Part 1 – Before the Runways

By Jacob Caldwell, CEO of Arctic Legacy and Kenai Aviation

Introduction

I am standing on a windswept Aleutian island, staring at cracked pavement that once carried bombers into war. The wind cuts through my jacket, and I think of the men who landed here in 1942 with nothing but packs, shovels, and orders. They had no shelter and no idea how long they would last. Far to the north, in a mountain pass in the Brooks Range, an elder once told me of a winter when no one in his village could leave. He said, “If you came in the fall, you stayed until spring. There was no other way.” These are two different stories, yet they share the same problem. Both places needed a way in and a way out. Both found their answer in a strip of land carved into a runway.

Adak Before the Runway

In August of 1942, Adak was empty. The last Aleut villagers had left a century earlier, resettled closer to the sea lanes. What remained were foxes, seabirds, and volcanoes. The U.S. Army arrived not because anyone lived here but because war had come to the Aleutians. The Japanese had bombed Dutch Harbor and occupied Attu and Kiska. The Americans needed an airfield closer to the enemy. Adak, 250 miles from Kiska, was chosen.

The men who landed at Kuluk Bay stepped into a nightmare of weather. One corporal wrote in his diary, “The wind has no mercy. The rain does not stop. We dig into the sand like moles because there are no tents yet.” A storm hit the very first night. A williwaw gale ripped boats onto the beach and drove snow so thick that visibility was zero. Another soldier remembered, “I put my hand in front of my face and could not see it.”

There were no docks. Heavy equipment had to be pushed off landing craft straight into the surf. Bulldozers rolled through salt water onto black sand. Men tried to light cook stoves, but the rain snuffed them out. They ate cold rations and crawled into holes for cover. For days they lived like that, wet and exhausted. Yet in those conditions, with Japanese aircraft a short flight away, they were ordered to build a runway.

Anaktuvuk Pass Before the Runway

In the Brooks Range, far from Adak’s volcanoes, the Nunamiut people had lived for centuries as nomads. They followed the caribou herds, moving camps with the seasons. By the late 1940s, after a long famine and years of movement, a group of families chose to settle in one place. They picked a mountain pass where caribou trails converged. They called it Anaktuvuk Pass, “the place of caribou droppings.”

When they first built houses there, they were sod igloos and skin tents. An elder named Simon Paneak described it as a “hungry country.” He said, “Some winters we had little meat. We prayed for caribou to return.” The village was more than a hundred miles from the nearest road and hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital. Supplies came by dog sled or by the rare mail plane.

People remember waiting months for letters. One man told researchers, “We knew the plane might not come until spring. If someone was sick, we waited. If someone died far away, we did not hear until much later.” The sense of isolation was complete. Families endured it with patience, but they also knew change was coming. Children needed a school. Medicine needed to arrive faster. Life in the valley could not continue on dog sleds alone.

Two Places, Same Struggle

On Adak in 1942, soldiers dug into volcanic sand and prepared to build under the threat of Japanese attack. On Anaktuvuk’s tundra in the 1950s, families huddled in sod houses and waited through winters with no link to the outside. Different enemies, different pressures, but the same problem: no way in, no way out.

The solution would come in the same form. On Adak, it was steel planks laid across a drained lagoon. In Anaktuvuk, it was a bulldozer shipped in piece by piece. Two runways would rise in two of the harshest places in Alaska. One would serve bombers in a world war. The other would serve schoolchildren in a small Arctic village.

This is where their stories begin.

Next in Part 2: Breaking Ground

We will see what happened when men on Adak worked through rain and mud to lay 6,000 feet of steel matting, and when families in Anaktuvuk stood beside surveyors to clear a strip of tundra for the first school.