Word: icelandic
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...haul. The inevitable result: much lower mortality among British merchantmen, much higher mortality among U-boats. Add to this the fact that Reykjavik can now serve as a base for U.S. naval patrols, particularly air patrols, as far as the coast of Norway, and the U.S. occupation of Iceland may eventually prove to be a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic...
...guard the secret of its occupation of Iceland the U.S. Navy blanketed its movements well, but one North Carolina newspaper publisher guessed what was up a full fortnight before the Navy moved. He received a letter from a young Marine renewing his subscription: "After July 1," wrote his faithful reader, "send the paper to me in Iceland." The publisher caught on, kept the intelligence to himself until after the Marines landed...
...sending not only marines but trees to Iceland. In the July Journal of Forestry, a young, husky, German-born Colorado forester, Jacob Jauch, tells how he has unofficially exported enough seed from Colorado's cork-bark firs and spruces to produce some 125,000 trees for Iceland's chief forester, Hakon Bjarnason...
...Iceland is now nearly treeless. This is not entirely the climate's fault: its coasts, washed by the Gulf Stream, are warmer than the high country of Colorado, and its capital, Reykjavik, has about the same mean annual temperature as New York City. But while the island was a subject of various European nations during the last 1,100 years, its timber was exploited until its hills lay rock-naked as its lava wastes. New forests never grew because, in winter, shepherds would turn out their hungry flocks, which gnawed groves of saplings, preventing the regrowth of natural forests...
Today, under nightless July skies, the Colorado trees are growing in Iceland's valleys, fenced off from sheep and guarded by rangers on ponies. The seeds were sent unofficially, as from one forester (Jauch) to another (Bjarnason). They are irrelevant to U.S. defense: the marines will have to stay in Iceland 50 years before the fir or spruce look like respectable forests...