RED STAR OVER ALASKA

RED STAR OVER ALASKA
The ALSIB Air Route: How America Sent Nearly 8,000 Warplanes Through Alaska and Siberia to Stalin

In the frozen skies above Alaska, American-built fighters took off wearing Soviet red stars.

Between 1942 and 1945, the United States and Soviet Union created one of the most extraordinary-and least remembered-air bridges of the Second World War. Known as ALSIB, the Alaska-Siberia Air Route, it carried nearly 8,000 American military aircraft from factories in the United States through Canada and Alaska, across the Bering Strait, and deep into Siberia.

It was an alliance few could have imagined before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

American ferry pilots brought P-39 Airacobras, P-63 Kingcobras, A-20 Havocs, B-25 Mitchells, C-47 transports, and other aircraft north through the dangerous Northwest Staging Route to Ladd Field at Fairbanks. There, Soviet pilots inspected the airplanes, learned unfamiliar American controls in a matter of days, replaced American insignia with red stars, and flew west toward Nome and Siberia.

The journey was far from safe.

Pilots battled Arctic cold, icing, fog, mountains, primitive navigation, mechanical failures, and enormous stretches of wilderness where an emergency landing could mean death. Some aircraft disappeared without trace. Others crashed into mountains or tundra and remained there for decades.

Yet the aircraft kept moving.

Great Falls. Edmonton. Whitehorse. Fairbanks. Nome. Uelkal. Seymchan. Yakutsk. Kirensk. Krasnoyarsk.

It was a production line across the top of the world.

In Red Star Over Alaska, Ian James tells the remarkable story of the pilots, mechanics, interpreters, engineers, construction crews, and Soviet ferry regiments who made ALSIB work. The book explores the building of the Alaska Highway and Northwest Staging Route, the unusual Soviet mission at Ladd Field, the rapid conversion training of Russian pilots, the aircraft Stalin wanted most, the dangerous Siberian relay system, and the forgotten casualties scattered across the Arctic wilderness.

It also tells a story filled with historical irony.

During World War II, Alaska was a bridge between America and the Soviet Union. American mechanics repaired Soviet aircraft. Russian pilots lived at an American military base. Red stars on American-built fighters represented an ally.

Only a few years later, the same Arctic became one of the most dangerous frontiers of the Cold War.

Red Star Over Alaska is the forgotten story of the brief moment when the United States and Soviet Union looked across the Bering Strait not as enemies-but as partners in the race to defeat Hitler.

For readers interested in World War II aviation, Lend-Lease, Alaska military history, the Eastern Front, Soviet aviation, forgotten military operations, and the hidden logistics behind Allied victory, this is the story of one of the greatest air-delivery operations of the war.