Latest news with #GretchenHeefner
Spectator
4 days ago
- Science
- Spectator
How the US military became world experts on the environment
In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria's for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North Africa where hot and dry conditions were assumed to persist throughout the year. Men froze half to death, even as their digging equipment foundered in winter mud. Sand, Snow and Stardust is the story of how the US military shed its ignorance and, by harnessing logistical intelligence and environmental knowledge, turned America into a global superpower. Before the second world war the US operated just 14 overseas military bases. By 1960 its 'leasehold empire' of more than 1,000 bases webbed the Earth and extended its influence over even the most extreme environments. In Greenland during the Cold War, bizarrely named bases proliferated across the landscape: SnoComp and Dogsled, Crystal Party and Snowman; Camp Fistclench, Camp Redrocks and Camp Century. It was an effort that was horribly wasteful and often wrong-headed; yet, in the final analysis, it was overwhelmingly successful, at least in turning a glacial valley in Greenland into a modern base that has been in operation since 1952. (In 2023 Camp Century was renamed Pituffik and given a new mission as a base for the US Space Force.) So here's the paradox that exercises Gretchen Heefner, a historian at Northwestern University, Illinois: the effort to establish military bases in extreme environments – laying airstrips across deserts and snowfields, anchoring radar stations into permafrost and pure ice – did evident and lasting harm to those environments; but it also left us with much better knowledge of how Earth environments tick.
Wall Street Journal
30-04-2025
- Science
- Wall Street Journal
‘Sand, Snow, and Stardust' Review: When the Battlefield Fights Back
When Allied troops landed in North Africa in November 1942, they expected blistering heat and endless sand. What they found was thigh-deep mud, torrential rains and bitterly cold temperatures. If, as they say, no battle plan survives first contact, the Allies' first defeat was at the hands of the weather. 'It was hard to square what the GIs had been told with the reality they found on the ground,' writes Gretchen Heefner in 'Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How U.S. Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments.' Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt III, the son of President Theodore Roosevelt, 'openly mocked pamphlets that had promised sunshine and warmth,' we learn. 'With 'customary dumbness,' he declared, the military had considered all of Africa a 'tropical country.'' The experience of having to fight the climate as well as the Germans launched a decadeslong effort by the U.S. military and its scientific partners to better understand the harsh environments our troops would face in future wars. American engineers and construction workers encountered similar challenges in building the post-World War II Pax Americana of permanent U.S. military bases around the world. 'It is difficult for us to grasp just how little was understood about the world's most out-of-the-way places' in the mid-20th century, writes Ms. Heefner, a professor of history at Northeastern University and the author of 'The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland' (2012). 'Wartime needs put in motion a spectacularly broad effort to collect information about places that were considered unknowable.' The military was smart enough to realize it not only didn't have all the answers, it didn't even know what the questions were. So it turned to a broad array of civilian experts. 'Academics who had traipsed across the world's deserts to look for new species and adventurers who had spent months riding sledges in the Arctic,' we are told, 'all found wartime homes in the research centers that were created to account for the unfamiliar.'
