Greenland and the United States

A relationship forged in war

Greenland, the world’s largest island, located largely beyond the Arctic Circle, is not a place that often comes up in discussions of World War II. And yet, while most of it is a frozen wasteland with a total wartime population of less than 20,000 (over twice that today), it played an easily overlooked yet strategic role in Allied victory. Thousands of American soldiers and coast guardsman served in Greenland during the war. With Greenland making regular appearances on the news and in public discourse these days, we saw it fit to provide a historical overview of the island and its relations with the United States during the war.

Greenland was a colony of the Kingdom of Denmark before the war. It was tightly controlled by the Danish government, with local administrative powers concentrated in the hands of two landsfogeder, governors, one for North and one for South Greenland. The population of 18,000 indigenous Greenlandic Inuit and 400 Danes was effectively cut off from the rest of the world. 

Nazi Germany invaded neutral Denmark and Norway (The German Invasion of Norway) on April 9, 1940, to secure a safe shipping route for steel bought from Sweden. Denmark fell quickly, and while it ostensibly remained a neutral country, its new government, installed by the Third Reich, was a Nazi puppet. With no clear protector and several powers eyeing the island, the future of Greenland was thrown into question.

An ore worth fighting over

Greenland had one strategically important natural resource: cryolite. Cryolite, “the ice that does not melt in summer” as the Inuit called it, is a white ore that was used by the indigenous people to wash their hides; according to some sources, they also put it in their tobacco. More importantly to the belligerent nations, it was also critical for aluminum processing, and therefore aircraft construction. The small mining colony of Ivigtut (modern spelling Ivittuut) in South Greenland held the world’s largest cryolite deposit, and the only one accessible by surface quarrying. Most of the world’s cryolite reserves are now gone and the substance has been replaced by synthetic cryolite in industrial use, but back in 1940, Ivigtut put Greenland on the map for any nation that wanted to build warplanes. 

An island left adrift

The nation that was most likely to try to conquer Greenland for the cryolite was not, in fact, Germany. It had little hope of sneaking an invasion fleet past Britain and the Royal Navy, let alone keep an occupation force supplied and ship the cryolite back to Europe. A far more likely invader was Canada. Canada was building aircraft for the British war effort and could have used the cryolite, and it was also geographically well-situated for an occupation.

The Greenlanders were worried about a Canadian occupation for two reasons. The first was that a Canadian presence and the Canadian extraction of cryolite would have dragged Greenland into the war and made it a target for German naval or bombing raids. The second reason was the presence of Free Norwegian forces (that fled the country and were now fighting under British control) in Canada. In the past, Norway laid claims on parts of Greenland, and was, in fact, operating weather stations along Greenland’s eastern coast. If Canada invaded Greenland, some or most of the occupation forces might have been Norwegians and might have refused to relinquish control of the land after the war. 

Another interested power was the United States. The Monroe Doctrine, first articulated by President James Monroe in 1823, declared that the entire Western Hemisphere was in the U.S.’s sphere of influence, and that the U.S. would not tolerate intervention into the affairs of the Americas by outside power. Now that Denmark had fallen to Germany but there were no German boots on Greenlandic soil, Greenland arguably belonged in the sphere of influence. President Roosevelt sympathized with the British cause, but the U.S. was still formally neutral in the war, and allowing Canada, a part of the British Empire, to invade Greenland would have violated the Monroe Doctrine.

Canada began mobilizing a task force to seize the cryolite mine days after the German invasion of Denmark, but stood down after a warning issued by Roosevelt in late April. (The British occupation of Iceland, which was in personal union with Denmark, proceeded without American interference.)

Aligned with America

Three men found themselves in the middle of these conflicting interests: the Greenlandic governors Eske Brun and Aksel Svane, and Denmark’s ambassador to the U.S., Henrik Kauffmann. Kauffmann was the first Danish envoy to declare that he could not act on orders from the occupied Danish government. He established the American Greenland Commission in late April 1940, funded largely by cryolite exports, to help Greenland the committee members included two former U.S. ambassadors to Denmark and Marie Peary Stafford, the Greenland-born daughter of famous American Arctic explorer Robert Peary. Stafford started lobbying for the construction of American military bases in Greenland for security and protection.

(On a brief note regarding early contact between the U.S. and Greenland, Stafford’s father, Robert Peary, convinced six native Greenlanders to go with him to New York in 1894. Four of them died to diseases in a few months. Peary also removed three huge chunks of meteoric iron from Greenland as trophies, the largest of which weighs 34 tons and is on display at the American Museum of Natural History today.)

