Cartwright, Labrador

In 1952 the US and Canadian governments started construction of a defensive radar network along the Arctic Atlantic coast and across Canada. It consisted of two lines of interlocked radar stations, the northernmost of which was called the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line. It paralleled another line a few hundred miles south called the Pinetree Line.

In June of 1953 I was told I was going to one of these stations. It was a far cry from duty in Japan, Korea or Europe but I was excited at the prospect, particularly since the tour of duty was for one year and if I worked it right and had less than six months on my enlistment when I came back to the States I would be discharged. I was to report to Grenier AFB near Manchester, New Hampshire and join the 922nd AC&W Squadron which was scheduled to go somewhere along the DEW or Pinetree Line in September 1953.

I went home on 15 days leave. Five days after I got home I received a telegram ordering me to cut short my leave and report early to Grenier to join what was called an "Advance Party" that was departing very soon for Labrador.

This meant I had to return to New Jersey, collect my gear and car (a green 1949 Plymouth that I had bought that winter) and travel to New Hampshire.

When I arrived in New Hampshire I was told I had two days before we were to ship out. I packed my civilian clothes in a spare duffel bag for shipment home and sold my car to the nearest used car lot. The next day about 50 of us went by train to the Brooklyn Navy Yard where we boarded a flat-bottomed WW II Landing Ship Tank (LST) loaded with vehicles and set out for the various radar base construction sites in Newfoundland, Labrador and Baffin Island.

LST’s were the largest of the numerous landing craft used during the war. They were designed for carrying a large cargo of heavy motorized equipment. They were an ocean-going craft with two large doors in the bow that opened to permit a ramp to drop for vehicles to drive ashore. Some had no top deck, just a cargo well. Ours had a top deck covering the huge cargo hold. The crew and passengers lived in compartments alongside the cargo hold. Our bunks were next to the steel plates that were the hull of the ship.

There were nine of us bound for a radar site at the mouth of the Sandwich Bay near Cartwright, Labrador. We were to work with the construction contractors who were finishing work on a new radar station. What work we were to do was not specified. There would be 123 men in our Squadron at Cartwright. The rest would be coming late in September. Several other "Advance Parties" were on board to be dropped at various other sites.

We spent nine days on that rough riding tub. I was one of the few who did not get sick – but it was a near thing. We made several stops to drop off people and cargo. I remember stops at St. John’s and Argentia, Newfoundland. There were others. I also remember all of the icebergs that we saw the last couple of days. You thought about those icebergs when you went to bed with your head next to the hull where you could hear the ocean on the other side of a three quarter inch steel plate.

One day we passed a big, old Portuguese fishing trawler anchored in a rough sea. It was a motor ship but it also had rigging for sails. Around it for miles were dories with single men in them. Single men in dories in the open, stormy sea. That has to be the definition of courage.

On the tenth day the LST beached its bow to the temporary town housing the construction workers who were putting the finishing touches on a radar site perched on a rocky, treeless promontory about one mile to the east. The site overlooked the mouth of Sandwich Bay, a 25 mile incursion into the central coast of Labrador. The tiny village of Cartwright was about two miles to the west.

The dominant feature of the contractors village was the thousands and thousands of oil drums in a stack 20 feet high and hundreds of yards long along the gravel beach. There was a large motor pool for the earth movers, bulldozers and trucks. There were barracks, a large mess hall, a big medical dispensary and every other kind of facility needed to provide the needs of 500 construction workers.

There were ten of us, two officers and eight enlisted men. We were housed in a large tent with a wood frame and floor. The officers moved into a plywood structure that was the barracks for the construction company foreman.

The countryside was hilly and covered with scrubby evergreen trees eight to ten feet tall. Lakes dotted the countryside. The only road had been built by the construction contractor (Morrison & Knudson) two years before. It went east one mile from the workers quarters up the hill to the radar site and west around the bay two miles to Cartwright.

The construction workers were virtually all Canadians, mostly French Canadians. They were working under six month contracts – if they stayed six months they got free transportation home – and the construction season lasted six months in any year. The site had been under construction for two seasons.

There was also a crew a technicians from Canadian Marconi whose job it was to install the two radar sets and all the radios. They were of mixed nationality. There were several Englishmen, two or three Scots, an Australian, a few English speaking Canadians and a French speaking Canadian foreman.

We of course were anxious to find out what it was we were supposed to do. We had been told that we were "hand picked" for this assignment. Whatever that meant.

Our Commanding Officer was a Captain named Sidney Kalmaer from Brooklyn. He was a certified character. He called everybody Sam. Short, stocky and dark with a handsome handlebar mustache, he was a bundle of energy who never really did anything. He was always conjuring up some sort of deal. He did not take himself or our assignment too seriously. We liked him.

Lieutenant John Laumer was the product of an ROTC program with a degree in Engineering. Very bright, a bit stolid and a hard worker but easy to get along with. He was an accomplished artist. He did a pencil portrait of me that I have had on a wall for a many years. He, like most of us, was just passing through.

