![]() ![]() If Canada could undertake a difficult construction task in the often-bitter weather of the 55th parallel, why couldn’t the US do the same even farther north? A trip wire situated above the Arctic Circle would provide hours of extra warning of bomber attack. ![]() However, the fact that Canadians were even attempting to build this barrier, whatever its limitations, intrigued some US defense officials. This Mid-Canada Line was a simpler microwave warning device, prone to false alarms set off by geese and other large birds. This system was fully operational in 1954, with the US paying two-thirds of its cost.Īt around the same time, with its own funds, Canada began building another line farther north, near the 55th parallel. DEW LIN EPHOTOS 1950S SERIESIn the early 1950s, the US and Canada began joint construction of the Pinetree Line, a series of some 30 radars that ran roughly along the line of the US–Canadian border. Without its own nuclear deterrent, Ottawa saw air defense as its best protection against Soviet attack. Air Force officials wanted something more-distant warning of attack.Ĭanada was worried as well. Lashup may have been better than nothing, but its old radars did not have much range, and it would have provided little advance warning of attack. By 1950, the Air Force erected an interim system named Lashup, which consisted of 44 World War II-vintage radars located near major US metropolitan areas. The cost seemed high to Defense Department officials, who sent USAF back to the drawing board. In 1947, the US Air Force proposed a $600 million radar fence composed of 411 radar stations and 18 control systems. DEW LIN EPHOTOS 1950S PLUSIn the late 1940s, however, Soviet acquisition of atomic weapons, plus Moscow’s development of a long-range bomber force, quickly changed the situation. ![]() After the war, the threat to the US homeland seemed minimal, and air defense budgets crumbled accordingly. Japanese troops and aircraft did gain a foothold in the western Aleutian Islands early in the war, but withdrew by the middle of 1943. As early as 1916, Alexander Graham Bell worried that airships might be able to float over the waves and bomb US cities.ĭuring World War II, the continental US remained virtually untouched, despite West Coast fears about Japanese aircraft. From the beginning of the age of flight, however, visionaries realized this geographic isolation might no longer serve as an effective buffer. “You had a lot of time to think,” says Ranson, who still works as a boilermaker, in Winnipeg, Canada.įor centuries, the United States depended on broad oceans and peaceful neighbors to protect its people and home-based forces from military attack. Others loved it and today remember their time on the line with fondness. Some couldn’t take it and fled when their contracts were up. Some immersed themselves in solitary hobbies like photography. Some hung around station bars, playing cards and swapping tall tales. DEW LIN EPHOTOS 1950S FREESome civilian technicians bought snowmobiles and went out hunting in their free time. “Like ancient guards in a lonely outpost on the Great Wall of China or Hadrian’s Wall, we watched, we waited, and we slowly went nuts.” “To that, I must answer that, for a brief while, we stood on guard,” writes former DEW worker Rick Ranson in his book Working North. Any traveler happening upon the abandoned stations might wonder what on earth they were for. Today, their mission may be largely forgotten. Yet year after year, the radar technicians, radio operators, pilots, cooks, metal workers, and military commanders who constituted the isolated DEW Line population braved cold and boredom to keep watch for the West. It had also gained a crucial few hours’ extra time to respond to any incursion by aircraft carrying nuclear bombs. When the crash project was over, North America had something that, for the era, was a technical marvel. ![]() Over the next two-and-a-half years, thousands of people and some 460,000 tons of material would be shipped, hauled, and airlifted some 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, up to a line running roughly along the 69th parallel. The US military’s greatest fear was of a sneak attack by Soviet bombers, flying undetected over the North Pole.įive decades ago this year, the US and Canada launched one of the most ambitious construction projects ever-the Distant Early Warning, or DEW Line, a series of radar early warning stations from Greenland to Alaska. When they were built, the United States’ primary adversary was communism, not terrorism. They look like relics from another time, which, in a way, they are. They rise abruptly from the icy wilderness, a jumble of buildings and platforms topped with giant white domes. They’re still up there in the frozen north, some of them. ![]()
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