ALSIB: the Alaska-Siberia Air Route project
The US Army Air Corps (USAAC) Cold Weather Experiment Station was established in 1940 at the newly constructed Ladd Field in Alaska, close to Fairbanks. During World War II and later, the Cold Weather Test Detachment was crucial in testing aircraft to the limits of their operability.
Ladd Field became a busy bilingual hub for an alternate “back-door” delivery route to the Soviet Union in 1942 for desperately needed American Lend-Lease aircraft, which had previously been transferred along a Miami-South America-Africa-Iran-Russia air-sea route, according to the bookazine Second World War Stories by Mortons Books. Ladd would be in the middle of the Alaska-Siberia delivery route, which the Russians refer to as the Alaska-Krasnoyarsk route and the Americans as the Alaska-Siberia (ALSIB) Air Route project.
8,000 Lend-Lease aircraft delivered
From their factories, American pilots would ferry brand-new aircraft to Great Falls, Montana, the starting point of the route. From there, they would continue their journeys along the pre-war Northwest Staging Route into western Canada and into the interior of Alaska. The aircraft would be handed over to Soviet pilots at Ladd, who would then make their way to Galena, Moses Point, and Nome before crossing the Bering Sea to Uelkal and continuing through Siberia to Markova on the Anadyr River. They would subsequently be dispatched to their front-line units after that.
The first delivery of Douglas A-20 Havoc light bombers for the Soviet Union arrived at Ladd in September 1942. They were handed over to Russian pilots once their “squawk sheets” had been cleared as per Russian specifications.
By the end of the war, more Lend-Lease aircraft had been delivered via the ALSIB route than by all other routes combined; nearly 8,000 aircraft—including Bell P-39s and P-63s, Curtiss P-40s and (one) C-46, Douglas A-20s and C-47s, North American B-25s, and AT-6s, and Republic P-47s—had been transferred by September 1945.
Ice fog
One of the biggest single challenges of operating in Ladd’s sub-zero temperatures was working around the minuscule moisture-generated ice crystals that float in still air, creating “ice-fog”, demonstrated during joint USAAF-Army “aggressor-defender” exercises, designated as Task Force Frigid, around Fairbanks in 1947.
With the outside temperature hovering around -60°F (-51°C), Army troops rapidly burned up calories slogging through deep snow while attempting to defend their positions. One unit called for air support to strafe” an attacking aggressor force In response, four P-51 Mustangs were quickly pushed out of a warm hangar at Ladd Field along with four heavily bundled-up pilots, who were squeezed into tight-fitting cockpits to perform a brief flilghtline warm-up.
The moisture produced by the engine exhausts became ice fog. The air-support mission was canceled because visibility was completely gone by the time they taxied to the runway for takeoff.
Second World War Stories is published by Mortons Books and is available to order here.
Photo by U.S. Air Force