The Royal Air Force (RAF) operated from two locations in the Imperial fortresscolony of Bermuda during the Second World War. Bermuda's location had made it an important naval station since US independence, and, with the advent of the aeroplane, had made it as important to trans-Atlantic aviation in the decades before the Jet Age. The limited, hilly land mass had prevented the construction of an airfield, but, with most large airliners in the 1930s being flying boats, this was not initially a limitation.
The government-owned Imperial Airways built a flying-boat station on Darrell's Island that served as an airport for passengers flying to and from Bermuda, as well as on trans-Atlantic flights staging through the Island.
World War II
Artist's impression of the Gloster Gladiator flown by Bermudian Flying Officer Herman Francis Grant "Baba" Ede, DFC on the 24th May, 1940, during the Battle of Norway
Between World War I and World War II, the Royal Air Force (RAF) had absorbed the Royal Naval Air Service and assumed responsibility for operating the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm (FAA). From 1933, an RAF Coastal Command detachment operating from the wharf at the HM Dockyard, on Ireland Island, was responsible for the maintenance of the aeroplanes carried by the cruisers based at the Bermuda, which belonged to the Fleet Air Arm's No. 443 Fleet Spotter-Reconnaissance Flight (which was administered by RAF Coastal Command), starting with HMS Norfolk. Flight Lieutenant Thomas H. Moon was appointed for duty with R.A.F. Detachment Bermuda with effect from 23 January 1934.[1]
Walrus and Seafox seaplanes at the original Royal Air Force-operated naval air station in the North Yard of HM Dockyard Bermuda, in 1938
This detachment also held aeroplanes in store, crated in parts. When an aeroplane could not be repaired, another was assembled as a replacement.[2][3] In 1939, with the rest of the Fleet Air Arm, this was transferred to the Royal Navy, which relocated the naval air station to Boaz Island.[4]
With the commencement of hostilities in 1939, Darrell's Island was taken over as a Royal Air Force station, with two commands operating on it. RAF Transport Command operated large, multi-engined flying boats, carrying freight and passengers between Europe and the Americas. RAF Ferry Command was responsible for delivering aircraft from manufacturers to operational units. As the requirements of the RAF and Fleet Air Arm could not be filled by the output of British factories, the Air Ministry placed orders with manufacturers in the neutral USA for all manner of aircraft. These included flying boats, like the PBY Catalina, which, designed for long-range maritime patrols, were capable of being flown across the Atlantic, albeit in stages.[5]
Imperial Airways, which had become the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), continued to operate in Bermuda throughout the War, as well, though in a war-role, with its new Boeing flying boats painted in camouflage. Its flying boats landed trans-Atlantic mail at Darrell's to be cleared by the British counter-intelligence censors at the Princess Hotel. In January, 1942, Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited Bermuda on his return to Britain, following December 1941 meetings in Washington D.C., with US President Franklin Roosevelt, in the weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.[6] Churchill flew into Darrell's Island on a BOAC Boeing 314. Although it had been planned to continue the journey by ship, he made an impulsive decision to complete it by a direct flight from Bermuda to England, marking the first trans-Atlantic air crossing by a national leader.[7]
The first Bermudian killed in the Second World War was Flying Officer Grant Ede, a No. 263 Squadron RAFGladiator pilot who took part in the 1940 Battle of Norway, before dying along with almost everyone else aboard HMSGlorious when it was sunk during the evacuation from Norway.[8][9][10]
Bermudian Flying Officer Herman Francis Grant Ede DFC and other RAF pilots
In 1940, the Bermuda Flying School was established on Darrell's Island with the goal of training pilots for the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy (RN). The school trained volunteers from the local territorial units using Luscombe seaplanes. Those who passed their training were sent to the Air Ministry to be assigned to the RAF or the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm (FAA). The Commanding Officer of the school was Major Cecil Montgomery-Moore, DFC, who was also the commander of the Bermuda Volunteer Engineers (BVE). He had left the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps (BVRC) to become one of at least eighteen Bermudian aviators of the Great War. The school trained eighty pilots before an excess of trained pilots led to its closure in 1942. The body administrating it was adapted to become a recruiting organisation (the Bermuda Flying Committee) for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), sending sixty aircrew candidates, and twenty-two female candidates for ground-based roles, to that service before the War's end.[11] With so many Bermudians entering the air services, the Air Training Corps was established in Bermuda during the war to train school-aged cadets (although, today there are only army and naval cadet corps in Bermuda).
In addition to the BFS graduates and BFC candidates, other Bermudians entered the air services during the war. These included at least two other Great War aviators who returned to service, Squadron Leaders Rowe Spurling and Bernard Logier Wilkinson, who served with RAF Transport Command and the RCAF, respectively. An officer of the BVE, Richard Gorham, transferred to the Royal Artillery, attaching to the RAF as an air observation post (AOP) pilot, directing artillery fire from the air. He played a decisive role in the Battle of Monte Cassino.
