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Gretchen Heefner, "Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Gretchen Heafner about a book she published with the University of Chicago Press in 2025 titled Sand, Snow and How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments. Which takes us on a very interesting sort of mid 20th century history, way before the US military was able, willing, interested in operating in seemingly everywhere. I think for those of us focusing on 20th century warfare, even just from the headlines, you know, the idea that there was a point when the US Military had never thought about desert warfare before would seem kind of odd. And yet there was such a point. And this history helps us understand that, as well as other extreme environments that I'm sure we're going to talk about, too. So, Gretchen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.
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A
I am absolutely delighted to be here. Thank you.
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B
Miranda, could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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A
Uh, oh. So I'm a historian of the United States and the world at Northeastern University in Boston. And while I did not train in the field of environmental history, I am increasingly moving towards that field, which you can probably tell from the title of
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B
the book I wrote.
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A
But the question of why this book, which is kind of why I laughed at the beginning, is I should start by saying this is not a book I actually intended to write. Rather, I followed a sort of series of archival finds, and it found me in these kind of unexpected extreme places that I was not again looking for at all. And the best way to sort of think about this is when I started this project, you know, six or seven years ago, I was really interested in the construction and maintenance of the empire of US Military bases that the United States put into place after World War II, really, in the 1950s. And this sort of landscape of military bases was quite novel. Right Before World War II, the United States had just 14 overseas bases during the war that balloons, you know, thousands and thousands, obviously. And after the war, the US has to think about what it wants its sort of global military footprint to look like. And I was curious about all of the sort of locations where this takes place. And so by the late 1950s, there's 1,000 overseas US military bases. Today there's around 850. So this is a sort of posture that will remain. And I was based on sort of my earlier work. I was really interested in the kind of intimate stories that take place around installations like this, kind of the local stories. How do local people deal with having a military base nearby? You know, how do engineers think about building things there? What's the politics of putting a base there? What's the economics of it? The sort of long term environmental consequences? And so that's what I started with. And the first bases I was looking at were actually in North Africa. This came out of a footnote of my first project. But I was thinking about these bases, the US Military, really the Corps of Engineers, who are the sort of primary characters in a sense of my project. These bases, air bases, they were building in Libya, in Morocco, in the early 1950s. And I used kind of the standard archives, you know, that people in my field will use, or diplomatic archives, military archives. And then I used a lot of these engineering files. And what I kept finding over and over again as I was taking notes is they were referencing sand. And it turns out all the Americans who show up in North Africa in the 1950s are preoccupied with sand. It's everywhere. And, you know, I sort of start thinking about it. Oh, I've never thought about sand in this way before. You know, let me, let me trace the grains of sand to the archive. I should say, not literally. There's no sand that came out of the archive, but they're referencing it all the time. It was annoying. It got into things. It ruined equipment, it ruined runways, it got into food. You know, you couldn't kind of keep the sand out. And as I followed it, I realized the engineers were talking about sand and sandy places, not just in Northern Africa, but they were comparing it to Saudi Arabia and to the Arabian Peninsula, to deserts in the United States. And they were sort of studying it and thinking about, like, what is this weird material doing to our stuff, all of this equipment we have, and to their ability to construct things. And as I kept poking around at these grains of sand, I realized they were also talking about ice and snow kind of in the same sentences, often in the same laboratory spaces, because they were also building these giant air bases in the Arctic. And then by the late 1950s, they're also talking about possible construction on the lunar surface. And so the moon gets cycled into this, and this is kind of where we get the sand, snow and stardust, sort of outline of the book. And I mean, I think it's useful for anyone listening if you think about why these materials become so important to them and why I became sort of captivated by the materials that Sort of part of this story was because they're granular, and granular materials are considered strange. They're kind of oddballs of physical matter. I mean, you just think of a day at the beach and this makes sense, right? Like wet sand packs like a solid and dry sand pours like a liquid. Like, it's just weird stuff and it behaves very oddly and the physics of it are not always clear. And so for engineers having to really massive, you know, installations everywhere, it becomes a serious problem for them. And so that's kind of what I started tracing. And that's kind of how this story about intimate local military bases became a story about kind of the nature of US planetary power and how integrated that is and involved that is with environmental knowledge and the ability to manage and understand different environments.
