Northeast Air Command
Northeast Air Command was a Major Command of the United States Air Force, responsible for the operation and defense of air bases in Greenland, Labrador, and Newfoundland. It was formed in 1950 from the facilities of the United States established during World War II in eastern Canada, Newfoundland and Greenland. It was discontinued in 1957.
History
Origins
Northeast Air Command was originally formed from the World War II facilities of the United States Army Newfoundland Base Command, which formed on 15 January 1941. The NBC was formed to command bases in Newfoundland which came under United States control as a result of the 1940 Destroyers for Bases Agreement; the 1941 US-Danish Agreement on Greenland, and the development by Air Transport Command of airfields in the Canadian Northwest Territories and Greenland to support aircraft ferry routes to Great Britain.Newfoundland Base Command
In the summer of 1940, President Roosevelt began negotiating with British Ambassador to the United States, Lord Lothian for the American lease of British bases, the "rental" to take the form of fifty over-age destroyers. On 2 September 1940, the negotiations were completed. In exchange for the destroyers, the U. S. got ninety-nine-year leases for bases in Dominion of Newfoundland, Bermuda, British Guiana, Antigua, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Jamaica and the Bahamas. No destroyers, or any other war material, was leased to Britain in exchange for the bases in Newfoundland or Bermuda, which were vital both as links in Britain's trans-Atlantic air routes and to waging the Battle of the Atlantic against Germany's submarines. The detailed lease agreements were not signed until March 1941. But by that time, American troops were already in Newfoundland.The first United States troops arrived in Newfoundland on 29 January 1941. The first base occupied was a temporary tent camp near St. John's called Camp Alexander. Nearby Fort Pepperrell received its first troops in November 1941. Newfoundland Base Command was assigned to the Northeastern Defense Command, a subordinate continental defense command of First United States Army, whose area included the east coast of the United States, with both commanded by Lt. General Hugh A. Drum, based at Fort Jay in New York City. In December 1941 the Northeastern Defense Command became the Eastern Theater of Operations and assumed First Army's role in continental defense. In March 1942 the ETO was renamed the Eastern Defense Command. The NBC was under the direct control of US Army General Headquarters for U.S. Troops in Newfoundland in the defense of the northeastern seaboard through First Army/Eastern Defense Command. The Base Command was responsible for its own supply, which was to be provided by the Second Corps Area, the service of supply organization also headquartered at Fort Jay, to the same extent as for units of the field forces.
NBC provided ground, antiaircraft, and harbor defense of U.S. bases in Newfoundland and Labrador, to work with Canada in defending Newfoundland, and to cooperate with the United States Navy in Newfoundland defense. Newfoundland Base Command was headquartered at Fort Pepperrell, St. John's, Newfoundland. Another major base was Naval Station Argentia.
The first USAAF presence in Newfoundland was in May 1941 when six B-18 Bolos from the First Air Force 21st Reconnaissance Squadron arrived at RCAF Station Gander. Later, the Army Air Forces Antisubmarine Command used both Gander and RCAF Station Torbay near St. John's for antisubmarine patrols over the North Atlantic and to provide convoy overflights over the shipping lanes, patrolling for U-boats. Both Canada and the United States built radar stations in Newfoundland. Beginning in the spring of 1944, the American stations were phased over to the RCAF so that American personnel could be moved to more active theaters.
Greenland Base Command
While the exchange of destroyers for a string of Atlantic bases was under negotiation, and then, while plans and preparations for developing the new bases were getting under way, the United Kingdom and Canada were consolidating their position in the North Atlantic by stationing troops in Iceland and were attempting to counter German activities in Greenland.With United States bases were under construction in Newfoundland, a number of possible sites for airfields in Greenland were made in late 1940. Greenland being a Danish colony with Denmark under the occupation of Nazi Germany at the time. These surveys were made with the justification that the defense of the American bases in Newfoundland and of the northeastern United States would be affected by a German military air base in Greenland.
