Bluie West One

Background

Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.

Bluie West One, later known as Narsarsuaq Air Base and Narsarsuaq Airport, was built on a glacial moraine at what is now the village of Narsarsuaq, near the southern tip of Greenland. Construction by the United States Army began in June 1941. The first aircraft landed there in January 1942, as a link in the North Atlantic air ferry route in World War II. The base had a peak population of about 4,000 American servicemen, and it is estimated that some 10,000 aircraft landed there en route to the war in Europe and North Africa.

Soon after the United States entered the war, the War Department decided to deploy Major General Carl Spaatz's Eighth Air Force to Britain, putting the North Atlantic ferry route facilities constructed by the Corps to an early test. Radioing from Bluie West One, while crossing the Atlantic in mid-June 1942, Spaatz ordered the movement to begin. The P-38 and P-39 fighters, piloted by combat crews who had been given special training in long-distance flying, were escorted by the longer-range B-17 bombers.

With stops at the Canadian-built base at Goose Bay in Labrador, Bluie West One in Southern Greenland, and Reykjavík or Keflavik in Iceland, the aircraft could fly from the new Presque Isle Army Airfield in northern Maine to Prestwick Airport in Scotland with no leg of the journey longer than 1,370 km (740 nmi; 850 mi). Other important bases in Greenland were Bluie West Eight near the present-day town of Kangerlussuaq, and Bluie East One on the almost-uninhabited east coast.

From the Wikipedia article Narsarsuaq Air Base (revision of Jul 7, 2026). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).