Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments
Gretchen Heefner
University of Chicago Press
Copyright 2025 by the author

The Army was caught by surprise in WWII. Not by the enemy, but by the conditions in North Africa. They were expecting a hot, dry, flat expanse of sand. That may have been the case in the east with the British, but in Algeria and Tunisia, the terrain was rough and rocky. In December, it got bitterly cold at night. And it rained, turning the dry land into a quagmire. None of the gear and equipment they had was useful.

The Army was going to have to learn – and quickly – how to function in deserts. Similar lessons about the fickleness of Nature would have to be learned in Alaska, too (though for some reason, Heefner barely mentions the military bases in the tundra there). Especially since – once the Nazis and Japs were defeated – they would quickly have to turn their attention to containing the Communist Menace, even if it meant bases in Libya and Greenland.

Heefner’s approach is quite scattershot. Most of the focus is on the expansion of US military presence, but there’s also a good deal on the naturalists and scientists who were studying those regions and could have told the military a thing or three. Or the natives who were ignored, or worse, pushed aside when it came time to build a base. The engineering aspects themselves don’t get much attention, either.

What does get good coverage is the way military needs stimulate general science. The need to make standardized airstrips all over the world pretty much led to the creation of the field of soil mechanics. Trying to come up with a palette for desert camouflage that would be effective in all deserts tipped people off onto the many ways that deserts differ from each other. In trying to deal with the shifting and flexing ice in Greenland’s “Camp Century”, researchers pulled out the first ice cores from that ice cap, and saw how climate changed over the millennia. Even today, “base camp” for researchers in North Greenland is the still-in-use Cold War facility at Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base).

All this work in service of our Cold War aims was put to good use in the Apollo Program and its proposed follow-ups. Are there areas in the American deserts that resemble lunar terrain where we can train astronauts? Would the “cut and cover” construction method used in Camp Century work on the Moon? And how do you deal with lunar dust? “It’s coarse and rough and irritating… and it gets everywhere.”

Heefner does go all over the place, but in general, she hits her target. It’s a good read, and anyone interested in the Artemis Program, or other attempts to set up bases on the Moon (or Mars) will find it worth checking out.