Master Sergeant Fred Sartain and Staff Sergeant’s Gordon Beaman and James Tilley were the career military men in our group. Sartain was easy going but not to be trifled with. He knew everything there was to know about what it takes to get things done in the military. Beaman was big and not very bright and was the object of a lot of not too subtle jokes. Tilley was from the hills of North Carolina, a self professed hick who didn’t talk much but possessed of an instinctive understanding of electronics that belied his backcountry speech.

The rest of us were Airmen First Class. Van Johnson was a quiet black kid from Philadelphia, Fred Niehaus was tall, very skinny, pious and boring without a trace of a sense of humor. Dave Billings was a down Easterner from Seal Harbor, Maine. Laid back and folksy with a devastating wit, he was the sort that would do a prodigious amount of work if he was led – but not if he was bossed. Heavy set, with graying hair, he looked ten years older than he was. I asked him once what the hell people from Seal Harbor did all year. He took a puff on his pipe and that in that great deliberate, clipped Maine twang "We fish and have sex – and in the wintertime we can’t fish".

Leith (Bill) Pike was a hot tempered kid from Casper, Wyoming. He was the only one of the younger guys who was married. He was slender, not skinny, and obsessed with the idea that he needed to gain weight. He was one of those people who everyone tiptoes around because you never knew what would set him off. Two things I remember about Pike. One was that I once took advantage of his temper and won $154 from him playing blackjack. The other was the fact that he was constipated for four weeks. Did not go even once in that time. Maybe that had something to do with his attitude.

Bill Pike was the only person I was in the service with that I saw in later years. In 1962 while standing in a cafeteria line at Boeing I saw Bill Pike. He, like me, had gone to college after discharge. He was am electrical engineer. I saw him many times over the years at Boeing. He still had the hot temper, and had gained the weight he was so worried about, in fact he was fat. His first wife and their children lived not far from our home in Kent. They had divorced sometime in the late 1960’s after an abusive relationship. He still was not a pleasant person to be around. Bill had a couple of heart attacks before dying from one around 1990.

Within days after the ten of us got settled in it became apparent that we had absolutely nothing to do. For three months. Absolutely nothing.

When you have nothing to do it is amazing how quickly you fall into a routine that fills all the time. And how upset you become when something happens to interrupt it. We had to get up in the morning or we would miss breakfast. The rest of the day was filled with going to the village to the construction site, card games and naps.

There were no more than twenty houses in Cartwright. There was a dock (substantially modified by the contractors) for small boats, a fish processing buildings and two stores. he larger of the two was a Hudson’s Bay store. Half a mile across the arm of the bay was a Grenfell Mission and the residence of the most important man in the territory, the Mountie.

The mission was a home for orphaned children and included a tiny hospital which, like the Mountie, served a prodigious area.

The Mountie was young and good looking enough to play himself in a movie. To our surprise he did not wear the red jacket and wide brimmed hat we had been conditioned to believe was Royal Canadian Mounted Police garb. His everyday uniform was a very ordinary blue with yellow striping. Turns out the red uniform is for ceremonial occasions only.

The authority vested in Mounties in places like this was quite remarkable. He represented all aspects of law enforcement and was a figure of respect. In the summertime he tended to his territory by boat, since there were no roads and all settlements were on the water. In the wintertime he covered it all by dog sled.

The natives appeared to be of European extraction. Fishing and some trapping were the only ways of making money. It was, at best, a marginal existence and those that had a tad of initiative and luck managed to leave Cartwright for other areas. The town graveyard showed that drowning and TB were the principal causes of death, which seemed to occur most frequently before people reached forty. Though they worked on the water, none seemingly knew how to swim. The water was simply too cold.

Most houses had a collection of dogs of all sizes and descriptions, all of them yowling a lot and causing the village to smell very bad. Turns out they were sled dogs. I had always pictured sled dogs as big malamutes or huskies. The only sled dogs that looked the part belonged to the Mountie.

There was the time we decided to go fishing in one of the nearby lakes. We collected our gear, got some sandwiches from the mess hall and set out through the woods. We had gone about half a mile when we ran smack dab into what was literally a wall of mosquitoes. Never before or since have I been amongst so many insects. They were not a particular problem in camp or near the bay, but any excursion into the woods made you food for the swarms.

Captain Kalmaer was pretty loose about things so we started looking a little motley. Those that could grew beards or mustaches (I couldn’t). We wore whatever was handy and comfortable and it generally did not look much like a uniform. Our appearance was not enhanced by the fact that we had to cut each others hair and none of us knew how.

We spent a lot of time with the Canadian Marconi crew. They were an interesting collection of people. Englishmen, Scots, Canadians and an Australian. On the rare occasions when we would come by some beer (more about that later) we would share it with them. They were a good group to drink with. Besides knowing the best bawdy drinking songs I ever heard their continuous arguments with each other were fascinating.

