Strategic Map: Northwest Frontier

On the following two pages, TIME presents a map of the U. S.'s northwest frontier, and its name is Alaska. Its area is one-fifth as large as that of the 48 States. At its westernmost point the mainland of the territory is separated from the mainland of Asia only by the 62 miles of Bering Strait. Its outpost, Little Diomede Island in Bering Strait, is separated from Russian-owned Big Diomede by only a mile and a half of open water. Its westernmost Pacific Ocean island (Attu) is only 250 miles southeast of Russia's advance submarine base on the Komandorskie Islands, only 696 miles east of Japan's advance base on Paramosmiri Island, off the toe of Kamchatka. An airplane from any of these Asiatic strongholds can cross the international date line and be over U. S. territory in 20 to 24 hours before it takes off.

Alaska has been vulnerable to invasion since navies were converted from sail to steam. It took the airplane to make it a strategic area from which an attack could be launched against the U. S. From the southern boundary of the narrow, water-laced Alaska panhandle which extends southward along the western frontier of Canada, Seattle is only 625 miles by air. From Juneau, considerably farther north and west, Pan American Airways runs regularly, twice a week, flies to Seattle in seven hours. The special importance of this fact is that this part of Alaska also lies along the route that any Oriental invader would naturally take in approaching the U. S. A ship following a great-circle course from Yokohama to San Francisco passes within 300 miles of the Aleutian Islands. The seemingly shorter route via Hawaii is 1,100 miles longer. So an invader intending to attack the west coast of the U. S. would find it a great advantage to snaffle Alaska and use it as an advance base for operations by air and sea against the U. S. proper.

There is a further threat since Russian naval and air establishments have been built on the Kamchatka Peninsula (which wanders off the western edge of the map), since the Russians are reported to have constructed bases at East Cape, Anadyrsk, and other nearby points on the Asiatic mainland.

These dangers do not make a liability of the $7,200,000 which Secretary of State Seward paid for Alaska in 1867. Alaska would still be there as a danger if Mr. Seward had not bought it. U. S. possession of it is a great strategic asset and $7,200,000 is not much more than the cost of a modern destroyer. Lying close to the great-circle course from northern Asiatic ports to the U. S., Alaska is a base from which U. S. submarines and aircraft can operate against the flank of any invader.

It is also a strategic economic asset. Since the U. S. bought it, the territory has exported about $2,000,000,000 in fish, furs, gold, etc. and its 70,000 inhabitants (half white, half Indian) have no more than scratched its natural resources.

Today, to protect strategic Alaska, the U. S. is spending $45,000,000, more than six times the purchase price of the territory. Alaskans, alarmed by Japanese and Russian reaches toward the north, hope it is just a start, that before the fortification of the territory is completed the U. S. will have sunk as much in it as it did in Hawaiian defenses: about $400,000,000.