Churchill was very much a wartime Prime Minister, who switched party loyalties to either
Tories or Labour in favour of non-partisan goal fulfillment. (In that regard, he could have
been a student of Judge James Wickersham’s career as a delegate to the U.S. Congress.) He
was promptly demoted to MP rather than PM at the end of WW II, although he continued to
bluster and serve in Parliament until his retirement in 1954.
15
The Pacific Theatre of WW II challenged Americans with a new geography lesson every
day for 31/2 years. And Americans like me seem congenitally inept at geography.
Here is the maximum (mid-1942) extent of the Japanese Empire before the U.S. and
participating Allies began to turn the tide. Japan, it will be remembered had a foothold in
the Aleutians, and had bombed Dutch Harbor by early 1942. Although the Japanese Alaska
Campaign was a clever feint to draw off strength of U.S. and Canadian forces, the result of
that extent of Japan’s Pacific reach on Alaska’s future was profound. Governor Gruening
was on hand for that episode of Alaska history.
16
Hopkins’ 2008 book is a good starting point for Scoundrel-ologies in OLLI sessions beyond
the present one.
A central theme of Hopkins’ book is the Scoundrelism of Genera Douglas MacArthur,
whose major contribution to WW II seemed at times to be his battles in the Inter-service
rivalries between the U.S. Navy and Marines versus the U.S. Army and Army Air Force.
In particular, his self-serving pitch to the Joint Chiefs and to the White House was that it
was essential to victory that the U.S. Army re-take the Phillipines as a base from which to
attack the Japanese Home Islands. It can be argued, as here, that the Phillipines were a sidetrack that cost thousands of lives and millions of extra dollars and extra time, whereas
island-hopping by Navy and Marines and the Army Air Force would have done the job more
efficiently.
On the other hand, MacArthur’s postwar management of Japanese rebound and reestablishment of civilian government was certainly a credit to his memory. Whichever view
you adopt, Roosevelt did not feel confident enough to sack MacArthur, but President
Truman did that a few years later…
17
Here’s a photo of MacArther, FDR, Admiral Nimitz and Adm. William Leahy, at a strategy
session in Oahu in July 1944, 13 months before Japan’s unconditional surrender.
18
Now back to Alaska’s role in WW II, under Governor Gruening’s appointed oversight of the
Territory.
19
To relieve military traffic pressure on the heavily used White Pass and Yukon Railway in
1943, a primitive access road was carved from Haines, Alaska, through the northwestern
corner of British Columbia and the southwestern edge of Yukon Territory. This became
known as the Haines cutoff, and it joined the Al-Can or Alaska Highway at Haines Junction,
between Kluane (Tloo-Arny) Lake and Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
20
Future Senator E.L. Bob Bartlett is shown here riding in one of the first Jeeps to make the
run over the Haines Cutoff, near Chilkat Pass that partially follows the Dalton Trail
pioneered more than four decades earlier by Jack Dalton.
21
At the end of WW II, the military buildup in Alaska was, to some extent, receding with
massive de-mobilization of the armed forces. The center of gravity of Alaska’s military
activity and civilian population had moved sharply toward Ship Creek, the one-time
construction camp for the Alaska Railroad on Cook Inlet, now dubbed more euphemistically
for commercial interests as “Anchorage.” Here’s Greuning, flanked by Evangeline Atwood
on the left and her husband Robert, on the right, publisher of the Anchorage Times, at a
1945 Governor’s Dinner.
22
Military celebrities found it easier after the war to make their way to Alaska and to be wined
and dined there.
23
Pipelines and roads were added to the infrastructure of NW Canada and Alaska by the War.
The construction of these military support lines provided experience in engineering around
the challenges posed by permafrost terrain. In 1968-1977, all too many of these engineering
lessons had to be re-learned the hard way, after the State of Alaska’s nest egg of North Slope
hydrocarbons had been discovered, and before its liquid fraction could make its way to
market.
24
And yet, Alaska remained a Territory for 14 more years after WW II. Moreover, the
appointed Territorial Governor remained a part of DTIP, one of the vestigial remains of U.S.
colonal imperialism.
25
Thanks to Naske’s book, we have a pretty clear focus on 20 years of Gruening’s life, from
his presidential appointment to DTIP, through 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower ended
Gruening’s 14-year reign by appointing the 66-year old Gruening’s successor as Territorial
Governor.
EG’s effectiveness and public service was far from over.
26
After 1953 Gruening argued and fought for Statehood and the self-determination it
connoted, alongside many committed Alaskans of prominence. Alaska residents’ “taxation
without representation” in Washington D.C. was fundamentally irksome.
In 1958, during Ike’s second term as President, Statehood passed in Congress, supposedly
because Alaska’s then Democratic Party predominance could be expected to be offset in
Congress by Hawaii’s entry into the Union, which promised to offset Alaska’s tilt with that
50th state’s Republican tilt.
27
With the enactment of Statehood, Alaska would finally elect its Governor, two Senators and
one Representative in Congress. Bill Egan of Valdez was elected Governor, Gruening and
E.L. “Bob” Bartlett were elected to the Senate (and settled the issue of Seniority by a coin
toss, which made the chronologically younger Bartlett Alaska’s Senior Senator). Democrat
Ralph Rivers was elected as Alaska’s first Congressman.
28