From these arguments I learned a few things. One was that in the British Empire there is true animosity between the non English and the English, another is how deep the class distinctions are among the English themselves and these distinctions are set by speech patterns. I also learned that battles fought 300 years ago are always refought with great vigor after a few beers.

Our mail and what few supplies we needed came in by bush pilots flying an assortment of aircraft, mostly DeHaviland Beavers or war surplus PBY’s. Occasionally an Air Force SA-16 Grumman seaplane would come in, but that was rare. There was no landing strip so all aircraft landed in the bay.

The aircraft came from the big base at Goose Bay, a couple hundred miles to the west. Captain Kalmaer never missed an opportunity to go to Goose Bay -– and who could blame him. He would always return in a day or two often with a couple of cases of beer for us. We appreciated that since there was no liquor of any kind available in Cartwright. We noticed he would also bring back mail bags full of something besides mail. Our suspicions were confirmed a couple of months later when the good Captain was court martialed for smuggling whiskey from the Officer’s Club in Goose Bay and selling it to the construction workers for $50 a bottle.

The mess hall was big enough for everybody to eat at once – all the construction workers, the radar installers and the ten of us. The food was good and it was plentiful. The construction workers had little else to do but eat so they would raise a lot of hell if something was wrong with the food.

Mutton was served a lot. I remember that a big bowl of mint jelly was always on the table. Once they served it four nights in succession and on the fourth night the place erupted with the sounds of all the workers bleating like sheep. They kept it up for the entire dinner hour. Mutton wasn’t served again for almost two weeks.

Late in September 1953 the base was finished and in a period of three days all the construction workers were gone. They left their village intact. The beds in the barracks still had blankets on them. The mess hall and the big frozen food storage building was left with every knife, fork and spoon still in the racks. All the trucks, bulldozers, machine shops, storage buildings and radios were left in place. They just packed their suitcases and duffel nags and went to the airplane.

The base they built was rather impressive. All buildings were connected by insulated hallways. Each man had his own room with a closet, dresser, desk, chair and three quarter bed complete with fancy navy blue wool blankets. There were several lounges, a mess hall that didn’t look like a mess hall and a small PX.

The radar and communications equipment was the latest. There was a heated garage big enough to hold most all of our vehicles and a fully equipped maintenance facility.

The ten of us had all this to ourselves for about three days – then the rest of the squadron arrived by ship. Two other ships arrived at the same time with a years worth of supplies. It took all 123 of us two long days to unload those ships and another week to stow everything where it was supposed to be. It was the only work the ten of us had done in three months.

At least the ten of us would finish our year three months ahead of everybody else.

We soon learned what winter in Labrador was like. It was what you would expect it to be. Big time cold. And wind. And snow, lots of snow. More wind.

Our quarters were comfortable and the food was good but there was not much anyone could do for the boredom. Our lives settled into a sameness that was oppressive. Every day was the same as the last -–except when the mail would come.

In the course of that winter mail came in by several means. The bay was frozen solid so ski equipped planes landed on it when the weather permitted. Helicopters came in more often and on a few occasions mail was dropped by parachute. There was a six week stretch when the weather was so bad nothing came in. Everybody was getting very testy and it was a matter of time before fights started. Fortunately they were able to drop us our delayed mail before we were at each others throats.

Each night after work I would go to my room and take a short nap. I would then go to the mess hall with the same three guys. After chow I would return to my room and wait for the PX to open at which time I would go and sit at the same table with the same guys and drink the same number of beers. Pretty soon we were repeating the stories we had told each other. In the course of those winter months I heard all the stories there were to hear about exotic sexual experiences in Japan, or Korea, or Germany. There certainly were none to tell about Labrador.

Airman First Class Marion Hollingsworth from Indiana lived in a cluster of rooms across the hallway from mine. Since the buildings were interconnected by hallways sound traveled a long way. Every night at precisely 11 o’clock Airman Hollingsworth would step outside his room and shout as loudly as he could "Oh how I hate this place!". We came to count on hearing it every night. Nobody complained.

One of the breaks in the monotony were college classes. Instructors from the University of Maryland were brought in for about three months. I was able to get credits for one year of American History. I planned to go to college after discharge and those credits would help.

The coming of spring and the breakup of the ice in the bay meant that I was a short timer. The only thing I had to concern myself about was precisely when I would return to the States. It was essential that I return with less than six months remaining on my enlistment. The magic date was 10 July. Returning after that date meant that I would be eligible for discharge, returning before that date meant that I would have to serve out the rest of my enlistment – which was a possibility I did not even want to consider.

I was issued orders to report to Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts on the 9th of July. I was going to miss early discharge by one day! Fortunately I was working for an officer who was willing to enter into a small conspiracy that delayed my departure enough to assure that I get to the States after the 10th. I was flown in to Goose Bay by helicopter where I stayed a couple of days before flying to Westover AFB in Massachusetts on the 14th. I was on my to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey and discharge.

This detail was made available by Lyle Foltz. Lyle served as a member of the Advance Party at Cartwright. He arrived in June 1953 and departed in July 1954.