USAAF, Fort Bell 1941-1948
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USAAF, Fort Bell and Kindley Field, Bermuda, 1941-1948. Prior to American entry into the Second World War, an agreement was arranged between the Governments of Prime minister Winston S. Churchill and President Roosevelt for the loan of a number of obsolete ex-US Naval destroyers to the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy, in exchange for which the USA was granted 99-year base rights in a number of British West Indian territories. This had the sleight-of-hand
effect of placing the defence of those territories in the hands of the neutral USA, allowing British forces to be sent to the sharper ends of the War.
Although not part of this exchange, Churchill also gave the US similar base rights in Bermuda and Newfoundland. This came as rather a surprise to many in Bermuda, when US engineers arrived in 1941 to begin surveying the colony for the construction of an airfield that was envisioned as taking over most of the West End of the Island. Frantic protests by the Governor and local politicians led to those plans being revised. The US Army would build an airfield at the North of Castle Harbour. The US Navy would build a flying boat station at the West End.
The airfield was intended to be a joint US Army/Royal Air Force facility, to be used by both primarily as a staging point for trans-Atlantic flights by landplanes. When the US Army occupied the area, it created Fort Bell. The next two years were spent levelling Longbird Island, and smaller islands at the North of Castle Harbour, infilling waterways and part of the harbour to make a land-mass contiguous with St. David's Island. This added 750 acres to Bermuda's land mass, bringing the total area of the base to
1,165 acres. The airfield was completed in 1943, and known as Kindley Field, for Great War aviator Field E. Kindley. Most of the base was taken up by the US Army Air Forces. The Western end of the airfield was taken up by the RAF. RAF Air Transport Command, formerly based at Darrell's Island, re-located to the landplane base, leaving only RAF Ferry Command operating on Darrell's.
After the end of the Second World War, the RAF closed its facilities in Bermuda. The Head of RAF forces in Bermuda, Wing Commander Mo Ware, was loaned to the Colonial Government to oversee the conversion of the RAF facility at Fort Bell into a Civil Air Terminal as the commercial flying boats which had provided the island's civil air links began to be superseded by landplanes, which could not operate from Darrell's Island. Mo Ware ultimately remained with the Colonial Government, after leaving the RAF, heading up the Civil Aviation department until his retirement.
In 1947, the US Army Air Forces were separated from the US Army to form the independent US Air Force (USAF). The base was then renamed Kindley Air Force Base, later becoming Naval Air Station Bermuda from 1970-1995 before being turned over the the Bermuda Government, which operates it, today, as the Bermuda International Airport (although it is still commonly known as Kindley Field).
