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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.'