Word: nomes
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Could Churchill and Chiang Kaishek, in a similar manner, have armed Stalin with a legal claim to the Alaskan port of Nome and control of the Seward-Fairbanks railway...
Just ahead of the winter freeze-up, the broad-bottomed barges cast off from Nome's weather-beaten docks and tagged southward behind their tugs toward the Bering Sea. Townsmen ashore watched the cargoes of Air Force trucks, black oil drums and crated airplane parts disappear into the blue distance. The Air Force was leaving Nome, lock, stock & barrel. On the plains east of the city, Marks Air Force Base-once the hub of several satellite fields and home for 10.000 World War II troops-was deserted save for its housekeepers and the solitary comings & goings of commercial airliners...
...Nome had company in her shivery loneliness. All the way across the Aleutian chain, most of the old World War II air bases were deserted, their torn Quonsets flapping and creaking before the storms. South toward the States, on the foggy, mountainous coastal strip-never much good for air bases-the last detachments of troops had been moved out of Ketchikan and Sitka, and out of Juneau, the capital of the territory. Under the armed forces' new strategy for defending Alaska, the U.S. was coiling its strength-its winterized jet fighters, its cadres of weather-wise pilots...
...airmen, the Joint Chiefs decided; in 1947, it turned command of the theater over to the Air Force. The primary enemy thus became enemy airplanes, the primary defensive position, U.S. air bases. Let Russia or anyone else slip ground troops-airborne or seaborne-into such "islands of tundra" as Nome or Point Barrow, said the airmen, and you could isolate them like the mighty Japanese bases of Truk and Rabaul were isolated in the Pacific war. You would bomb the planes and shelters and leave them all shivering in the cold with no place to march...
...exodus from Nome was only part of a process by which Alaskan military commanders were getting ready for trouble. The command had taken great pains to rehearse the evacuation of wives & children of servicemen. At Kodiak, women & children had been tagged, checked off big lists, and marched to the waterfront in a driving rain to test the evacuation plan. At Fairbanks, Big Delta, Shemya and Adak, they had hurried to airfields with their baggage...