Neither the United States, nor Canada or the UK desired any Wehrmacht facilities or armed forces in Greenland to obtain weather data. During the summer of 1940 Nazi Germany had organized in Norway a number of expeditions for the purpose of establishing radio and weather stations in northeastern Greenland, in the neighborhood of Scoresby Sound. Although manned, it would seem, by Norwegians and Danes, and led by a Dane, these weather stations were under German control and were operated for the purpose of assisting the German naval and military effort. A mixed British-Norwegian landing party seized a supply of aviation gasoline, dismantled several radio stations, and took into custody a number of heavily armed Danish "hunters" found on the coast. This was in late August or early September 1940. A few weeks afterward the British intercepted another vessel off the coast of Greenland with about fifty Germans, some of them meteorologists, on board. All this activity at the top of the Western Hemisphere was a source of much concern to the United States.
In addition to seizing German ships and weather equipment on Greenland, the British and Canadians were planning on building air bases on the island to conduct antisubmarine warfare in the North Atlantic. Although the United States Government had acquiesced in the British garrisoning of Iceland, it had no desire to see Britain make the same move into Greenland; for Greenland was, unlike Iceland, definitely within the Western Hemisphere and within the scope of the Monroe Doctrine.
The Department of State reached an agreement on 9 April 1941 with Danish Foreign Minister, Henrik de Kauffmann, acting on behalf of His Majesty the King of Denmark in his capacity as sovereign of Greenland. The agreement recognized that as a result of the European war there was danger that Greenland may be converted into a point of aggression against nations of the American Continent by Nazi Germany. The agreement, after explicitly recognizing the Danish sovereignty over Greenland, granted to the United States the right to locate and construct airplane landing fields and other facilities for the defense of Greenland and for the defense of the North American Continent.
As soon as the agreement with the Danish Government was concluded, President Roosevelt authorized the War Department to go ahead with the preparations for building airfields and other facilities in Greenland. $5 million in funds previously allocated for constructing the bases acquired from the British in the Bases for Destroyers agreement was re-allocated to Greenland. On 30 June construction of the first U.S. Army and Navy base in Greenland, code-named Bluie West I began. Greenland Base Command was established on 1 September 1941 with headquarters at Bluie West I to take charge of the U.S. forces and facilities being planned.
By the end of September 1941, when the contractor's people arrived, the troops at Bluie West I had erected 85 buildings, about two-thirds of the total needed for the initial force, and had begun to install the necessary utilities. They had built three miles of access roads, constructed a temporary dock, and started work on the airfield. By the time the civilian construction force arrived they had finished grading one of the two runways and had a metal landing mat partly laid. Bluie West I was thus one of the earliest U.S. Army airfields, if not the first, to make actual use of Pierced Steel Planking in runway construction, an important engineering development and one that afterwards contributed greatly to the winning of the war, particularly in the Pacific. After the arrival of the civilian construction force the engineer battalion, reinforced by a company of the 42nd Engineers, concentrated exclusively on airfield construction. They continued to do so until February 1942 when the civilian force took over this work as well. By then the first runway was ready for limited use. Construction work on a second west coast base further north, at Sondrestrom or Bluie West Eight, began in September 1941.
In addition, the United States obtained rights to build bases in Greenland. In July 1941, a task force of service troops arrived at Narsarsuaq. This site had been chosen as a major staging base between Labrador and Newfoundland. Work began at once on the base, which was given the code name Bluie West One, and the first plane set down on 24 January 1942. Work on a second west coast base further north, at Sondrestrom or Bluie West Eight, began in September 1941. A third field was placed on the east coast almost directly across from BW-1 at Angmagssalik.
In the summer of 1941 the North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol was organized as a joint endeavor of the Army, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Greenland Government. All the activity on the east coast the year before had demonstrated the ease with which anyone could establish a foothold in the vast Arctic wastes, the near impossibility of finding a hostile force that had established itself, and the difficulty of dislodging one, once it was discovered. An air patrol of the east coast, even after the new bases were completed proved its worth by assisting in the capture of the trawler Buskoe on 12 September, as that vessel, a small German-controlled Norwegian ship, was attempting to establish a radio and weather station in the Mackenzie Bay area.
In addition to the Army Airfields, the U.S. Atlantic Fleet established a number of stations on Greenland to support radio, weather, and naval patrols as part of the Battle of the North Atlantic against German U-boats and the protection of Allied convoy traffic in the North Atlantic.