Small archive of original photographs taken at Narsarssuak (Narsarsuaq) Airbase, Greenland, 1942-45.

Group of 7 (seven) gelatin silver print photographs, in uniform 200 x 250 mm format; no inscriptions to versos, but presumably taken by a USAF serviceman; all of the prints are in excellent condition.

These original photographs, taken sometime between 1942 and 1945, show USAF personnel at the airbase at Narsarssuak (Narsarsuaq), Greenland, which had been established by Northeast Air Command in the second half of 1941. A USAF plane pictured in two of the images features the motto Coelum Ad Proelium Elige (Choose the Weather for Battle), indicating that it belonged to one of the USAF Weather Squadrons. Another shows a wooden building with the tongue-in-cheek sign Narsarssuak Hotel de Gink (i.e. Narsarssuak Hotel for Homeless Men); and two show a Norwegian merchant vessel, the Annik (Bergen), which had taken part in dangerous North Atlantic convoys.

From Wikipedia:

‘[In 1941] United States obtained rights to build bases in Greenland. In July 1941, a task force of service troops arrived at Narsarsuaq. This site had been chosen as a major staging base between Labrador and Newfoundland. Work began at once on the base, which was given the code name Bluie West One (BW-1), and the first plane set down on 24 January 1942. Work on a second west coast base further north, at Sondrestrom or Bluie West Eight, began in September 1941. A third field was placed on the east coast almost directly across from BW-1 at Angmagssalik (Bluie East Two).

An interesting contribution to the defense of Greenland was the Northeast Greenland dog sledge patrol organized in the summer of 1941 as a joint endeavor of the Army, the United States Coast Guard, and the Greenland Government. All the activity on the east coast the year before had demonstrated the ease with which anyone could establish a foothold in the vast Arctic wastes, the near impossibility of finding a hostile force that had established itself, and the difficulty of dislodging one, once it was discovered. An air patrol of the east coast, even after the new bases were completed proved its worth by assisting in the capture of the trawler Buskoe on 12 September, as that vessel, a small German-controlled Norwegian ship, was attempting to establish a radio and weather station in the Mackenzie Bay area.

In addition to the Army Airfields, the United States Navy Atlantic Fleet established a number of stations on Greenland to support radio, weather, and naval patrols as part of the Battle of the North Atlantic against German U-boats and the protection of Allied convoy traffic in the North Atlantic….’