Brrrrr!

This is a picture of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, as seen from Sondrestromfjord, Greenland. It's important to me because I spent a year of my army life there from spring of 1955 to spring 1956. When people here continually ask me how I am handling the cold weather in Nebraska, I usually tell them a few tales of what really cold weather is like. Thanks to the nature of this blog, I can show you in just a few pictures what that place was like.

First, they no longer call it by the Danish name Sondrestromfjord. It is now officially named Kangerlussuaq, its original Inuit name. Further, to my astonishment, it is now a tourism stopover, and an Air Greenland flight leaves Baltimore, MD, destined for Kangerlussuaq once each week during the summer.

Since the early 1950s, there has always been a fairly nice hotel there. Sondrestrom was a refueling point for the very first over -the-pole flights from Los Angeles to Europe, and the hotel was maintained for the passengers in case the planes could not take off due to weather or mechanical difficulty. When I was there, the two airlines involved were TWA, flying Lockheed Constellations, and SAS , piloting Douglas DC-6Bs. Both were the last generations of propeller driven passenger aircraft. The USAF has closed its airbase and now the entire "town" and airfield is under the care and maintenance of the Danish government.

With today's long range jet aircraft, stopping to refuel is no longer necessary, but SAS still flies there from Copenhagen, Denmark, two to three times a week. The picture to the left was taken in the 1970s and shows a Douglas DC-8 being prepped for flight. The steam in the air tells us the temperature was probably between thirty and forty degrees below zero.


During the winter, morale was a problem for those of us who stayed the entire year. The officers in charge tried their best to keep us grinning, but signs like the one to our right failed to get the job done.
Many times in winter, when we had been outside in extremely cold weather, we were required to drink a glass of cold water before we could have a cup of coffee. The water helped warm our teeth in stages so that we could have a hot drink without cracking the enamel and requiring extensive dental work.

A creature of the north doesn't seem too impressed with the SAS jumbo jet parked on the ramp. In Greenland and Scandinavia they are called reindeer. In Canada and Alaska the same animal is called a caribou.






Even the little critters will take a curious look at what the strange two legged animals are up to.







This is what the old airbase looked like. That's the control tower in the center and the runway is just in front of it. The string of boxlike buildings at the bottom of the photo are cement barracks for quartering the military residents. Before we left Ft. Eustis, VA, to travel to Sondrestrom, we were told that when we arrived we would be able to find a woman behind every tree. As you can see, there are no trees in Greenland. None. Not even one.

Was it cold? You betcha it got cold. We army types didn't stay on the base itself as shown above. We were stationed in wooden barracks seven miles over the hills. We were located at a little facility called Camp Lloyd right at the harbor. There were twenty of us (more or less) who stayed the entire year. In the summer when the harbor thawed we imported 300 army stevedores from the States to unload ships filled with goods for the airbase. Army trucks and army drivers then hauled the goods over the hills and to the base.

Our showers and restrooms (officially called latrines) were about fifty yards from the barracks, which were not well insulated. In the winter if you wished to really chill a six pack of beer, you placed it on the floor overnight. It would be ice cold for the next day.

One night after having showered, shaved, et al, I dressed up in my bulky but warm air force flight suit and trudged back to the barracks (Walking was not difficult as there was not much snow. It was usually too cold to snow). As I stood at the barracks door preparing to enter, the thermometer on the outside wall said that the temperature was 44 degrees below zero. I reflected that I had not seen the sun in weeks, thanks to perpetual darkness, and I swore that when I got back to the USA I would never, ever complain about hot weather again. I still keep that promise today.