A mortal threat to America from Japan, inspired Canada to build the series of airfields north to Alaska known as the Northwest Staging Route. The NWSR would at least get some defense material north, and it established a rough path for the land route to come—the Alaska Highway.
By 1943 the Japanese, permanently on the defensive after the naval battle at Midway decimated their carrier fleet, ceased to be a mortal threat to Alaska. In Europe, though, Hitler had long since unleashed Operation Barbarossa, a massive attack on the Soviet Union. In the beginning the disorganized and under-equipped Russians couldn’t offer much resistance, but winter came to their rescue. Winter didn’t turn the Germans back but that first winter stopped them temporarily.
Link to another story “Canada Went to War Early”
Allied leaders, Roosevelt and Churchill, didn’t care much for Stalin and his Soviet Union. But in a crisis, the enemy of their enemy was their friend. The Soviet army faced three German armies across a massive front, Germany’s only real opposition. But without massive resupply, especially warplanes, the Soviets would crumble.
“The Arsenal of Democracy” the United States could churn out warplanes. Under Lend Lease they would ‘sell’ them to the Soviets, worry about getting paid later. But getting them from the United States to the Soviets on Hitler’s Eastern Front posed a problem. The direct route from the United States to the Soviet defenders crossed the Atlantic and the heart of Hitler’s empire.
Canada’s Northwest Staging Route offered a solution. If pilots couldn’t get planes around the world, they could get them over the top. American pilots flew the bombers and fighters from plants in the lower 48 up to Edmonton, Alberta and then on up Canada’s string of airfields to Fairbanks and finally to Nome. Russian pilots would take them there, fly them over the narrow Bering Strait and on across the vastness of Siberia to where they could pound the German armies besieging Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad.
Ironically the Northwest Staging Route did more to win the war than the Alaska Highway. The Highway remained critical, but primarily because it gave the Canadians better access. Canada worked on the NWSR throughout the war; ran telephone lines between the airfields, improved radio communication, enlarged runways…
Fred Spackman worked on the airfields of the NWSR throughout the war, left many photographs to his daughter who graciously shared them with us. Link to the Northwest Staging Route group on Facebook