Robert J. Casey, who has just completed a survey of the strategical situation in Alaska, provides some startling and hiterto unpublished information about pre-belligerent developments in Alaska.
By Robert J. Casey
Sitka, Alaska, Dec. 9 - The war, any Alaskan will tell you, started not Sunday morning in the Hawaiian Islands but Saturday night at Sitka. And the Alaskans will give you evidence that the first shot really was touched off a couple of months ago - and they'll make out a convincing case.
A drill barge burned Saturday night. In the channel between the town and the naval base it looked like a simple fire - one of those things you can expect around a busy construction camp. Except that it constituted a menace to navigation it didn't seem to be worth much attention from anybody save the camp fire department. So, if you gave the matter any thought at all you might have wondered at the tone of dispatches which told
about it... . Authorities feared talk about it....Authorities feared terrific damage....The military base was thought to be in danger...and - significantly - the populace of Sitka had been warned to leave the town.
You Wondered at It
You heard that over your radio and maybe you wondered - now why should a fire on a drill barge in a wide channel cause the evacuation of a town - particularly when the inhabitants, old and young and well and ill had no place to run to, except the snow-filled crevices of the mountains that rise abruptly where the pavement ends-?
Well, through the well meant hush-hush that has done nothing to keep such people as our little brown brothers from knowing what has been going on in our defense
program in Alaska, you finally get a hint of the reason. That fire wasn't anything new to Sitka. It was the third of a series, all mysterious, all big enough to threaten the destruction of a large and important part of the establishment.
The first one was a little more than two months ago. News of it over established channels to the United States has been significantly scarce.
Guard Dynamite Stores
Sitka base, one violates no military secret in announcing, has been
constructed by blowing the tops off a series of small rocky islands in the channel and linking them together. For this job large quantities of dynamite were necessary. As is the custom on projects of this kind, the stick dynamite was stored in one shed. The detonating caps were stored in another. Both, theoretically, were under military guard.
One fine night a sentry discovered smoke coming out of the cracks in the dynamite shed. He turned in an alarm. The soldiers and Marines responded and volunteer firemen from the town swarmed across on the ferry.
Everybody seems to have realized that there was danger of a blast that might blow Sitka out into the sea but, because of the separation of the explosive and the caps that might detonate it, the danger appeared to be remote. The dynamite, undisturbed, might be expected to burn out in a terrifically hot but harmless blaze.
End of Island Goes Up
Then, for no reason that anybody has so far assigned, the caps went up... so did the dynamite. So did that end of the island.
Three men were reported to have been killed in the fire and blast...
twenty-two to have been injured. Nobody volunteered to say officially that there had been sabotage. Nobody alive who might have been a competent witness as to whether or not it was an accident...
They got some plate glass up from Seattle to replace the panes knocked out in the town, diverted some of the construction crew from hard rock work to repairing the camp, built two more shacks and got another shipment of dynamite and caps. Within three weeks of the first explosion there was another one.
Army Captain Killed
The fire started in the same place and pursued the same course. An Army captain due for retirement the following day led the detail that went to put out the blaze in the dynamite shed. His wife arrived from Seattle in Juneau just in time to meet his body. Two soldiers were also killed. The number of injured never was accurately reported, because by that time official censorship was going well, but it was said to have approximated the list in the first affair.
You get the general impression that Sitka was not inclined to minimize the barge fire.
And now one of the things that every Alaskan wishes he didn't know is that the western tip of the territory is only about 800 miles from Japan.
Describes Isolation
You start to tell about the skyway that Canada built, in the interests of Pacific defense, from Edmonton to White Horse. You mention that U. S. bombers are already
slipping into the north country over this weather-free route, that the threat of any invasion from nearby Asia is rapidly being countered. Then you notice that your audience is not particularly interested.
Of Alaska's isloation from the United States, a mining engineer with whom I rode on the plane to Sitka, said:
"We are part of continental America but we are as isolated as if we were on an island somewhere west of Hawaii. Most of our supplies come in here from the outside and they all come by boat. War will stop the boats . . . and when the boats stop, we stop.
"Few people realize the tremendous distances in Alaska. Nome, for instance, is just about due north of Honolulu. In the Russian days there was a regular trade between Sitka and the Sandwich Islands and very little between Alaskan ports and
California - in point of time Seward is as far from Juneau as Seattle.
Need Road to U. S.
"Inasmuch as 90 per cent of our population lives on the coast a lot
of people are worrying about bombing; but I don't think we'll be bombed.
"But I do believe we can expect a lot of trouble from submarines. And
damage they may do to steamship lines along this coast, they are certain to put a crimp in shipping and that means that they will put a crimp in Alaska. A skyway for bombers is fine but what we need right now for civilian defense is just something that we've needed since
this peninsula became U. S. territory, a road that will give us a physical link to the United States."
Thanks to the thick hush-hush with which these rocky coasts are enveloped, nobody knows what the Navy is doing for the protection of Alaska. So you can look at a map of the shore-line from Ketchikan to Point Barrow and count the thousands of islands and bays and inlets with no official information about whether enemy submarines
might find a hiding place in these lonely nooks or not. Lacking any word of comfort from the Navy, you'd say they could.
Meanwhile, there hasn't been a plane out of Juneau bound for anywhere in the past seven days. Out in the gulf somewhere three steamships are tied up in the lee of some rocky promontory that gives protection against an 85-mile gale. Just now, at least, Alaska seems to be a lot of long, cold miles away from anywhere else.