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B
That's a great summary of the kind of scope of the book as well as a fascinating behind the scenes portrait of sort of how you got there. So thank you for taking us on that kind of journey. I think it really helps for people who maybe don't go into archives themselves to kind of get a sense of how these things can kind of happen to us as we go into archives and go, hang on a second, what's going on? And for any historians like myself listening to this, who have our own archival stories, you know, we always love hearing about other people. So thank you for that introduction. And I think it lets us now get into some of those things you were finding, starting, as you mentioned, with sand. So there's also that question then of where the bases are. You mentioned kind of the numbers before World War II and the fact that it ballooned so massively. So with that ballooning sort of on the table, as it were, what sorts of environments was the US at that point? Kind of like, yeah, okay, we have to expand some bases and like, these ones will be fine. We know how to do this. Whereas these ones going, ooh, hang on, we really need to go over there. But we've kind of never done done that before. Can you sort of map out for us in some cases, literally, which if there was a map of kind of green for, yes, we know how to do that and red we don't. Like, what did that look like going into World War II? And why was there so much red on the map?
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A
Yeah, it's a good question. I was just thinking as you were talking about the archives, like it's a vocational hazard we have, right? Going into the archives and getting lost, it's getting sent somewhere, hazard.
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B
It's wonderful.
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A
I guess it's a bit of both. Depends on how far we go astray. And in this project it was quite significantly so. I mean, heading into World War II, I think the easiest way to think about it is to think about the fact that the United States was actually ill prepared for most of the world on the eve of World War II. And I say this, you know, much has been written about of kind of how the United States kind of lurched into war. And one of the issues was that the US Military was pretty anemic. It was a pretty small military. It ranked 17th in the world, I think, don't quote me on that, in terms of size and kind of readiness. And someone sort of complained that it was, you know, the same size or smaller than the, the army of Bulgaria, of Bulgaria in 1940. So it was really not a sort of world class military ready to sort of enter into World War II. And then kind of within that framing, I was interested in the question of sort of how had military planners, if they had at all thought about the rest of the world. And it turns out within their own sort of documents, especially their sort of laments after World War II. There's a lot of sort of post war retrospectives that the military wrote about its performance and its preparations. And in many of them they kind of said things like we weren't ready for the world's sort of climact, you know, different climates and environments. We were kind of prepared for maybe continental US and continental Europe, but the rest of the world was sort of a blank hole to us. But that is precisely where World War II is being fought by the time the United States enters into the war. And for anyone sort of reading the newspaper in the early 1940s or listening to the radio, you know, FDR is giving all these fireside chats like it's quite clear that this is a global war. You know, airfare, air, air power has made it such as, well as the sort of like just sprawling scope of where this war is taking place. And so it is going to be fought in places that are like jungly and the Arctic and the desert areas of the world in ways the US Military is completely unprepared for. They try quite quickly to ramp up preparations for sort of new kinds of extreme environments that they hadn't thought about before. And so they will actually set up in 1942, the US army sets up a desert training center and a sort of Arctic training center and a high altitude training center, which were some of the stories that I, that I sort of pack in the book unfold. But in a sense, it's kind of too little too late. I sort of, you know, everyone, most people sort of know who Major General George Patton was, and he was involved in this process. And he was involved in setting up the Desert Training center, which was out in California and Arizona in 1942. And he sort of desperate for information, writes all these letters to experts saying, please send me any information you have on the desert. You know, like any information, I don't care how small it is, it doesn't really matter. I need all information I can get. And so they're kind of just trying to pull anything they can into it because in fact, they're not ready to send troops to these places.
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B
Yeah. I want to talk more about the kind of desperation there in some of the letters. I mean, you have some examples of the book that make it quite clear that desperation really is the word here. And it's not just a question of kind of, oh, it would be nice to know everything. Right. Like, what are the actual consequences for the military of not knowing how to operate in these places and trying to. Anyway.
