Opening an Arctic Escape Route: The Bellot Strait Expedition Adam Lajeunesse and P. Whitney Lackenbauer During the second half of the 1950s, Canadian and American vessels surged into the North American Arctic to establish military installations and to chart northern waters. This article narrates the expeditions by the eastern and western units of the Bellot Strait hydrographic survey group in 1957, explaining how these “modern explorers” grappled with unpredictable ice conditions, weather, and extreme isolation to chart a usable Northwest Passage for deep- draft ships. The story also serves as a reminder of the enduring history of US Coast Guard and Navy operations in Canada’s Arctic waters in collaboration with their Canadian counterparts. Au cours de la deuxième moitié des années 1950, des navires canadiens et américains ont envahi l’Arctique nord-américain pour y établir des installations militaires et cartographier les eaux du Nord. Le présent article traite des expéditions des unités est et ouest du groupe de levés hydrographiques du détroit de Bellot en 1957 et explique comment ces « explorateurs modernes » ont été confrontés à des états de glace imprévisibles, à des conditions météorologiques et à un isolement extrême en traçant un passage du Nord-Ouest utilisable pour les navires à forts tirants d’eau. Le récit nous rappelle également l’histoire durable des opérations de la Garde côtière et de la Marine américaines dans les eaux arctiques du Canada en collaboration avec leurs homologues canadiens. In 1957, the construction of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line string of Arctic radar stations entered its third season and the US Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS) – which had been created eight years earlier to control, operate, and administer ocean transportation for the American military services – prepared The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord 31, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 1-30 2 The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord to send its convoys of supply vessels into Canadian waters to finish the project.1 Operating these icebreaking and construction fleets over the past two seasons had proven a crash course in Arctic operations, accelerating the US Navy (USN) and Coast Guard’s (USCG) learning curve and bringing into focus many of the dangers involved in operating large numbers of thin-skinned ships in the waters of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The MSTS inherited one persistent worry from past Arctic enterprises, extending as far back as the whaling fleets and Victorian explorers of the nineteenth century: the prospect of being trapped by the ice as the region froze back up in the fall. In the eastern Canadian Arctic, cargo ships had access to a reasonably reliable gateway through Lancaster Sound and Baffin Bay into the Atlantic Ocean. These were some of the last areas of the Arctic to ice up in the fall, with parts of Baffin Bay still navigable well into November. In the western Canadian Arctic, entering and exiting the region was a more precarious proposition. Ships moving east over the top of Alaska into Canadian waters had to pass between the Beaufort Sea icepack and the coastal area surrounding Point Barrow. In the summer months, the ice receded from the coast, allowing ships to pass along a narrow but navigable waterway between Alaska and the permanent pack-ice farther north – a tenuous route at best. During the 1955 and 1956 DEW Line sealifts, difficult ice conditions and strong currents repeatedly closed this escape route on the MSTS fleet as it tried to exit west. In his 1955 report to the Navy, the commander of Amphibious Group Three (the task force assigned to sealift material to the central DEW Line stations), Rear Admiral G.C. Towner, noted that calling the north Alaska coast a “route” was a misnomer, given that it was never open in any “ordinary sense.” Icebreakers were repeatedly beset, cargo vessels suffered heavy damage and schedules were impossible to maintain as the ice crashed south into the shore, only then to recede, “like the opening and closing of a series of doors.”2 For the ships operating east of Point Barrow, failure to slip through that door before it closed for the winter meant being crushed by the ice or, in the best-case scenario, being trapped until the next season’s thaw. Relying on luck to preserve dozens of vessels carrying hundreds of crew members and service personnel was poor policy and, beginning in 1956, the US Navy started to examine potential escape routes to the east.3 Finding reliable routes was no less important to modern vessels than it had been to previous generations of explorers and whalers. While narratives surrounding Arctic exploration during the so-called “heroic age” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are plentiful, there is comparatively little scholarship on modern exploration during and after the Second World War. Nevertheless, Canadian and American planners, backed by scientific 1 On the MSTS, see Salvatore Mercogliano, “Sealift: The Evolution of American Military Sea Transportation” (PhD diss., University of Alabama, 2004). 