Out of the Arctic

The U.S. Army took another step in retreat from Canada's subArctic. To Winnipeg from Churchill, Manitoba's port on Hudson Bay, chugged a trainload of some 200 Army engineers, quartermasters, signal men and maintenance men. They had been holed up in dreary, chilly U.S. outposts in the far north for so long (some of them for two years) that they could be forgiven for chalking on the sides of their U.S. Pullmans: "Back To God's Country."

These men and others like them had gone into northern Canada in mid-summer 1942 to build and maintain air bases on the "Northeast Staging Route to Europe." They had manned the $1,700,000 runways, barracks and hospital at The Pas, the $9,300,000 establishment at Churchill on the west shore of Hudson Bay,* the $7,000,000 base at Southampton Island's Coral Harbor (socalled because of the tropical fossils found there). But the great air ferry route was hardly used: the route via Labrador and Iceland proved more feasible. The first job of the ten Army nurses stationed at the Churchill base was to deliver an Indian baby who was promptly nicknamed "G.I. Joe." The soldiers had time to learn how to harpoon whales from canoes. Sixteen married Canadian girls.

All U.S. personnel will be out of northern Canada by winter. Under the terms of an Ottawa-Washington agreement, the bases which cost the U.S. $90,000,000 (including the cost of the "Northwest Staging Route" to Alaska) become the property of Canada for $75,000,000.

* One reason for high cost: civilian dishwashers got $250 a month.

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