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A
Yeah. The example that I use in the book most directly is sort of the. Part one of the book is about sand and desert areas. And so I'm interested in US planning for the invasion of North Africa, which happens in late 1942 as part of Operation Torch, which is the Allied sort of, you know, effort to kick the. The Germans and the Axis powers out of North Africa, across the Mediterranean, back into Europe. And ultimately it's successful. But in the book I make the argument that the lack of environmental intelligence and the failure to appropriately understand what northern Africa will be like for the Americans delays the war by a few months, delays the ability of the Allies to reach Tunisia and Tunis by a number of months. And the reason for that is because they were ill prepared. I think the most basic thing is to think of like, if you're packing for a trip and you pack the wrong stuff, it makes life kind of miserable. And that's what happened to the Americans. And sort of specifically, when you think about the kinds of information they would have that would have been better or the sort of intelligence they could have used or what went wrong. It's things as basic as the gear they packed for troops in sort of September of 1942, as the sort of all the requisitions have happened, all the material is flowing to sort of ships on the eastern seaboard where the GIs will be packed up and all their equipment will be packed up and shipped across the Atlantic to, to get to North Africa in time for November. Eisenhower, who's, you know, the supreme Allied commander at the time, meets with someone and, and says, you know, what will they need? What's. What's North Africa like? Right? Will they need underwear? Will they need long underwear? He asks the diplomat he's talking to, which this guy finds it so curious, he writes it down. Why is this guy asking me what kind of underwear the troops will need? It turns out they did need long underwear, but nobody thought of packing it because they thought they were going to North Africa and this desert environment, it was supposed to be sunny and hot and dry. In fact, as the GIs are kind of on the ships across the Atlantic, they get these special pamphlets about how to protect themselves from sunstroke and heat stroke and, you know, keep a hat on all the time so they don't get a sunburn. More damaging, in a sense, is engineers pack what are called mini bulldoz, these sort of mini bulldozers because they think they're going to be moving sand and dirt around. It turns out they show up in. In November in Morocco and Algeria, and it's wet and it's rainy and it's cold and everything is muddy and everything gets stuck. And so they literally can't get airplanes off the ground because they can't smooth out runways. There's pictures of sort of the wheels of airplanes being entirely covered in dirt and mud and just kind of sucked in. Ernie Pyle, who's the sort of famous World War II reporter, writes back that General Mudd was actually winning the war. And in fact, Eisenhower and FDR both at later points recognize was a failure to plan for the right kind of terrain and climatic climactic conditions that delayed the war by a number of months. And so there was very serious consequences, right, to not having been well enough prepared to arrive in North Africa and just not even just kind of getting a sense, you know, you think right now we can, like, find out, like, the temperature in, like, Tripoli. You know, I could look on my computer right now and tell you exactly what the temperature is and what the dew point is, like what to expect in four hours. That was not information that was available. And Americans had not really, you know, been interested in gathering that information before
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B
the war with very clear stakes there. So I'm glad we established that because it then makes kind of. It makes sense why they would be so invested in trying to figure this out as quickly as possible. So you mentioned a few methods already. We've got some centers being set up. We've got the kind of letters of desperation being sent out to anyone who might be able to help. Can you tell us more about these sorts of efforts?
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A
Yeah, to gather information. I mean, so during the war they set up these test centers and they're interested in their training centers really. So the, there's a desert training center out, as I mentioned, in California, and they send, you know, over a million American GIs go to this desert training center to train. They're not actually training for desert war. Further, they're training just to train because it's a wide open space and it's like the only big open space where you can like bomb and strafe things and do all the things, things they want to do in practicing. A side effect is they start thinking about desert training and desert or for warfare more particularly. But it was really the sort of mistakes that were made in the war that will ultimately lead, lead engineers to think about what they need to do and how they need to do it. So the Corps of Engineers, as I mentioned before, are really, the Army Corps of Engineers are the sort of chief characters in my book. And there's, and it's probably worth thinking about why During World War II, the Army Corps of Engineers, who most people associate with like building dams and stuff in this country and roadways, are charged with building military infrastructure at home and abroad. And so it's kind of a new role for them. It's a huge role, obviously. And they're, they're being asked to sort of replicate runways. I mean, I use the Runway a lot in the book because it's kind of has to be replicated everywhere and has to look exactly the same everywhere you put a Runway, especially in the early Cold War period. But these, these engineers have to build runways, they have to fix roads, they have to fix harbors, they have to put in communication lines. They're kind of doing all the back end infrastructure that makes the military function.
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Right.
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So sometimes they're involved in combat too, but it's really about like putting in the sort of the guts that allow everything else to happen. And so they're really studying things and they're writing things down. And one of the things that I think is fascinating about engineers, they're actually quite boring in a sense. The things they write down are really boring, but they write down everything. And so you get this amazing corpus of knowledge about how they're experiencing and seeing the world and the kinds of materials that they're actually using during the war. And after, to kind of figure out how do they. How do they get from, you know, A to B to Z? Like, how do they get from, like, a muddy field to a Runway that can actually catch airplanes, bombers over and over again? And the questions and the stakes and the type of Runway or the type of materials and the type of infrastructure you're building get higher, actually, as we move out of World War II into the cold War, particularly because the machines and the technologies get more and more sophisticated, more and more expensive. So, like, you can't have these heavy bombers in the 1950s be destroyed because your Runway doesn't hold up, if that makes sense. And so they're really going to start studying materials and processes and how they put all this stuff together. But it's really as the world as during the war, we see the engineers start to create all these pamphlets and mechanisms for sharing information. They create all these, like, hand drawings they mimic. There's mimeographs of them, copies of them. They create, like, glossy pamphlets in some cases, and they're sharing experiences around the world. And this continues after the war in the Military Engineer, which is a monthly publication of military engineers, where they're sort of giving away all their secrets and talking about everything and sharing best practices and strategies. One of the. The ways that I found, really, like, when I found it, I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe they did this. And I want to find this lab, which I never found. But at the end of the war, the Corps of Engineers sends out a letter to all the runways, all the airfields all over the world that the Americans are controlling. And they ask the engineers there, they say, can you please send us a sample of the material at your Runway? So, like, send us a box of stuff. And then also just a narrative description of what it's like. And most airfields do not send anything back, but some do. And so the Corps of Engineers starts collecting all of this, like, 50 pounds of dirt from, you know, like, Vietnam and another 50 from Okinawa and another 50 from Libya. And they're sort of collecting dirt and sand and samples of materials and these narratives, which they do I. Which I could find about what these places were like. And they're trying to basically build a corpus of knowledge about the world and its environments. Right. They're trying to sort of codify things and classify materials and places so that if they have to go back out into the world, they're actually prepared.
