Canada and the United States rapidly are pushing to completion a vast airport construction program which could be used in a "bridge of planes" to Russia over the "top of the world" via Alaska.
Flying from the eastern part of the United States to northern Alaska, across Canada, this correspondent saw the route which planes to Russia could follow. Airfields are in preparations, some of them virtually completed, capable of handling a huge volume of planes of every type.
American bombers already have tried out the route, with various alternative by-passes, and are flying regularly to Alaska by the so-called "inland valley" to avoid Pacific coastal storms.
Canada has allocated $9,000,000 for four airports along this route. This air route through Canada is of tremendous value now to the United States in that it would establish air links between this country, Alaska, Asia and Europe. After the war commercial planes may fly "over the top" to Japan and China. It is 4000 miles shorter that way than across the Pacific by way of San Francisco.
There are four great airports in western Canada, all of them many miles from major centers of population. The biggest, the farthest north, and the most important is at Whitehorse, in the Yukon territory. It is an hour's flight from Juneau, and on a
direct line with Fairbanks and Nome. Here great runways are being completed, and great stores of gasoline are being brought in by the White Pass and Yukon railway along the mountainous roadbed from the Alaskan port of Skagway.
A few hundred miles south is Watson Lake, where an airport is being hewed out of the wilderness, hundreds of miles from the nearest civilized settlement. The gravel runways already are capable of handling huge American bombers and have done so in increasing numbers in recent weeks. Early this year an expedition of tractors, bulldozers, caterpillars, a sawmill on wheels and workmen crashed and cut their way through 350
miles of wilderness and ice to reach Watson Lake, to build that airport.
At Fort Nelson a similar heroic job of airport building has been gotten well underway in a record short time. It is similarly situated in the wilderness, where gasoline, until recently, has been brought in entirely by air. Farther south is Fort St. John, the jumping-off place between civilization and wilderness. Here, too, groundwork for an airport has been constructed. Farther south the territory of Yukon ends and the
province of Alberta begins.
Grande Prairie and Edmonton, Alberta, maintain sizeable airports for both Canadian and American use. There are Canadian Royal Air Force training stations at both these places. From Edmonton it is an easy hop to Great Falls, Mont.
This route, avoiding high mountains, skirting the Rockies, and favored by generally good
weather could be used by short-range fighter planes as well as by long-range bombers. Once in Alaska, the planes may follow several routes to Nome, and thence across to Siberia. Russians have disclosed the existence of secret landing fields at sufficiently frequent
intervals across Siberia to enable them to reach Moscow in short-range planes.
Bombers, of course, which are understood reliably already to have begun to stream into Russia by this route, have a much easier time of it. They can follow either the inland way or go by the coast route from Seattle to Prince George, to Juneau, where adequate airports are available or are under construction. This is the route
usually followed by commercial air lines.
Canadian aviation officials, even before the war, had surveyed the possibility of this over-the-top road to Moscow and to Tokyo. Preliminary plans for its accomplishment were held in abeyance until Russia entered the war.
