Greenland’s Icy Fury

Stationed at a lonely wind-pounded outpost in an isolated backwater of World War II, the nineteen men of the Greenland Ice Cap Detachment were charged with erecting a weather/rescue station on the ten-thousand-foot-high Ice Cap to serve the Polar aircraft-ferrying route to Europe and to provide vital weather data for the expanding war effort. Greenland’s Icy Fury is a lighthearted accounting of one of the least accessible and least known but most stunning parts of the globe–southeast Greenland–and its natural history, geography, geology, glaciers, and foremost, its savage weather and awesome climate. The Polar route to Europe afforded stepping stones for then-short-range aircraft, even though the landing fields were mere pinpoints in the wilderness, but hazardous flying conditions took a heavy toll of planes and airmen. Hitler’s Nazis as well as the Allies knew that Greenland’s white expanse was a virtual weather factory that played a key role in the day-to-day weather of the North Atlantic shipping lanes and the battlefields of western Europe. Ironically, few people today even realize that American troops were stationed in Greenland during World War II or what obscure role these troops played. A member of the all-volunteer Ice Cap Detachment, and a graduate geologist before the war, the author found time to look at the rocks, fjords, glaciers, and wildlife of southeast Greenland and to set down the framework for this book. Greenland’s Icy Fury is aimed at inquisitive readers who appreciate the outdoors, are curious about their world, and would enjoy decidedly offbeat bits of WWII nostalgia.