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Yeah, I want to talk more about this organizing of information. You spend a moment in the book talking about, like, what kinds of definitional categories they use, and also kind of by definition, which ones they don't use. And there's something interesting about how they're prioritizing sort of how the knowledge is collected and sorted. Can we talk about that?
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Yeah.
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In terms of. I mean, there's a number of ways we could think about it, but I think, for one, the military, not surprisingly. Right. Is interested in sort of like operational and tactical needs. Right. So they're. They're going to be interested in mobility and traffic ability and how do you move things from one place to the next? How do people. I mean, how do people survive? That's not quite what they're interested. They're sort of interested in how equipment, like a battalion survives. Right. So they're going to be interested in very specific questions that are quite practical and they have applications. And the way that I think maybe it's easiest to think about this is the military brings in all of these outside experts because, you know, as I. As we mentioned, a patent has no idea what he's doing. He's like a military guy, but he's like, I don't know about environments. So they invite all these during the war. Then after, they invite sort of explorers and anthropologists and other people who consider themselves to be experts in these fields, they invite them in to sort of help them think about, like, what kind of shoes should we wear? You know, what kind of tire treads do we need? And one of the guys they bring in, actually in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is this guy, Henry Bader, who's a Swiss glaciologist. And this is a pattern. The Americans have to bring it in sort of foreigners because there's considered to be sort of no local supply of experts in these areas. So Bader comes in to run this really big organization called the Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment, which still exists today under a different name, but this is for the Corps of Engineers. And he's basically going to run a center that's trying to figure out how do you build things and operate materials and machines in Arctic and extremely cold places? And so Bader sets up. Bader is actually brilliant at linking, like, basic research to military needs. And so he's like, okay, wait, you want to build a base under the Greenland ice cap, which the United States military does. And he's like, you want to build this base? You need to. If. If you want me to be able to help you build that base, I need to be able to understand all the basic Mechanics of ice and snow. So I need to do really basic experiments back in my lab and in Greenland. And after a few years of all those basic experiments, I'm going to be able to tell you how to apply it to this meat of like, burying human beings under ice and snow and keeping them alive. And the same kind of thing applies to, if you want to know how to drive, what. What's the best kind of truck tread or tire to go across, you know, ice sheet. Yes, I will tell you that. However, before I tell you that I need to study, like, ice crystals and I need to catalog every ice crystal in the world. And so they're like, a lot of scientists and research teams will come in and say, okay, we're going to give you the basic. We need basic information to help you with the applied. But that's what the military wants, if that makes sense. But there is a connection between the sort of basic research and science and the application for operational, practical needs. Does that answer your question?
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B
Yeah, I think that is an interesting aspect of this and the kind of role of outsiders, too. So that kind of paints a picture of sort of how this collecting effort is going before we get to though the Greenland base, and we will get to the Greenland base, really hard to avoid it. There is this sand thing, as you mentioned. Right. That's kind of what you got. Interested in following it through the archives. Like, it really is coming up quite a lot. And it's not just about sort of, oh, we have these campaigns in the middle of World War II. Why is it still relevant even in the kind of early Cold War period? Why are kind of sandy environments almost. It sounds like regardless of national borders, like, it's not this country or that country. It's like sand as a concept. Why is that coming up so much in this early Cold War period?
