Why Greenland has been a US military stronghold since the Second World War

This article appeared in History of War magazine issue 146.

In May 1939, the US Senate debated a proposal to purchase the territory of Greenland from Denmark. The War Department was consulted, but ultimately vetoed the project based on its conclusion that the territory lacked suitable locations to build facilities for aviation and naval forces.

This event was one of a series of historical attempts to purchase the island stretching back to 1867.

Within the first week of his second term as President of the United States, Donald Trump was energising the mainstream media by declaring his intention to buy Greenland, a scheme that was met with hostility from the Danes.

While the Senate of 1939 debated from a viewpoint of political expediency, the Trump administration’s perspective was apparently more about economic than political benefit. Yet this search for economic gain has a historical precedent rooted in the United States’ wartime requirement for aluminium to feed its burgeoning aircraft industry.

By 1943 America was the world’s largest producer of aluminium with an output of 43 percent of global production. Aluminium is manufactured by refining bauxite ore into alumina, which is then smelted into pure aluminium through an electrolytic process that requires large quantities of the mineral cryolite.

Cryolite is a rare mineral of the sodium group with small deposits found in Spain, the United States and Canada; however, until the late 1980s the largest seams of cryolite anywhere in the world were located in western Greenland.

Greenland is situated in the Western Hemisphere which under the terms of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Neutrality Act of November 1939 was protected by the policy of “joint defence of the Western Hemisphere”.

On 9 April 1940, the day that Denmark fell to the Nazi war machine, the Danish envoy to the United States, Henrik Kauffmann, in violation of his diplomatic status, signed an agreement authorising the US to act as defenders of Greenland and build military installations there.

American military investment in the autonomous Danish territory was not entirely based on altruism as they eyed the seemingly endless source of cryolite being excavated from the mine at Ivigtut on Greenland’s southwest coast.

A formal request for US assistance endorsed the political agreement on 3 May and an invitation to establish a consulate was accepted, and the United States Coast Guard (USCG) vessel Comanche sailed for Ivigtut with the newly minted US consul and staff onboard.

In June 1940 the USCG icebreaker Northland was also ordered to Greenland under the command of Edward ‘Iceberg’ Smith and continued sailing to and from Greenland in support of the US mission there.

In May 1940 en route to the island, Northland found itself caught up in the death ride of the German battleship Bismarck as it was attacked by aircraft from the British carrier HMS Victorious. Smith reported with typical understatement: “It is fortunate that there were no accidents and mistaken identities when all parties were more or less on a hair trigger.”

Much of Western Europe’s weather originates in Greenland, drifting east on Katabatic winds, and Danish and Norwegian meteorologists had built weather stations on Greenland’s mainly uninhabited east coast to monitor and forecast conditions, transmitting the resulting data.

After occupying Norway and Denmark, the Nazi authorities saw an opportunity to infiltrate the territory. As a result, German and Quisling personnel entered into the weather stations during the traditional summer rotation of staff, simultaneously establishing a small military presence.

The first US air base, designated Bluie West One, was under construction in July 1941, becoming Greenland Bases Command and the HQ of the US Army Air Corps and the USCG Greenland Patrol.

However, the facilities were rapidly relocated to the more suitable airstrip and weather station 30 miles (48km) north of the Arctic Circle at Sondre Stromfjord.

US personnel lived a monotonous existence, contact with the islands’ population being strictly forbidden, exemplified by reassurances to the American public by US Consul James Penfield: “Our Arctic soldiers live in model camps in a womanless world,” going on to proudly extol the available facilities: “Like other American camps, this one boasts a motion picture theatre, barber shop and an excellent library.”

There had been some sporadic military activity, with the British-controlled free Norwegian gunboat Fridthof Nansen boarding and capturing the German-controlled trawler Vesle Kari and taking prisoner the men at the weather station at Myggbukta, but there appears to have been an element of ‘live and let live’ between the opposing forces.

The harsh weather conditions of Greenland’s northeast coast enabled naval access for three summer months of the year, prompting Smith to create the Sledge Patrol in August 1941 to observe German weather stations and their personnel. Sledge Patrol was crewed by Danish meteorologists, hunters and trappers operating along a 400-mile (645km) stretch of the northeast coast.

Greenland’s southwest was surveyed by teams from the USCG cutter Cayuga, supported by Northland’s seaplane, and suitable air base sites at Narsarsuak and Kipisako were chosen for expansion.

On 9 April 1941 the US Secretary of State and Kauffmann signed an agreement conferring American protectorate status on Greenland and the US Navy took over operational control of the area from the coastguard.

After American (and therefore Greenland’s) entry into the war in December 1941, German military personnel were sent to the northeast coast to reestablish weather stations and provide protection for them. Yet they were confined to the east by rapid US expansion which brought storage depots, artillery positions and further ports and air bases.

During the early years of the conflict, German U-boat operations had wrought havoc with Allied shipping. The convoys plying their way across the Atlantic supplying Britain and the Soviet Union suffered grievous losses to the Kriegsmarine’s wolf packs, losses which were mitigated to an extent by Royal Air Force Coastal Command patrols.

The lack of range of Coastal Command aircraft left an undefended area known as the Mid-Atlantic Gap, rendering merchant shipping and their escorts without air cover and vulnerable to attack. Greenland’s air bases plugged this gap by mid-1943 and Allied shipping losses decreased correspondingly.

Cryolite exports to Canada, USA and Portugal reinvigorated the national economy and assured the success of the US military aviation industry which produced over 50,000 aluminium-skinned aircraft annually throughout the Second World War.

The cryolite mine at Ivigtut ceased operations in 1987, but the fact that Greenland continues to be rich in mineral deposits, including the largest sources of rare earth elements outside China, will continue to make it an attractive proposition for the US.

This article originally appeared in History of War magazine issue 146. Click here to subscribe to the magazine and save on the cover price!