Sentiment Journey, The Forgotten Air Fields of the Sixth Air Force
The previous installments of this series in the Journal described the “big five,” principal Army Air Service/ Army Air Corps/Army Air Forces semi-permanent airfields that, with the exception of Rio Hato, were situated within the confines and former borders of the Panama Canal Zone itself.
Army planners realized early-on, however, that these “permanent” stations, with their excellent station facilities and hard-surface runways, had by the end of the 1930s become exceptionally well-known to potential adversaries and, being situated for the most part very near major population centers near either end of the Canal on the Pacific and Atlantic entrances, provided highly recognizable and easily targeted objectives – not only to intruding aircraft but, indeed, to large-caliber naval guns that might be brought to bear by attacking surface fleets or submarines.
As early as the 1920s, when the Air Service was operating from a solitary, permanent station in the Canal Zone – France Field – the crews of the far-ranging bombardment and observation aircraft, as well as a smattering of early amphibians that operated from there, quickly located suitable landing areas elsewhere in the Republic. The location and qualities of these landing areas, fixed with some precision, soon became a part of the patrol and cross-country training regimen of the units. One of the criterion the crews apparently engaged was whether the landing area offered even the briefest of respite from the torrid tropical environment at the home stations in the Canal Zone!
The truth is that, through most of the 1920s, Army aircraft alighting at these locations did so with scant regard for Panamanian sensitivities or ownership, and in most instances, worked out arrangements with local municipalities or land- owners, if they could be identified. So isolated were some of these landing areas, however, that even assigning a proper geographic name to them often took some time to sort out, as the Army crews often called them one thing, while the local Panamanian citizenry had no idea what they were talking about.
As the 1920s and 1930s played out, however, defense plans for the vital Canal soon required that some formal arrangements for the use of these locations beyond a hand-shake or verbal agreement was required, and thus a truly astonishing array of base leasing agreements were slowly but surely hammered out between the Army hierarchy in the Canal Zone and the often indignant and suspicious central government of Panama, a sovereign nation, in spite of the rather casual regard for this status often voiced by U.S. military personnel stationed in the Canal Zone enclave.
As the WWII inevitably approached, the importance of these stations, which in most cases the Army very much wished to keep confidential, became ever more central to mobilization dispersal planning.
Mere hours after Pearl Harbor, and the lessons learned there and in the Philippines, these dispersal airdromes (sometimes cited in official parlance as “Aerodromes” or “Auxiliary Aerodromes”) were very quickly engaged in what might well be described, in retrospect, on a very nearly crisis basis.
From December 7, 1941, through to V-J Day, nearly all of the stations described in the narrative that follows became very familiar indeed to USAAC Caribbean Air Force and USAAF Sixth Air Force crews. These men, and a few women, enjoyed a rather peculiar wartime existence, however, that was seldom replicated in other overseas locations. While they indeed “roughed it” in primitive conditions at many of the airdromes described in these pages for extended, fixed periods, they soon realized that the training value of such deployments also earned them a reprieve at one of the pre-war, permanent installations in the Canal Zone proper, at the end of these deployments. Thus, performance “in the field” soon came to be recognized as the key to once again being able to enjoy hot showers, clean sheets . . .