2 Cmmdr, Amphibious Group Three, “CTG 5.1: Operational Report Project 572, 1955,” Waldo K. Lyon Papers, Naval History and Heritage Command (NHH). 3 US Navy, “Post Operation Report: MSTS Arctic Operations” (1957). Opening an Arctic Escape Route 3 research programs, icebreakers, airplanes, and complex logistical systems, set out to understand and master this “hostile environment” in the interests of science and continental defence during this period.4 The postwar naval and coast guard task forces that operated in the region faced age-old environmental challenges associated with unpredictable ice conditions, weather, and extreme isolation. Over time, the size and scope of Arctic convoys grew, requiring innovative planning, elaborate preparations, and complex joint (Canada-US) interdepartmental/interagency coordination. These “modern voyages” of exploration made an expanded security footprint in the Arctic possible and facilitated the establishment and sustainment of stations in parts of the Arctic that were hitherto inaccessible to non-Indigenous people, culminating with the construction of the DEW Line.5 This article narrates the difficulties experienced by the eastern and western units of the Bellot Strait survey group created in 1957 to chart a usable Northwest Passage for deep-draft ships, advance hydrographic sounding efforts, and mark the route with aids to navigation. While historian P.J. Capelotti and retired Coast Guardsman Dick Judge have chronicled the details of this historic operation, the academic community has largely overlooked it.6 The role of the Canadian icebreaker HMCS Labrador has similarly received only passing reference.7 Drawing on the work of Capelotti and Judge, we use records from American and Canadian archives as well as private letter collections and diaries to incorporate US Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Navy perspectives, revealing how the North American partners overcame environmental challenges to achieve the first “triple feat of circumnavigation” and the first hydrographic survey of narrow, swift- 4 Matthew Farish, “Frontier engineering: from the globe to the body in the Cold War Arctic,” Canadian Geographer 50, no. 2 (2006): 177-196; and Farish, The Contours of America’s Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 5 See for example: Richard Morenus, DEW Line: Distant Early Warning – The Miracle of America’s First Line of Defense (New York: Rand McNally, 1957); Daniel Heidt and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “Sovereignty for Hire: Civilian Contractors and the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line,” in De- Icing Required: The Canadian Air Force’s Experience in the Arctic, eds. P.W. Lackenbauer and W.A. March(Trenton: Canadian Forces Air Warfare Centre, 2012), 95-112; and Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “Western Electric Turns North: Technicians and the Transformation of the Cold War Arctic,” in Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History, eds. Stephen Bocking and Brad Martin (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016), 259-90; and P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Matt Farish, The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line Coordinating Committee: Minutes and Progress Reports, 1955-63, Documents on Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security (DCASS) no. 15 (Calgary: Arctic Institute of North America, 2019). 6 P.J. Capelotti, Across the Top of the World: The U.S. Coast Guard’s 1957 Northwest Passage Expedition (Washington: USGC Historian’s Office, 2007); and Dick Judge, The Historic Northwest Passage and the CGC Storis: The Story of a Young Man Growing Up in the Coast Guard in the 1950s (self-published, 2007). 7 P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Elizabeth Elliot-Meisel, eds., “One of the Great Polar Navigators:” Captain T.C. Pullen’s Personal Records of Arctic Voyages, Volume 1: Official Roles,DCASS No. 12 (Calgary: Arctic Institute of North America, 2017); and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, Adam Lajeunesse, and Jason Delaney, HMCS Labrador: An Operational History (Antigonish: Mulroney Institute on Government, Arctic Operational History Series, vol. 1, 2017). 4 The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord flowing Bellot Strait which separates continental America from the Arctic Islands. The story also serves as a reminder of the enduring history of US Coast Guard and Navy operations in Canada’s Arctic waters in collaboration with their Canadian counterparts. Between the end of the Second World War and the completion of the DEW Line, the US Navy and Coast Guard sent dozens of icebreakers and cargo