiers who had begun to love and understand Alaska and who wanted to homestead when the war was over. Married soldiers often wrote saying they wanted to give their children the excitement of growing up on our last frontier.
Soldiers, as well as civilians, wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, asking her the same questions about homesteading. Her office forwarded some of those letters to me, to draft her responses. That was when I learned of her passion to help everyone who wrote to her.
So many requests came to Ickes and Mrs. Roosevelt that I suggested to the secretary that I write a paperback book on Alaska to be published by the Department of the Interior and to be sent free to would-be pioneers and homesteaders.
“Do it,” he said.
Ickes wrote the introduction:
The war has rekindled the fires of curiosity about our last big land frontier.… This booklet is designed to clear away the misconceptions, to debunk the ballyhoo, and to answer some of the questions. It attempts to give a true picture of Alaska, its opportunities and its limitations. Life on the frontier is not easy, and those who go there must be ready to trade hard work for the right to build on wide horizons.
In the midst of the war, Ickes asked me to return to Alaska and the Canadian Northwest to investigate the Canadian oil project (Canol) and to report on the Alcan Highway, linking Alaska and Canada. These were newly coined words in the lexicon of oil and highways. The name of the Alcan would soon be changed to the Alaska Highway.
“I want you to go,” Ickes explained, “because you know Alaska and you know the Arctic. Nobody has given me a report yet on how the oil project and the Alcan Highway are progressing. Can you be ready to leave in twenty-four hours?”
I laughed, “What will I do with the extra twenty?”
He pressed a button for his operator. “Get me General James A. O'Connor in Edmonton, Alberta.”
“General,” he said, “I want to send my special assistant along the highway.”
I gathered that the general said something like, “Send him right up, Mr. Secretary.”
Ickes shouted, “It's not a him, it's a her.”
The general must have said what I heard so often: “We've got no bathroom facilities to take care of women. We're not letting any women drive on the highway, least of all civilian women.”
Ickes's jowls shook with laughter, “You don't know the plumbing this gal has lived with. She was in Siberia, where the outhouses were so high you needed a ladder to get up to them.”
A day later I was on a plane flying to the Canadian Northwest. General O'Connor, a jovial Army officer with a chest full of ribbons, met me at the airport in Edmonton. He shook my hand. “The politicians up here are so excited about your coming that they asked me if you will speak in the Parliament.”
The next morning, the general picked me up at my hotel and drove me to the huge Parliament building. A Canadian guard escorted me to the podium. I looked out at the audience. They were all men, some in civilian clothes, the others in Canadian Army uniforms. I decided to talk to them the way I had talked to the soldiers in the Anchorage clubhouse, telling them the stories of Alaska that had become so much a part of me. It seemed to work. They stood up and applauded. The general's com
ment made me chuckle. “To think I tried to stop you from coming.”
The next three weeks were spent with geologists, architects, Army engineers, and workers sent by three American construction companies, Bechtel, Price, and Callahan, who were already starting to build the Canol pipeline. Some of them were enthusiastic about the prospect of finding oil, but others were convinced that too much money and time had been spent without finding sufficient quantities. In the Senate, Harry Truman, then a senator chairing the Truman Investigating Committee, later denounced the Canol project as an “inexcusable boondoggle.” When I learned that Ickes agreed with Senator Truman, I asked him, “Then why did you send me to cover it?”
“I didn't want to influence you with my bias. I knew I would get your honest opinion.”
Unlike Canol, the Alaska Highway was an instrument of war and later peace, stretching 1,500 miles from Dawson Creek in British Columbia to Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a swiftly built road across which food, ammunition, and medical supplies could be trucked from our factories in the States through Canada to Alaska. It augmented the work that both our pilots and Soviet pilots were doing, flying butter and guns to the Soviet Arctic and on to our Allies in Europe. For me, it reaffirmed what Stefansson had been arguing for years, that the shortest transport routes of the world lie over the top of the globe, not around its belly.
I traveled the highway in an Army jeep driven by an affable African-American soldier named Tom. With Southern courtesy, he opened the door of his Jeep, helped me up, put my camera bag on my lap, and made space behind me for my Army knapsack, loaded with film, fresh notebooks, pens, and a small DDT bomb to protect me from diseases and hopefully from the curse of mosquitoes.
The highway began in the heart of golden prairies and then broke a path through mountains that, in the sunlight, turned soft lavender. It ambled naked and broad through birch forests that cast long, lean shadows on it. It was a road of moods, bright and inviting in the morning, a little sleepy in the hot sun of the early afternoon, and mysterious at night when you rode beneath the Northern Lights, whose curtain of colors lit up the subarctic sky.