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Yeah, I mean, I think sand is coming up, but to be honest, it's also like all these extremes. And the reason is because they're building in all of them in these new ways. But I think sandy environments come up for, I mean, two reasons, and it links to the Arctic. But to start with the sandy places in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the United States server defense establishment is thinking about, like, where should we put these bases? They. They want, number one, to be able to put them in places that are kind of hidden away. And so big desert spaces seem to be kind of blank. Right? They're not. But the American military is sort of like, okay, there's less people in these sandy Places, this would probably be a good place. They're also talking to, in this case, a lot of, like, the French control Morocco in. In the late 1940s and early 1950s. And so the French are like, if you're going to put. If you're going to put bases in Morocco, they need to be away from people. So put them out in the desert, right? And then in Libya, it's a trustee. So anyways, the. The politics make it that being in Sandy, what are considered wastelands makes the most sense. At the same point, the bases, at least in North Africa and then there's sort of string of bases are. It's about strategy. And so it's like, where do you build things so you're close enough to the Soviet Union that you can get there, you know, deposit your bombs and come back. This is book for airplanes are, you know, transatlantic. And so there's a strategic reason, there's a political reason. And then also sand becomes interesting to them because they expect that wars might be fought in Sandy places. And so they want to, you know, they want to experience it, learn about it and figure it out. And the US Military, and this is sort of where I take the story, is starting to understand that if they can deploy anywhere and understand all strange places or difficult places and they can actually operate across all of these places simultaneously, that's like a new type of planetary power that nobody else has. Some countries are great in certain environments. You know, like, the Russians are considered to be Arctic experts because they actually have a lot of Arctic area. But the Americans are like, if we can do it all at the same time and really master everything simultaneously, that will be a new type of, you know, ability to deploy anywhere. Nobody else has that.
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B
Okay, well, that certainly makes sense given the kind of imperial side of things. Staying on the desert, though. I mean, you mentioned runways are obviously a huge key part of this. Right. And I think the stakes for that have been made quite clear. But there are some additional practical elements that you mentioned for the World War II part that continue on. I mean, part of it is this kind of hiding, you know, being out of sight, being able to kind of be everywhere at all times. That's great. You can land the plane. But then there's the question of, like, what are people actually doing? How are they operating? And this is, I think, the piece to me that was kind of the most. Well, of course, they had to figure it out at some point, but it's been so prevalent in kind of all media images of the US military for the last 26 years, that the fact that desert camouflage uniforms didn't exist at some point kind of took me aback for a moment. And then reading the story in your book about how they actually figured that out and the really lengths they went to, to look at every possible color of every possible sand. Can we talk about that, please?
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A
Oh, yeah. So, yes, one of the, one of the most fascinating characters in the book, frankly, Sir Hubert Wilkins is figures large in this one. So, yeah, there is this. I mean, there were desert uniforms. The Americans didn't have them. Right. Like the British had desert uniforms. And, and the Americans kind of borrow everything from the British during, before and during the war in terms of desert capabilities. But anything that can borrow from them, frankly. But. So Wilkins is an Australian explorer and ornithologist and sort of like photographer. He's kind of been all over the world in the 20s and 30s, and when war breaks out, he actually offers his service to the Australian and British governments who both turn him down because they say he's too old. So he shows up, the United States in. The United States is like, yes, please, we need your help because we don't know anything about the world. Not quite, but, you know, something like that. And so Wilkins starts advising the US Military and he does that during the war, and then he, after the war, he continues with the army, especially the Quartermaster Corps in the army, to helping them think about gear and materials and sort of. He's around for a long time advising the United States government and military on how to approach and best shield themselves in camouflage patterns from the world. So he ends up. I was fascinated. This is one of those weird archive finds where you're like, what am I looking at? It's like, oh, okay, I'm looking at swatches of cloth in this man's archive. Like lots of swatches of cloth. So Wilkins goes and he's asked to come up with a camouflage uniform. And he decides, yes, this is great. He's like, I don't think the British did a good job because they have one uniform. But we need lots of camouflage uniforms. We need lots of colors. We need to be able to figure out, like, what's the perfect vision of the alt, but what's the ideal desert? And how am I going to figure that out? So he basically goes. He. He goes across this sort of amazing infrastructure of military power. United States is put into place. He's. He leaps around the world on planes, going to sort of every desert. He kind of appears all over. He appears in, in Iraq and he appears in Afghanistan. He appears in Libya, and he goes to Morocco, and he's in Saudi Arabia. He's kind of all over the American desert Southwest. And every time he goes, he kind of pulls out of his bag these, like, poster boards of color swatches that he's, like, dyed onto fabrics, and he kind of is matching them to desert terrain. And there's all these pictures of him standing in the desert with these swatches, trying to figure out, like, which colors are best. I mean, it's this amazing. Like, it's like the old Pantone color. I mean, there's a new Pantone color wheel. You know, he's, like, doing it for desert color, and he also does it for the Arctic. And so they also send him to figure out all the whites. You know, he has dozens of white colors. So his job is to figure out, like, what is the ideal desert uniform? What is the ideal Arctic uniform. How do you kind of take these global color palette, mix it together, and come up with, like, the five colors that most represent the perfect desert and the ideal desert? And so that's one of the ways they're thinking about, like, how do we take representative samples, smush them together, and then create a category or, you know, sort of catalog things based on what we need? I mean, in a sense, Wilkins's camouflage is a cautionary tale because he. He has this vision, I think, of, like, a uniform for every desert. Like, he really believes every Devizer is so different. You can't possibly match the Mojave to the. You know, to. To, like, the Sahara. The military doesn't have time for that, and they don't have money for that. And they're like, no, we just want one, you know, so there is something kind of sad about Wilkins is like, thousands of color swatches and fabric materials, and they all get kind of blended into one, which is kind of what the. Where the military is going. Like, they're not interested in the particulars. They need sort of abstract, big concepts. Concepts so they can kind of deploy things faster and build things faster and make things work.
