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The Navy's Alaskan program is still greater, likely to cost more, for the Navy's job is to range far to sea and it needs bases for submarines, destroyers, capital ships as well as bases for aircraft. Its big establishment will be at Kodiak which Alaskans hope will eventually be made as strong as Hawaii, 2,600 miles directly south. Far west of Kodiak (and about 900 miles farther west than Hawaii) lies the Navy's outmost listening post, Kiska Island, which can be used as an advance base for air and submarine operations. Closer in toward Kodiak is a bigger station, Dutch Harbor, famed as landing place for naval patrol boat flights on Arctic training.
The Navy is no less hard at work at its inner defenses along the Inland Passage. For if Kodiak and Dutch Harbor are well defended an invader is likely to make his first thrust there. With a toe hold in Alaska's Panhandle he might end the supply lines of the northern bases while he strengthened his position for raiding against northwest U. S. Big Navy base in the Panhandle will be at Sitka, but other U. S. bases are being set up at Juneau and Ketchikan. A few weeks ago the Indian inhabitants of Metlakatla, on U. S.-owned Annette Island, descendants of refugees from religious persecution in Canada in the '80s, voted permission for the U. S. to set up a base on their reservation, too.
Arctic weather has a bag of tricks that cannot be learned in occasional nights to Alaska or midwinter operations in Minnesota. This winter, many a service pilot and mechanic who has worked at San Diego and Shreveport will head north to beat new enemies—sudden fogs, icing weather, sub-zero temperatures that make engine-starting tough. New hangar and field equipment will have to be designed and tested, new cold-weather clothing tried out. From now on, Alaska becomes a permanent station of U. S. defense.