Long ago, in talking of the sea, Sir Wilfred Grenfell,
the Labrador Doctor, said to me, "If you are fond of cruising,
why don't you come to Labrador and map one of the uncharted
fiords there?" ^*

If, when Grenfell had made his suggestion, I could have
looked into the future and seen what it was leading to, the vision
would have amazed me. The daydream would have led over dizzy
heights and through many a deep morass. The lure of the North
and the exploration of new techniques for charting by aerial
photography led me into a far greater digression from my regu-
lar work than I would have dared to undertake knowingly. But
then, as if by special planning of Providence, all of this digression
suddenly became germane to the issue of World War II.

In the spring of 1941 I was on active duty in the Naval Re-
serve as Lieutenant Commander in the Medical Corps, attached
to the Squantum Naval Air Station while working up the results
of some physiological research at Pensacola. In May, a letter from
my friend Major Harold B. Willis of the U. S. Army Air Corps,
requesting information about Labrador, brought me to Washing-
ton armed with photographs taken on our survey ten years earlier.
In Washington I learned that a chain of air fields was to be
established on the land masses of the far north. These were to

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