- [28:59]
B
But just to clarify, we're talking a, like, not super young Australian dude wearing desert clothes, standing in a desert, like, flapping bits of cloth around. I've seen the photos in the book. Like, that really is what he's doing.
- [29:13]
A
Yeah, and he'll talk. He'll. He, like, tries to talk to people about. I mean, his. He has these amazing accounts where he writes, like, here's where I stayed in. You know, in Tripoli, and I talked to this guy, and he's like, oh, if you want to really see the desert, you should hitch a ride on this jeep and go out with these engineers to go see this thing. So he's kind of like, interviewing people and talking to people and trying to figure out, like, you know, where's. Where's the best place to see all the colors of the desert. I mean, he is. He's a fascinating. He's fascinating because of this.
- [29:39]
B
He's also fascinating in sort of contrast to another big project. Right. It is now time to talk about Greenland, where, in terms of how this was actually made, this crazy base under the ice. Talking to local people and trying to figure out every single detail didn't seem to be the way it worked. How was the space actually built?
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A
Yeah, so in 1951, the US Air Force tells the Corps of Engineers they want a massive air base, like, for 5,000 men up in Tule, Greenland, which is the northwest coast of Greenland. And important to note, there was a very small population of Inuit people in this part of Greenland, a few hundred at most, living, you know, a nomadic lifestyle. And they had settlements around the coast. And in fact, the only reason the United States knew. Knew about Thule was because there was a Danish supply station and weather station there. And so there was a, you know, a somewhat larger settlement of indigenous people living near that. Near the. Near a trading post. And so that's the only reason the United States even knew about Thule at all. But when they decided they want this air base there and so they want to bring 5,000 people.
- [30:43]
B
Right?
- [30:44]
A
So the question is, how do you do it? The Corps of Engineers is given this assignment, like, in January of 1951, and they're supposed to start building the base that spring, which is kind of absurd. And when you think about. I mean, again, it's hard for us in, you know, the 21st century to imagine, like, in 1950, getting from Boston to Tuli would have taken many flights and days. You know, it just took forever to get there. You had hop on all these little planes all the way across, and the weather was terrible, and you never knew if you could get in or out. And so even going to visit and scout the site was difficult. You know, as you sort of noted phrase it in the question, like, there was zero effort to talk to any of the indigenous or local people, even the Danish, like explorers or traders who were in Greenland at the time, about what it would be like to build there or what construction would be like there. The United States military, I think it's safe to say, and Probably. It's important to note, and I say it in the book, I think I try to as much as I can. We should always preface this conversation with thinking about, like, when the United States military goes to places to deploy, it very rarely thinks about the local impact or its significance. Department of State officials think about it because they're always worried about the political blowback. But the military is like, this is where we want to site build it for us. We'll come and, you know, sort of inhabit it and take over from there. And there is very little consideration given to local people, to local environments, to local economies, to the sort of political organization of a place by the military when it's kind of declaring its intentions. That's true abroad and at home, frankly. So what happens in Greenland is that. And so there's complete disregard for local sledge routes and trading routes and hunting areas as the military comes in and literally drops 5,000 people here. I mean, this is crazy because the population of Greenland at this time is like 30,000 total. So all of a sudden you're bringing in 5,000American troops to build it. They have to also hire American laborers. And they hire most of the American laborers from Minnesota and cold places for. So it's people with cold weather experience. They're paid a ton of money, way over what they would have gotten paid here. They're sent on sort of ships up to. Nobody knows where they're going. They're like, you're going to go somewhere cold, you're going to build a base. So people sign up, they get sent on ships. They get sent up to Greenland in the spring of 1951. Nobody knows when the bay is going to thaw because they didn't think to ask any local people. Again, this is where local knowledge would have been useful, knowing when the ice is going to thaw off the. The bay. And so the ships get stuck for a while and they finally make it and they sort of, you know, release everything. There's a hundred, something like 100 ships. It's a massive, massive undertaking. And they have to bring everything with from the United States. There's no indigenous supplies. There's no local materials. It's all ice and snow up there. I mean, it is really cold and pretty bleak up in northwestern Greenland for, for most people coming from the outside. So they have to bring everything up there and they build this massive base which is actually still around today. It's now called Betafux Space Base, but it is still an American air base up in the northwest part of Greenland. And also I think important to note that the United States military, everything it brought there was kind of on a one way ticket and it just left things. And so there is massive environmental damage from the space. The United States is accumulating environmental data all the time, but it's also just leaving stuff behind. And so there's I think over 30 sites that the local Greenland is. Greenlanders have, have subsequently asked for the United States to clean up. The other piece of the story that I think is vital to think about is the local Inuit population was forcibly moved in 1952 from their location at Thule, like 60 miles to the north. 100 people were told they had to get out within a few days and so they had to move their settlement. And there are still people asking for sort of compensation and limit from that.
