An armada of 120 ships built a secret Arctic air base in one summer
In June 1951 a fleet of 120 ships left Norfolk, Virginia, carrying 12,000 men and 300,000 tons of cargo to northwest Greenland. Working around the clock under the midnight sun, they raised Thule Air Base in secret, a project often likened in scale to building the Panama Canal.
The site had drawn attention long before the Cold War. The explorer Knud Rasmussen, who set up a trading post nearby in 1910 and named it Thule after the classical edge of the world, was the first to see the flat Pituffik plain as perfect for an airfield. During the Second World War, with Denmark under German occupation, its ambassador in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, let the United States defend Greenland on his own authority and was charged with treason at home for it. A weather station and gravel airstrip followed.
Once Denmark joined NATO in 1949, the Korean War prompted a global American base-building drive, and Thule became its prize: sitting across the pole from the Soviet Union, it was also the most northerly port that ships could reliably resupply. A 1951 agreement let the United States run it under NATO, with the Danish flag flying beside the American one. The code name was Operation Blue Jay, and the French geographer Jean Malaurie and his Inuit companion Kutikitsoq stumbled upon the construction by accident while returning from the geomagnetic North Pole.
The base came at a cost to the people already living there. Residents of a cluster of huts called Pituffik were moved away, and in 1953 Denmark relocated 130 inhabitants of Thule village about 97 km north to a new settlement, now Qaanaaq. In 2003 Denmark's Supreme Court found the move unlawful and awarded the Thule tribe 500,000 kroner.
During the Cold War up to 6,000 service members were stationed there, bombers tested cold-weather operations, and the base staged construction of Camp Century, a nuclear-powered camp carved into the ice. Now run by the Space Force and renamed Pituffik in 2023, it tracks missiles and satellites with about 150 permanent personnel, 1,524 km from the North Pole.
Source: Pituffik Space Base