Meanwhile, determined to keep Greenland away from the Nazis, the governors invoked an emergency clause from a 1925 law on how Greenland was to be ruled. The law made the vaguely define provision that the governors may, in exceptional cases, “take such measures as the people’s best interests may require.” Brun and Svane decided this entitled them to cut links with the Danish government and act as a sovereign nation. Orders from the puppet government in Copenhagen through radio or mail were quietly ignored. 

A joint meeting of the provincial council of North and South Greenland was held in May 1940 where the governors sought and received the councils’ support. At the end, the meeting wrote and sent two statements. One was for King Christian X of Denmark (Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown – Part I), expressing regret over the situation. The other was for U.S. President Roosevelt with a message of friendship.

Securing the cryolite

Acting on the Greenlandic requests for help and pursuing the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. Treasury Department, the home department of the Coast Guard at the time, sent USCGC Comanche and four other cutters, to Greenland with a team to establish a provisional U.S. consulate in Godthaab (present day Nuuk, Greenland’s capital). Meanwhile, USCGC Campbell was dispatched to Ivigtut to secure the mine with three-inch deck guns stripped from the ship and the USCGC Northland, eight Lewis machine guns and 50 Springfield rifles. The Coast Guard was uniquely suited for service around Greenland: it had been participating in the International Ice Patrol, an organization monitoring Arctic iceberg presence, since 1914. Consequently, they had both the training and the ships needed to operate in the icy waters of Greenland.

An outright invasion or raid by Germany (or Britain or Canada) was not the only concern; there was also the possibility of pro-Nazi European workers sabotaging the mining operation. The Coast Guard wanted to guard the mine with its own men, but could not do so without violating Greenland’s formal neutrality. In July, three men of the Campbell’s crew were recruited for a secret assignment, and others followed later. The men were voluntarily discharged from the Coast Guard and simultaneously hired as “civilian” security guards by the mining company on one-year contracts. They were given double their Coast Guard pay as well as housing and necessities, and a hefty bonus. A verbal agreement also promised them a promotion, a choice of next duty station and other benefits if they re-enlisted with the Coast Guard after their civilian contract was up. 

The mining of strategically important cryolite continued undisturbed, even though synthetic cryolite began to spread a few years later, still during the war. The mine was eventually shut down in 1987.

Flyover country

In March 1941, the Lend-Lease Act came into effect, and the U.S. started supplying Britain with war supplies. The convoys traveled across the icy waters of the North Atlantic, and were constantly hunted by German U-boats. An area of particular concern was the “Mid-Atlantic gap”, a region that was too far east to be patrolled by anti-submarine planes taking off from the American continent, and too far west from Britain, allowing U-boats to operate without threat from the air. Britain and Canada started pressing for the construction of an airfield near the southern tip of Greenland from where aircraft could “close the gap.” Rather than allowing foreign interference, the U.S. decide to construct its own airfields. Over a dozen “Bluie” stations (the U.S. codename for Greenland) were established along the coasts over time, including two air bases, several airfields and numerous radio and weather stations. The most famous base was Bluie West One (Narsarsuaq Airport today), which was a stopover point for the Lend-Lease aircraft as well as the heavy bombers and long-range P-38 (Like Lightning from a Clear Sky) and P-39 fighters of the Eighth Air Force on their way from America to Europe. In the end, the job of closing the Mid-Atlantic gap was accomplished not so much by these bases, but by the use of extremely long-ranged B-25 Liberators and the construction of more escort carriers.

Of course, the extreme weather conditions and great distance made flights dangerous even with the aid of such stations. The most famous example of the danger was the fate of the “lost squadron,” two B-17 Flying Fortresses (The B-17 Flying Fortress) and six P-38s, which ran out of fuel, had to make an emergency landing, and were eventually swallowed up by the ice. One Lightning, “Glacier Girl,” was recovered in 1992 and restored to flying condition.

American bases on Greenland’s soil

On April 9, 1941, the first anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Denmark, ambassador Kauffmann, acting “on behalf of the King of Denmark,” signed an agreement with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The agreement made Greenland a protectorate of the United States, and extended the eastern limit of the Neutrality Zone to between Greenland and Iceland. Once the puppet government of Denmark learned of this, Kauffmann was stripped of rank and tried in absentia for high treason. Several consuls and an ambassador who spoke up in his defense were dismissed. Kauffmann’s sentence was revoked as one of the first actions of the new Danish Parliament after the country’s liberation, and he earned the nickname “the King of Greenland” for his independent-minded actions during the war. Kauffmann’s treaty was updated in the early 1950s and remains to this day the legal basis for the U.S. operating military bases and stationing troops in Greenland. 

With the American bases in Greenland ready, local Coast Guard operations were placed under Navy command. Two units were established specifically for service in Greenland: the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Greenland Bases Command, and the Coast Guard’s Greenland Patrol. 

Our article will continue with Greenland’s role in the “weather war” and the history of American military presence in Greenland during the Cold War.