During the Second World War, US preparations for combat in North Africa revealed an astounding level of American ignorance about the influence of heat on the human body. Training exercises resulted in numerous deaths from dehydration and heat exhaustion. At the Army Desert Training Center in California, instructors tried to harden soldiers to extreme conditions. Rather than increasing water rations amid intense heat, they told men to endure it. General George Patton kept his soldiers to one quart of water per day, and a field manual insisted that any additional water would be wasted due to perspiration. Many soldiers died in training because of such assumptions. These losses led the US military to begin the process of developing more robust expertise about survival in harsh conditions.
Gretchen Heefner’s Sand, Snow, and Stardust is about the US military’s efforts to function in extreme environments. It is a thoughtful tour through a few crucial decades of US military history, when the armed services imagined what knowledge and logistical expertise they would need to perform in any conditions. Most of Heefner’s narrative focuses on desert and arctic warfare, with additional discussion of space and the Moon. It covers the period from the Second World War to the 1960s, as scientists and engineers assessed effects of heat and cold on humans, and sand, ice and snow on machines. She analyses new centres that studied human survival, such as the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and the air force’s Arctic, Desert, and Tropic Information Center (ADTIC), and new coordinating bodies such as the Research and Development Board (within the Department of Defense). Heefner peoples the story with some colourful characters, such as the Australian Hubert Wilkins, who advised on extreme desert conditions, and Paul Siple, who had accompanied the explorer Richard E. Byrd on Antarctic expeditions in the 1920s and was a zealous advocate for polar research.
A highlight of Heefner’s book is her discussion of the army’s efforts to create a long-term station in Greenland called Camp Century. We learn about the displacement of Innughuit people, as well as a secret project to build tunnels for moving around nuclear missiles. Heefner notes that civilian and military projects proceeded simultaneously, and the military presence in Greenland was normalized by a publicity campaign to play up civilian aspects. The army invited Boy Scouts to participate in scientific observations, and the site was featured in magazines such as Life and Popular Science.
While in Greenland, the army learned the hard way that temporary operations in extreme conditions were one thing, but long-term occupation was quite another. Construction teams built an ambitious site, and even brought in a nuclear reactor to supply power. Within a few years they had shut it down and removed the reactor, humbled by unreliable construction and unpredictable ice movements. Even amid such setbacks, sites such as Camp Century served as proof of capability. Heefner writes of ‘the stunning audacity and breadth of US infrastructure, and the lengths that engineers would go to master the extremes’ (pp. 204–5). By the 1970s the US military believed it could deploy anywhere on earth.
While Camp Century was chosen for its strategic location, Heefner argues that most sites developed during this period were typically attempts not to understand specific environments, but rather to create generalizable abstractions about desert and arctic warfare. They were designed to empower military operations that could occur anywhere, and provide the US with a wide range of credible options in military intervention. The Yuma Test Station in Arizona, for example, ‘could become a giant outdoor simulation for all the world’s deserts’ (p. 130). For the US military, it seems, a desert was a desert, whether it existed in Africa, Central Asia, or southern California. Research on these sites also focused on more than just human endurance of extreme temperatures. Heefner includes a fascinating section on the efforts in the 1950s to create new desert uniforms, based on comprehensive surveys of the world’s desert colour palettes. Similarly, the Army Corps of Engineers Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) saw in Greenland an opportunity learn about arctic processes generally, and to give military commanders a more sophisticated classification system of the substances they had to work with (indeed one resultant reference manual was called The Physics and Mechanics of Snow as a Material).
One of Heefner’s points is that, despite obvious differences between deserts and ice, “extreme” environments were often conceptualized in the same ways by military engineers. The challenges of sand dunes and snow drifts shared some commonalities. Considerations about transport, drainage and construction were often similar. In fact, early ideas about construction on the Moon (provided to NASA by the Army Corps of Engineers) were adapted from what the military had learned about arctic and desert environments. The aerial photography and terrain assessment techniques used in Greenland were reused to evaluate potential lunar landing sites. A perusal of the manual Lunar Construction reveals a ‘sophisticated amalgam of previous plans and ideas, many of which had ties to some of the terrestrial extremes’ (p. 271).
Heefner’s lively prose is rooted in close reading of primary sources, and she tells an important story about the dovetailing of environmental science and US military ambitions. A minor quibble is that she sometimes overstates significance, as when she claims that ‘the United States became a planetary power because of the acquisition of environmental intelligence’ (p. 302). However, the causal relationship between environmental knowledge and the development of US power is not the focus of the book. Instead, Heefner shows us how the US military tried to understand environments in which it might need to operate. Through initiatives begun in the Second World War, it gathered immense amounts of data, and created sophisticated ideas of how humans and their infrastructures could function in extreme conditions. The resulting concepts and practices had a long-standing influence on military strategy, and the collaborative relationship between environmental scientists and military partners, especially in remote locations, would continue for many decades to come.
