Alaska: Airman's Theater

BACKGROUND FOR WAR

Just ahead of the winter freeze-up, the broad-bottomed barges cast off from Nome's weather-beaten docks and tagged southward behind their tugs toward the Bering Sea. Townsmen ashore watched the cargoes of Air Force trucks, black oil drums and crated airplane parts disappear into the blue distance. The Air Force was leaving Nome, lock, stock & barrel. On the plains east of the city, Marks Air Force Base--once the hub of several satellite fields and home for 10.000 World War II troops--was deserted save for its housekeepers and the solitary comings & goings of commercial airliners. The little (pop. 1,852) Alaskan coastal city, just under 30 jet-driven minutes from Siberian fighter outposts, last week found herself 500 miles out in front of the new U.S. defensive position.

Nome had company in her shivery loneliness. All the way across the Aleutian chain, most of the old World War II air bases were deserted, their torn Quonsets flapping and creaking before the storms. South toward the States, on the foggy, mountainous coastal strip--never much good for air bases--the last detachments of troops had been moved out of Ketchikan and Sitka, and out of Juneau, the capital of the territory. Under the armed forces' new strategy for defending Alaska, the U.S. was coiling its strength--its winterized jet fighters, its cadres of weather-wise pilots and its supporting Army troops--into one tight defense net in the Alaskan heart.

Road Fed & Ice Free. The heartland is a 500-mile-long loop of sea, plain and jagged mountain, notable because--in Alaska's trackless central land mass--it is stitched together by year-round transportation. It begins in the southwest at the island naval base of Kodiak, encompasses the ice-free ports of Seward and Whittier, fans up along the 471-mile Alaska Railroad, and there hooks on to the Alaska (Alcan) Highway, last segment of the 2,350-mile overland route from the U.S.

Here, and only here, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had decided, could the U.S. build a base that 1) could be supplied through the paralyzing winters, 2) would be strong enough to defend itself, 3) would be central enough to defend Alaska against attack. In any future world war, Alaska would be a prize in transpolar air warfare. Here the U.S. would first intercept Russian planes curving eastward out of the Chukotsk bases (where the Soviets have been building up fuel supplies), bound for such atom-worthy targets as the Hanford plutonium plant in eastern Washington, or the West Coast aircraft plants--or possibly industrial targets in the upper Midwest. Offensively, Alaska was a strategic refueling point for transpolar B-36s.

Non-Global War. Why, then, was the U.S. falling back to Alaska's inner core? It had been different in World War II. The Japanese, landing on Attu and Kiska, had tied up ten U.S. divisions. The Navy, hard-pressed at the crucial battle of Midway, had nonetheless spared five cruisers, 13 destroyers and six submarines to defend the big peninsula against a diversionary raid. Air bases were strewn along the coast and down the Aleutians at enormous cost: in 1942 the Army diverted desert-camouflaged planes intended for Africa to defend the very areas where the U.S. was now closing out bases.

The answer was that the Joint Chiefs had taken a second look at Alaska and this time had seen it through airmen's eyes. To fireside strategists, equipped with an armchair and a globe, the Aleutians might look like neat steppingstones from Asia up to the North American continent's front door, islands to be defended one by one. But the steppingstones had to be seen. The globe, for instance, did not show the masses of empty tundra stretching inland from the western coast like sloshy, moldy pudding. No map could hint the subzero temperatures that could cripple an army, taunt it with frostbite, hold it to a mile-a-day advance through roadless mountains and plains.

Alaska is a battleground for airmen, the Joint Chiefs decided; in 1947, it turned command of the theater over to the Air Force. The primary enemy thus became enemy airplanes, the primary defensive position, U.S. air bases. Let Russia or anyone else slip ground troops--airborne or seaborne--into such "islands of tundra" as Nome or Point Barrow, said the airmen, and you could isolate them like the mighty Japanese bases of Truk and Rabaul were isolated in the Pacific war. You would bomb the planes and shelters and leave them all shivering in the cold with no place to march to. Don't make U.S. airplanes vulnerable by scattering them through the wilderness, they said. Let them range from bases in the heartland.

Man of Practice. The theory seemed bold and simple. The complexities in carrying it out fell to a wiry, weather-beaten Air Force Lieutenant General named William E. Kepner, commander in chief of Alaska (CINCAL). Bill Kepner ran his taut command from a birch-walled office on the first floor of a thick, concrete command center at Anchorage. Around town it was known as "The Kremlin," much to his distaste ("There is nothing Russian in my command; I know of no Kremlin in it," says he gruffly).

