Civilisation is coming to the tractless wastes of Canada's frozen north as a result of the war and the strategic importance of Alaska as a springboard to Japan. The John the Baptists of this new way of life are the youngsters of the Canadian and United States Air Forces, who are battling with some of the worst flying conditions in the world to ferry vital supplies and equipment to the Arctic Circle and beyond.
Men of the Royal Canadian Air Force have just finished flying us over the country from which the eastern Pacific push against Tojo will be launched. From Vancouver to Nome, from Edmonton to the Arctic Ocean, we have seen landing strips and giant runways
where there was nothing when war begun. We have seen the Alaska Highway, which compares with Australia's north-south road as one of the great engineering feats of this war.
This is a tough country. It isn't a place for pansies. It may lack some of the refined horrors of the New Guinea jungles, but it is a grim unfriendly refrigerator where a man signs his death warrant if he makes a mistake.
NEW AND RAW.
You start out from Vancouver on a fine clear morning and buck northward over the mountains of Vancouver Island, up to a seaplane base where gaint flying boats
waddle down the runways into the water like overgrown ducks. Everything here is new and raw. Tractors are still hauling huge logs from the bush and dragging out roots. All along this coast there are stations like this, where handfuls of men are living in complete isolation for months on end, flying coastal patrols and waiting for the day when they'll get a signal to join the procession northward.
Farther to the north, on a coastal island, bulldozers have nudged into the denseness of the pines to tear out a space for an emergency landing field, with steel strips running along the beach and control towers and sleeping quarters buried in the bush at the back. A cross strip of steel runs from the main tarmac through sandhills to the bush clearing. Men are still working widening the breach in these sandhills. Today it is so narrow that as a DC-3 lumbers through it has a clearance of only a couple of feet at each wingtip.
Across to the water to the north the mountains of Alaska loom clear and coldly blue. Bleak winds from the Arctic howl across the sandhills day and night, and
eastward lie the Canadian Rockies.
Eastward is our route, high over water cold and uninviting, a thick cloud bank stretching northward, fog whipping past the plane windows, temperatures dropping until all aboard have greatcoats on, and feet beat on the floor for warmth. The aircraft is climbing steadily. Prince Rupert on the coast now far behind, mountains of snow and ice ahead, the highest in North America. Names all around tell of the history of this country, the Spanish navigators who skirted the coast before and after Captain Cook, names of Indians and Hudson Bay outposts, names of places and trails that became bywords in the days of the Yukon goldrush - Quatsino Sound, Caamaano Sound, Prince George and Fort St. John, Francois Lake, Hudson Hope and Whitehorse - French and Indian and English names jostling each other over the map, telling a story of the racial strife and national jealousies that marked Canada's early history.
VIOLENT WIND CURRENTS.
Over the Rockies, the planes follow the river valleys - much as the Parers and others who opened up New Guinea did - to avoid climbing over the highest peaks.
We roar through canyons that have been carved down the ages by mountain torrents rushing seaward. The sheer walls, bare of all vegetation near their peaks, seem close enough to take a wing tip off. Violent air currents hurl us madly up and down and around, until baggage in the tail is a hopeless jumble and everyone aboard is hanging on for dear life.
Everywhere are the pines, their branches bowed under the weight of snow, looking like the mass product of some crazy maker of toy Christmas trees. Far below in the valleys we see glaciers whose lower reaches are just beginning to thaw, and lakes still
frozen in solid masses of ice. Through these treacherous canyons and over these frozen ranges the Royal Canadian Air Force is flying daily, bashing against head winds of gale force, dodging blizzards and fog and bad weather. Without these men, and these air bases, the north could never have been held, the Allies could never never have won back the Aleutians, the Great Alaska Highway, the artery through which Allied men and machines will one day be pumped into Japan, could never have been built.
Flying this country you land at every opportunity to refuel. Bad weather makes reaching your ultimate goal a gamble, and frequently after half-a-day's flying pilots have to retrace their steps because of fog or bad visibility. Ceilings of 500 feet are the rule rather than the exception.
In the heart of the Rockies, we drop down to look at another air base which is one of the links in the chain that will eventually strangle Japan. Then more awe-inspiring mountains, sweeping out of sight on both sides in a frozen panorama reminiscent of mid-winter Kosciusko expanded to Gargantuan proportions. We dine at Prince George, the first visitors to use the new Air Force officers' mess, opened only that day. By nine o'clock at night, still broad daylight and the sun an hour from setting, we reach
Fort St John, in the eastern foothills of the Rockies.
This is the heart of the Peace River country, North America's finest wheat growing area. Bush fires raging for miles around the station provide a cortrast to the cold and misery of the mountains. Here at Fort St. John we are on the Alaska Highway, which starts at Dawson Creek, 50 miles south, and runs northward through Whitehorse to Fairbanks. Fort St. John was a fur trading post - it still is - a typical snow country town, with frame buildings and wooden sidewalks like outsize duckboards.
The 350 people here depend for a living mainly on furs and trading with the drivers of the great road convoys that thunder along the highway every few hours. The
local paper deals largely with trapping and trading activities, reports that the last of the ice went out of the Tannana River at Fairbanks at 2.08 hours May 4, and that 125,000 dollars was bet on the event by the local punters.
BUSH PILOT PIONEERS.
All this country was pioneered for aviation by Canada's famous bush pilots, who literally lifted their crazy crates over these forests and mountains long before these tremendous aviation potentialities were realised generally. The pilot of our plane, Flight-Lieut. Lougheed - one of the finesttransport pilots in the RCAF - was a bush pilot for years before the war. Another officer we met at Fort St. John had spent most
of his life as a bush pilot. Many of the RCAF commanding officers of stations in the Northwest are men who knew the Yukon and northern British Columbia like the backs of their hands from flying float planes and ski planes with freight. and passengers before the war. One of them we met has 2000 hours in his logbook, but had never landed on anything but floats or skis until a few days ago. The Air Officer Commanding the entire Pacific Coast, Air Vice Marshal Stevenson, flew bush fire patrols for most of the years between his Royal
Flying Corps days in the last war and the outbreak of this war.
Seeing the fighters, bombers and transport planes roaring into the north today, it is difficult to realise that it is only 16 years since the first pilot flew over the "Barren Lands" of the North-west.
