Bluie East Two: The WWII Air Base Abandoned in Greenland

In 1940, Germany occupied Denmark, and the U.S. stepped in to take responsibility for the defense of Greenland, Denmark's vast Arctic territory. Greenland sat on the shortest air route between North America and Europe. In 1941, the U.S. began planning a string of bases there, code-named "Bluie," the wartime code name for Greenland. Bases on the west coast were called Bluie West, and those on the east coast Bluie East. Finding a site on Greenland's rugged east coast was hard. In November 1941, a U.S. Navy expedition led by Lieutenant Frederick Crockett used dog teams to search the area around Angmagssalik, now Tasiilaq. Near a place called Ikateq, meaning "shallow water," Crockett found a flat alluvial shelf at the base of high mountains, facing a narrow strait. It was the best site available, though it was subject to extreme weather. On July 26, 1942, a supply flotilla led by the Coast Guard cutter Comanche brought construction crews to build the base. By November 1, the station was sending weather reports, and in 1943 a 5,000-foot gravel runway was completed. Bluie East Two never became the trans-Atlantic stopover it was meant to be. Iceland's Keflavík proved more useful. But it served well as an alternate airfield, a weather and navigation station, and a base for search-and-rescue missions. After the war, the base lost its purpose, and at the end of 1947 the U.S. evacuated it along with many other stations in Greenland. The agreement that allowed the bases also allowed the U.S. to dispose of equipment and facilities in Greenland after consulting Danish authorities. So the Americans left almost everything behind. The Danish government had no use for the site, and local people took what they could use. The runway remained useful for occasional flights, including supplying construction of a Cold War radar station at Kulusuk in 1958. What stayed was the debris: a crumpled steel hangar, rusted trucks and vehicles, building materials, and thousands of fuel drums. Locals came to call the rusting orange barrels "American flowers." Over the years, as the drums rusted, leaded fuel leaked into the surrounding ground and channel. Bluie East Two is one of more than 30 abandoned U.S. military sites in Greenland from World War II and the Cold War. In January 2018, Denmark agreed to fund a cleanup of some of them, committing 180 million kroner over six years. Cleanup work at Bluie East Two began in late summer 2019. A 2023 study used drones and satellite imagery to document the base's rehabilitation. Some locals had argued the ruins should stay as they were, a historic site and a draw for visitors. However much is cleared, the shelf at Ikateq will still mark the place where the U.S. built an air base in the Arctic and then walked away from it.