Kristian and Henry Neilsen, in their 2021 book Camp Century: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Arctic Military Base Under the Greenland Ice, detail an offer of one billion US dollars made to Denmark, which had ruled Greenland under the auspices of the Danish crown since 1814, in December 1946. The United States then, as now, desired control of Greenland to bolster international security against their nuclear foes in Russia.
As Kristian and Henry explain, the
American presence in the Thule area, far to the north on the west coast of Greenland, had begun during World War II, and the Americans had been there ever since. The American weather station Bluie West Six, built during the war, lay just a few kilometers from the indigenous settlement of Pituffik. Just after the war, as part of Operation Nanook, the Americans expanded the existing installation with a gravel landing strip as part of an upgrade to a new and larger weather station. Between 1947 and 1950, American reconnaissance planes thoroughly photographed the area for cartographic purposes. Meanwhile, young university students did surveying and mapping work on the ground. There was little information about the geographical and meteorological conditions in the area, and acquiring this knowledge was an essential precondition for realizing the polar strategy and thus establishing US military supremacy in the Arctic.
Denmark refused the offer from Washington.
“While we owe much to America, I do not feel we owe them the whole Island of Greenland,” Foreign Minister Gustav Rasmussen told Josia Marvel, then the US ambassador to Denmark.
As the historical record would have it, both Denmark and the United States owe much to the ancient Norsemen who are believed to be the first people to have inhabited Greenland. Their obscurity can, at least partially, be accounted for by the scant details we possess of their early civilization on the roof of the world.
“The [Icelandic] sagas give a detailed (and to some extent an historically correct) account of life in Greenland during the period of the Norsemen,” writes Jørgen Taagholt, who sifted through what evidence does exist for an article published in a 1989 issue of Earth Sciences History.