At 57, Airman Kepner was remarkably well fitted to be top boss in a crucial tri-service operation. As a youngster he had done a hitch in the Marines, later had marched with the Army infantry on the Mexican border. In 1917, he was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant in the cavalry, fought through the toughest land battles of World War I in France and won a D.S.C. for leading a patrol into a German machine-gun nest. Between wars he became an Army expert on ballooning (in 1934 got to 60,613 feet in the Explorer I before she ripped apart), was subsequently trained in airships by the Navy. Also a topflight airplane pilot, in World War II he first commanded a fighter outfit in Europe, then became boss of a bombardment division. Even his knowledge of the atom bomb is intimate: he was deputy commander for all Army and Navy aviation at Operation Crossroads, the Bikini bomb test.

The Heartbeat. The beat of Bill Kepner's heartland is the take-off roar of his F80 Shooting Stars, F-82s and his all-weather F-94's based at his three key airfields. Big, sprawling Elmendorf Air Force Base lies next to Kepner's "Kremlin" at Anchorage. Ladd's runways mark the flat, far-northern Tanana plain just south of the Yukon River. Lonely, bleak Eielson, 26 miles southeast of Fairbanks, is the home of the weather reconnaissance B-29s that regularly fly the "Ptarmigan hops" to the pole (TIME, Oct. 9). Eielson, with the world's longest (14,600 feet) runways, may one day have another chore: handling B-36s shunting over the pole on short notice.

Concentration in Alaska's heartland carries one big risk: any potential enemy could more easily hit and wipe out the entire U.S. strength on one darting surprise raid. "Alaska is a one-shot deal," said Kepner's predecessor as CINCAL, Lieut. General Nathan Twining. "We have to be prepared to meet a surprise attack the first time or not at all. We won't have a second chance."

The Defensive. Bill Kepner counts on a thin forward net of Eskimo fishermen and coast watchers, advance weather stations, his own scattered auxiliary air bases, and his sketchy radar outposts to give him a few minutes warning. His ready-duty fighters can scramble to take off in as little as three minutes--no easy feat in the heavy cold of Alaskan winter, where both plane and fuel must be carefully preheated. (According to legend, the best Arctic ground crewman is the one who warms a blowtorch in his hut so he can light the torch to warm the preheater, which preheats the plane.)

Once warned, Bill Kepner's jet fighters can range well out over the Alaskan coast. But warnings are far from certain. In a mock attack last September, "aggressor" aircraft swept through gaping radar holes with little difficulty, theoretically strafed Alaskan bases for 20 minutes before the air-raid sirens went off.

On the Ground. The Army's prime job in Alaska is to defend airfields, not land masses. Kepner has the tough, trained 4th Infantry Regiment as the nucleus of his ground strength, and a meager assortment of quadruple .50-caliber machine guns, 40-and 90-mm. antiaircraft batteries. In any or all of its aspects, ground fighting is a brutal, fearful business in the winter cold.

Trucks, guns and tanks can be winterized to work at 50DEG below zero, although sometimes a sound-looking tire will collapse with a frozen crunch as the truck begins to roll. The bursts of ordinary bombs and shells are smothered in the deep snow. (The Army will soon try out proximity fuses for subarctic use.) At 50 below, a soldier is only 10% efficient. At minus 52, he behaves like a battle shock case: his eyes glaze and he wanders in aimless circles.

Cold Facts. Kepner needs more soldiers, more planes, more guns and more radar to fend off any "one-shot deal." That, like everything else in Alaska, is more difficult than it sounds. The Pentagon can't send more people until there is more housing. Already at lonely Eielson, troops are living in portable Fiberglas and canvas shelters. At Fort Richardson, 1,100 men are crammed into a new 500-man barracks; officers and noncoms with families live in squalid hovels, pay extortionate rents. The Air Force had long had to beg Congress for its Alaskan housing money. Now costs are enormous: a prefab house that would cost $9,800 in the U.S. costs $50,000 by the time it is freighted to Alaska from Seattle and erected at the going wages of the territory's high-priced carpenters and plumbers.

Last spring, Ike Eisenhower told Congress that Alaskan defenses were in no shape to meet the potentialities of war. Kepner, for all of his awareness of what his command lacks, professes not to be so gloomy. "If the enemy invades, we'll hand him quite a jolt," he says laconically.

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