DEW line “black hole in Canadian history”

The impact of the early warning defence radar sites, which sprouted like mushrooms across the Arctic in the mid-1950s, is the focus of a research project the Arctic Institute of North America, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies hope to undertake.

“My dream is to have this enormous gap in our national history filled,” said Bob Williamson from the AINA in Calgary. “It’s embarrassing that it’s a black hole in Canadian history.”

Fifty years ago last month, Canada and the United States approved the construction of the distant early warning line. These 58 sites, known as the DEW line, were strung from Alaska to Greenland along the 68th parallel, and were intended to serve as a radar shield to detect Soviet bombers.

The McGill fence, later referred to as the Mid-Canada line, was built at the 55th parallel to confirm the direction of bombers detected by the DEW-line.

The two lines would be the primary air defence warning during an “Over-the-Pole” invasion of North America.

But by the time the $600-million DEW-line was finished in 1957, it was already obsolete.

Even though the DEW-line offered no guarantees that the enemy bombers would be shot down, the sites were an effective deterrent until they were replaced in the 1980s by the unmanned North Warning System.

The DEW line had already changed the Arctic environment, which was left contaminated by debris, leftover fuel and toxic substances forever.

It also altered Inuit society in profound ways, said Williamson.

First, there was the “the sudden presence” of a DEW line site in places that had never seen a building.

“It was quite an upheaval. This was a quiet part of the world except for the wind,” Williamson said.

During “Operation sealift” in the early 1950s, 120 ships in two convoys delivered 23,000 construction workers, 42,000 tonnes of steel, 337 million litres of fuel and 12 acres of bedding to the sites.

Inuit gravitated toward the activities at the sites.

“The DEW line was built in a hurry and they hired as many people as they could,” said Williamson, who was working in the eastern Arctic as an anthropologist during that period. “A lot of the Inuit were quite keen to get work and have money and get housing, as well as medical facilities.

Times were pretty hard then. This was the time of the really dreadful TB epidemic. Life was very hard for the people. Fur prices were not good then and the federal government was just starting to assume responsibility.”

Williamson said it’s easy for people to get sentimental about the old way of life before the DEW line and criticize the forces of change, but he doesn’t think all the changes that started around the DEW line were bad.

For one thing, the DEW line opened up air transportation in the Arctic.

And, as a result, the DEW line was ultimately responsible for the development of cooperatives because it made the transportation logistics possible.

The changes were, however, profound.

“People were encouraged to move into the communities, and suddenly there was urbanization,” Williamson said.

“My real life seems like something somebody once told me about,” a DEW line employee told a journalist after six months on the DEW line.

Williamson said Inuit need to be heard in the story of the DEW line.

“But not too many of the older people who were directly affected by the arrival of the line are alive,” he said.

The research project Williamson and his colleagues are proposing, which is called “The DEW-line Sea-Lane Project,” has a double purpose.

It’s also intended to examine the potential problems of the next wave of development in the Arctic. This will be caused by global warming, melting sea ice and the expected opening of the Northwest Passage to year-round shipping.

“We want to see what lessons we can learn from this experience all begun by this first initiative of the DEW line and to see what impact the recession of the sea ice which will permit large amounts of shipping will have,” Williamson said.

“That will be a very large industrialization.”