Northwest Staging Route

Download coordinates as: The Northwest Staging Route was a series of airstrips, airport and radio ranging stations operating in Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska during World War II.

The Northwest Staging Route carried warplanes to the Soviet Union, at a time when that country was fighting German invaders along the Eastern Front.

The US-Canadian Permanent Joint Board on Defense decided in the autumn of 1940 that a string of airports should be constructed at Canadian expense between the city of Edmonton in central Alberta and the Alaska-Yukon border.

[1] Neither the Eleventh Air Force, nor the United States Army, nor the Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union could wait for the Alaska Highway to be completed.

Marks Army Airfield, near Nome, Alaska was 500 miles closer to Russia, but was ruled out because the United States feared it was too vulnerable to Japanese attack.

One route originated at Great Falls Army Air Base, Montana, where aircraft bound for Russia were ferried from their manufacturing plants in Southern California.

The aircraft were supplied with Russian language operations and maintenance manuals, as well as painted in Red Air Force camouflage colors and national markings.

[3][4] The Russians set up a command at Ladd Field and Nome where their pilots were trained to take over the aircraft and fly them to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and on to various fronts in western Russia.

It was sometimes quite exasperating, as the USAAF would work long hours of overtime to get the aircraft into first-class condition so that all the Russians had to do was fly them from Fairbanks to the Eastern Front.

President Roosevelt considered holding a summit in Fairbanks in 1944 to meet with Stalin, however the location was subsequently changed to Yalta in the Soviet Union.

In 1945, the United States and Soviet Union were about to embark on a Cold War and the Russians departed Fairbanks shortly after the Japanese capitulation in September 1945.