The Arctic in WW2 and Cold War: Military Strategic Role

The Arctic Ocean played a major role in the two world wars, as well as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the First World War (1914-18), the northern sea route, sometimes referred to as the Northeast Passage, became a major lifeline for Imperial Russia following the incomplete Baltic blockade by the Central Powers (mostly Imperial Germany).

Britain sent several older battleships to the Russian port of Arkhangelsk to serve as icebreakers and secure a steady supply of war material for their Russian ally. Between 1915 and 1916, Czar Nicholas II ordered the establishment of a port in the Russian city of Murmansk, a terminal for the railway line, because the waters surrounding this area were ice-free year-round. The Russian Revolutions of 1917 and a treaty signed with the Central Powers in 1918 ultimately brought hostilities to an end in this region, although sporadic fighting continued until the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922.

With Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Arctic again became a prominent battleground. German and Finnish troops attempted to capture Murmansk, but harsh weather and stiff Soviet resistance prevented them from doing so. Allied convoys in the Arctic organized by both Great Britain and the United States (who entered the war in December 1941) provided vital supplies for the Soviet Union. The convoys came under attack from German ships and airplanes departing from occupied Norway, and German submarines harassed the convoys along the way.

German troops also occupied some of the Arctic islands to obtain vital weather information, because they were at a clear disadvantage in this regard due to the Allied meteorological stations circling the globe. The strategically important Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard became a sporadic combat zone between Allied and German forces. A skeleton crew manning a German weather station on Svalbard’s Hope Island, largely forgotten by the High Command, was the last force to surrender in September 1945, months after the official German capitulation in May of the same year.

Plaque located at the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawai’i, commemorating the 1958 voyage of the USS Nautilus to the North Pole (Library of Congress)

The Cold War (1945-91) turned the Arctic into a major strategic ground between the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. The region was the shortest distance between these two nations and led to the proliferation of airbases and early warning stations in Alaska and Siberia. The Arctic also became a major site for a nuclear- powered naval race. In the late 1950s, nuclear-powered submarines and icebreakers came to the forefront. For instance, in 1958, the USS Nautilus made the first underwater Arctic crossing, and a year later, the USS Skate surfaced at the North Pole.

The Soviet Union excelled in double-hulled icebreakers, placing its first nuclear-powered ship, the Lenin, into service in 1959. Between 1975 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, its navy developed the powerful Arktika-class icebreakers. One of them reached the North Pole in 1977. The current Russian Confederation continues to construct such vessels to enable ice-free access to the vital northern route. Older ice-breaking vessels are now operating to grant access to the Arctic for a growing stream of tourists visiting the area due to its remoteness and the unique flora and fauna discussed earlier.

Nazi Weather-Observing Stations in the Arctic. When the Second World War broke out in Europe in September 1939, predicting the weather became an important component of military operations. The capture of Denmark and Norway in 1940 allowed the Germans to utilize weather information from stations located in the Arctic. By 1941, however, most Danish or Norwegian stations had been captured or destroyed by the Allies. Likewise, Allied airplanes and vessels quickly dispatched German weather ships. Requiring weather information for their operations in the Soviet Union, the Germans developed manned and unmanned weather observation stations, which were set up around the Arctic Ocean. The best- known unmanned station was “Karl,” which went into operation on Labrador Island off the Canadian coast.

Manned stations were a great deal more reliable and could be found on islands off the coast of the Soviet Union and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The station Schatzgraber (Treasure Hunter) was established on the Franz Joseph Land Archipelago in 1943. After eating polar bear meat infected with ringworm, its crew had to be evacuated from the site. The remains of this station were discovered in 2016. Among the last weather stations to be established on the Svalbard Archipelago was Haudegen (lit. Swashbuckler; Wilhelm Dege, the leader of the expedition, provided this play on words) in September 1944. Notable for sending weather data to Nazi-occupied Norway until the end of the war in May 1945, the crew was forgotten until they surrendered to a Norwegian seal hunter in September 1945. Rainer F. Buschmann.