- [34:35]
B
Yeah, there's definitely no, like, let's do lots of local gathering and figure out what could work best going on here. It's just kind of we're going to build a base tomorrow and we're going to kind of do whatever needs to happen to make it work. And it's clear from what you've described, right, a massive amount of labor, effort, money went into this. The base was constructed with all of these kind of additional consequences. But I can see how from a US Military perspective at that moment, it's kind of like, look what we've done, right? We said we were going to do it and we did it. And we said we were going to do it in the desert and we did it. So as we're now moving kind of chronologically, if we're Talking early Cold War, 50s, working this out, you know, we're now really into sort of hay space. Right. And given the way you've described it so far, like it's starting to kind of make sense how the US Military is like, well, we did this with the sand, we did this with the snow. Bring on space. Right. In some ways it sounds like they almost wanted to combine both of those sets of knowledge. Is that right?
- [35:36]
A
Yeah, I mean this is again one of these things. I wasn't looking for this at all, but I ran across in the Corps of Engineers archives a document, it was actually a two part study that ended up being 400 pages called Lunar Construction. And that's it. It's just this big picture of a moon. It says lunar construction on the front of it. And the Corps of Engineers was asked by both the army and the Air Force in the late 1950s, so well before the Apollo program is taking flight to come up with a model for building a military base on the surface of the moon. And so the Air Force and army have both been doing this on their own, and they asked the Corps of Engineers to come in with, like, basically the feasibility study. Like, how would we do it? What's going to happen? What will this look like? Amazingly, the Corps report says by 1975, we will have 50 men living on the mountain moon. And then the idea in this report was ultimately, the next step is going to be Mars, right? So Mars is always like. When you think of the moon, Mars was always the next step. And so that's, you know, obvious. Very similar story to one that's happening today, which I found fascinating. But what I was interested in when I was reading this report, linear construction in particular, was the fact that, you know, the preoccupied with, like, what the moon is made of, like, what we can't build there unless we actually know what it's made of. And so, again, they're really linking it to the problems and experiences they had both in the desert and then also increasingly in Greenland. So in Greenland, they built this massive Tuli Air Force base. By the late 1950s, the Corps of Engineers is building this subglacial facility called Camp Sentry, which, you know, comes out of Henry Bader's work thinking about, like, how do you dig and dig down into. To. To an elastic material with viscoelastic material, which is ice. Can you have people live down there as if they're living in Arkansas? Right? Like, the GI is not supposed to know they're living in ice tunnels. They're supposed to be totally comfortable. It's like the whole job of the American military here is like, environmental proofing everything, right? They're not sending explorers to the ice. They're sending GIs to live in an American base under the ice. And this is also their vision for the moon. And so they kind of take these blueprints that they're putting in place in under the Greenland ice cap, and they're almost like, visually, they actually look incredible. They look exactly the same. Which was, I think, what first struck me. I was like, wait, this. I can't tell if this is the moon base or the Greenland base. Right. They actually look exactly the same. And they're thinking about them in the same terms, but they're also really, really thinking about the particulars of the material. Like, how do we. Not only what is the moon going to be made of? Because they don't have any scoops of it yet, right? There's no samples of moon dust on the planet at this point, when they're, when they're making these plans that will come later in the 60s, but they are interested in if we, if we know enough about ice and snow, can we make fake moon dust? Right. Like, how are we going to sort of manufacture our way into being able to build a model for a place we've never been, like no human being has ever been. Like, how do you do that? How do you actually come up with the fine grained, you know, details for how structures were whole or how you're going to shovel things? Right. Is it a granular material? Is it not? So all these questions were the same questions. They were sort of asking about the extremes on Earth. And again, the extremes I'm looking at are linked because they're these arid, granular places. You know, there's plenty of other extremes one could look at, but these were all linked in the very sort of material conditions that the engineers sort of showed up, showed up in and had to navigate. And thus they're making these sort of comparisons across them. So that's kind of how the moon came into the story. Again, I was not interested. Like, I'm actually not, like, I'm not really into space. Like it's not my thing, but the story was so obviously going in that direction and so that's where I took it.
