The Northwest Staging Route was a series of airstrips, airport and radio ranging stations built in Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska during World War II. It extended into the Soviet Union as the ALSIB (ALaska-SIBerian air road).

Origins

The route was developed in 1942 for several reasons. Initially, the

7th Ferrying Group 7 (seven) is the natural number following 6 and preceding 8. It is the only prime number preceding a cube. As an early prime number in the series of positive integers, the number seven has greatly symbolic associations in religion, mythology, s ...

, Ferrying Command, United States Army Air Corps (later Air Transport Command) at

Gore Field Great Falls International Airport is a public/military airport in city limits three miles southwest of central Great Falls in Cascade County, Montana, United States. The airport has also been called Great Falls Municipal Airport. The Nation ...

(Great Falls Municipal Airport) was ordered to organize and develop an air route to send assistance to the Soviet Union through

Northern Canada Northern Canada, colloquially the North or the Territories, is the vast northernmost region of Canada variously defined by geography and politics. Politically, the term refers to the three Provinces_and_territories_of_Canada#Territories, territor ...

, across Alaska and the

Bering Sea The Bering Sea (, ; rus, Бе́рингово мо́ре, r=Béringovo móre) is a marginal sea of the Northern Pacific Ocean. It forms, along with the Bering Strait, the divide between the two largest landmasses on Earth: Eurasia and The Ameri ...

to Siberia, and eventually over to the Eastern Front. The US-Canadian

Permanent Joint Board on Defense The Permanent Joint Board on Defense (spelled Defence in Canadian English) is the senior advisory body on continental military defence of North America. The board was established by Canada and the United States on August 17, 1940 under the Ogd ...

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. Late in 1941 the Canadian government reported that rough landing fields had been completed.Carter 1983, pp. 42, 44–45. With the outbreak of war, American lines of communication with Alaska by sea were seriously threatened and alternative routes had to be opened. The string of airports through the lonely tundra and forests of northwest Canada provided an air route to Alaska which was practically invulnerable to attack, and it seemed to be in U.S. interests to develop them and open a highway which would at once be a service road for the airports and a means for transporting essential supplies to the Alaskan outposts. In response, the United States Army began building the

Alaskan Highway