I’ve already posted a couple geographical/historical oddities this week, and it got me thinking of some more… The island of Greenland has always intrigued me. It always seemed so opaque to any inquiry on any map. As most school boys could learn, I knew about the exploits of Eric the Red and Leif Ericson. This was especially true for a school boy living in Minnesota, where even the football team co-opted Scandinavian heritage.
I suppose the current societal flux about global climate change relates to the exploits of these Norse seafarers, since they saw what we would now call ‘ice land’ as green land. I always thought that the moniker of ‘greenland’ should have been applied to Ireland (an unsolicited personal opinion, which in no way impugns the land of the Irish…).
What I recently found was that in Greenland, as with the settlements in Vinland, the Norse settlers (once again, this is a pejorative term for some…) had problems with the indigenous peoples. In Greenland, they were battling the local Inuit peoples, who had been living there for centuries.
This generally sums up the totality of what most know about this land. The Greenlanders slowly died of and contact with the settlements ceased by 1300(CE).
For a student of history, this now comes to a period of almost virgin, untilled soil. In the year 1500, Portuguese explorers found this (world’s largest) island yet again, while looking for a Northwest Passage. As you might know, since we don’t currently have a Northwest Passage, this was dropped by Portugal. A couple of centuries late, Denmark tried its hand at an attempt to re-colonize this land (with little of any practical results).
Jumping ahead, there are a few interesting little bits to consider. In the 1930’s Norway tried to challenge Denmark’s hold upon this island (since Eric the Red was from Norway…). This actually was adjudicated in an international court (e.g. for Denmark, as it turned out…).
The real core of my interests in oddities comes to the fore here, in that at the onset of WWII, the Germans occupied Denmark, and the local Greenland governor temporarily transferred sovereignty to the USA. The USA, as with the rest of the Allies, could see that Greenland, in German hands would have a dire effect upon Atlantic shipping. As a matter of fact, the USA had some small airbases in Greenland during the war, and even more interestingly obscure, there was a US military dogsled patrol guarding the northeastern shores of Greenland. This ‘Sirius Patrol’ actually detected several German weather stations.
As you could extrapolate from this, Iceland was in similar straits during WWII, where the British armed forces occupied the island in 1940. Later on the USA took over control of Iceland at the request of the local government. For me, these little bits of information make me wonder what WWII was like in much of Africa and South America…