- [39:15]
B
Well, and there's also, as you said, the fact that it is related to some things happening today. So I don't want to kind of leave that just as an offhand comment. What are some of the things that you're finding in these archives that are, you know, decades and decades in the past now that are actually still very much going on today, both within and beyond the US Military?
- [39:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple, couple of connections. One is, I mean, just I am always struck visually, like when you see any sort of space vehicles today, you know, that are either NASA related or private company related, they look, I mean, you could like see the blueprints back in the 1950s and 60s. Like they just look the same. It's quite, it's like a little jarring to me. I'm like, wait, have they invented anything new in the past 70 years about space? It looks like everything was sort of designed in the 50s and 60s and now they just have the technology to make it possible.
- [40:03]
B
Possible.
- [40:04]
A
So there's like a very interesting visual similarity that's striking when you spend enough time with these documents. But I think there's also this sense that, I mean, in some Ways the lessons that the military Learned in the 50s and 60s about extreme environments have to keep being relearned. I mean, this is one thing when I talk to sort of military engineers today who talk about the fact that, like, oh, we had to do that again when we went back into the Middle east, you know, like, oh, we still messed up with construction and construction practices. So, like, all these documents and reports and files that the engineers build, I mean, the engineers write everything down, as I mentioned, they write reports. They're not always attended to. So the same mistakes end up kind of happening over and over again. But one thing that's happening. So the US Military and I try to make this point in the book. There's sort of two stories that we have to narrate in tandem. And one is that the military has done a lot of devastation and destruction to global environments. And it has also been responsible for a lot of environmental studies and the ability of people to study the environment. And you have to sort of think of those contradictory ideas at the same time because they're both true. And so, yes, there's all this damage the American military has done and all of this work that still happens, that happened in the 1950s and 60s, and it's happening today. Again, we can use the Greenland base as an example of this. All of this scientific research about climate change is happening from these bases. And so in the 1950s and 60s, Henry Bader and his engineers used the US military and its needs to build an under the ice base to experiment with ice core drilling, which is basically the sort of foundations of modern climate science, right? These ice cores that tell us about global temperatures going back thousands and thousands of years. They experimented with the technology in Greenland that they would bring to Antarctica and sort of create the longest, most robust cores. Similarly, today, the same base, which is now paid to space base, is where a lot of NASA's Climate Surveillance Surveillance satellites and planes take off from. And they're looking at ice sheets and they're doing all this, you know, super modern stuff, like, way more interesting technologies now to, like, they don't. They don't need to drill down to the ice. They can, like, you know, look down into the ice from the sky. But they still need these facilities and they still need the US Military's infrastructure to get all of this stuff done. And that's, I mean, it's awkward. That's always been an awkward dance for me to think about with both of these, because the United States military has in fact, come up with amazing, remarkable, sophisticated technologies and ways of seeing the world and doing things in the world while it's also left, you know, sort of a trail of devastation across much of it. So that is kind of the awkward dance I'm trying to do in the
- [42:42]
B
book and one that I think is continuing in a lot of ways in the US Military and the private sector. So I think a good place to kind of conclude our discussion about the book. But what, may I ask, are you working on now? Did you come across something that was a footnote? Here is now the next project. I mean, what are you up to now?
- [43:00]
A
Not surprisingly, I have been lost in the archive again. So I was a couple of different things. But one of the things that I had been working on for a while is kind of a broader environmental history of the US Military. And of course, I went to, recently went to the University of Chicago archives to look at. I wanted to think about the environmental history of the Manhattan Project from an urban perspective because, like, some of the Manhattan Project was in Chicago. Right. It's just sort of interesting. We often tell the Manhattan Project story from Los Alamos or from the desert or from California. But I was intrigued by this urban space and what that looked like. And I ended up running across the papers of some of the wives of some of the scientists who worked in Los Alamos. And so I'm kind of like I've taken a diversion into looking at Laura Fermat's papers and some of these other scientists wives and the work they were also doing, which was pretty important and interesting. So I'm working on both of those simultaneously and we'll see what happens. And I also have a project that I work on with undergraduates and grad students called the US Based Project, where we're looking at the environmental impact of American military bases over time. So really since the sort of Since World War II to the present, and trying to uncover local stories of both, you know, destruction and also like ways the military is trying to remediate or work on developing models for climate change in various bases around the world.
- [44:19]
B
Well, that all sounds very interesting. So enjoy the archives. Good luck with the coordination. I mean, all sounds cool. And of course, listeners who are intrigued can read the book we've been talking about titled Sand, Snow and How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Gretchen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast Podcast.
- [44:41]
A
It was a delight. Thank you so much.
- [44:44]
C
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