In 1940, extending upon an agreement made secretly before Britain's declaration of war in 1939, the USA was given 99-year free base rights in Bermuda, and began construction of a Naval Air Station, the Naval Operating Base (NOB), for flying boats, and an airfield for landplanes. The terms of the agreement were that the US-built airfield, on British territory, would be a joint US Army/Royal Air Force base. When the airfield (named Kindley Field after an American aviator who had fought for Britain during World War I) became operational in 1943, RAF Transport Command relocated to it, taking over the West end of the base in Castle Harbour.
With the entry of the USA into the War, at the end of 1941, the US Navy began operating air-patrols from the Island. Bermuda was a forming-up point, during the War, for convoys numbering hundreds of ships. Despite the importance of guarding against Axis submarines and surface raiders operating in the area, the RAF had not posted a Coastal Command detachment to maintain air cover. The Fleet Air Arm operated ad hoc patrols from its base RNAS Bermuda (the personnel of which were carried on the books of HMS Malabar) on Boaz Island. This was a repair facility which had several aeroplanes on hand, but no aircrew at the start of the war. It operated its patrols using pilots from ships at the Dockyard on Ireland Island, and RAF and Bermuda Flying School pilots from Darrell's Island. These patrols ceased in 1941 with the arrival of a US Navy patrol squadron, which operated from Darrell's Island until the US NOB became operable.
The RAF operated from its two facilities in Bermuda until the end of the War, when both Commands withdrew their detachments. Darrell's Island reverted to its pre-War role as a civil airport, until the replacement of flying boats as trans-Atlantic airliners by land-planes, like the Lancastrian, the Tudor, and DC4, led to its closure in 1948.[12][13]
The senior RAF officer in Bermuda, during the War, Wing Commander E.M. "Mo" Ware, was loaned to the civil government to oversee the conversion of the RAF's end of the military airfield into a Civil Air Terminal. Pre-fabricated buildings were relocated from Darrell's Island to assemble the first terminal. Ware remained with the local government after leaving the RAF, becoming the Director of Civil Aviation for many years.
Although no longer maintaining any detachment in Bermuda, the RAF has continued to use the Island as a trans-Atlantic staging post since the War. Whereas most foreign military aircraft passing through the Island had used the US military end of the airfield, the RAF had continued to disperse its aeroplanes at the former RAF end of the field. Large detachments of tactical aircraft, accompanied by larger refuelling, transport, and maritime patrol aeroplanes, regularly staged at the island on transits between the UK and the garrison at Belize, or bombing ranges on US bases.
Bermuda was first documented by a European in 1503 by Spanish explorer Juan de Bermúdez. In 1609, the English Virginia Company, which had established Jamestown in Virginia two years earlier, permanently settled Bermuda in the aftermath of a hurricane, when the crew and passengers of Sea Venture steered the ship onto the surrounding reef to prevent it from sinking, then landed ashore. Bermuda's first capital, St. George's, was established in 1612.
While the defence of Bermuda remains the responsibility of the government of the United Kingdom, rather than of the local Bermudian Government, the island still maintains a militia for the purpose of defence.
The destroyers-for-bases deal was an agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom on September 2, 1940, according to which 50 Caldwell, Wickes, and Clemson-class US Navy destroyers were transferred to the Royal Navy from the US Navy in exchange for land rights on British possessions.
Kindley Air Force Base was a United States Air Force base in Bermuda from 1948–1970, having been operated from 1943 to 1948 by the United States Army Air Forces as Kindley Field.
HMD Bermuda was the principal base of the Royal Navy in the Western Atlantic between American independence and the Cold War. The Imperial fortress colony of Bermuda had occupied a useful position astride the homeward leg taken by many European vessels from the New World since before its settlement by England in 1609. French privateers may have used the islands as a staging place for operations against Spanish galleons in the 16th century. Bermudian privateers certainly played a role in many English and British wars following settlement, with its utility as a base for his privateers leading to the Earl of Warwick, the namesake of Warwick Parish, becoming the most important investor of the Somers Isles Company. Despite this, it was not until the loss of bases on most of the North American Atlantic seaboard threatened Britain's supremacy in the Western Atlantic that the island assumed great importance as a naval base. In 1818 the Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda officially replaced the Royal Naval Dockyard, Halifax, as the British headquarters for the North America Station (which would become the North America and West Indies Station after absorbing the Jamaica Station in 1830.
Naval Air Station Bermuda, was located on St. David's Island in the British Colony of Bermuda from 1970 to 1995, on the former site of Kindley Air Force Base. It is currently the site of Bermuda International Airport.
USS Gannet (AM-41) was an Lapwing-class minesweeper built for the United States Navy near the end of World War I.
The Airport Security Police is the police force of the Bermuda International Airport.
Royal Air Force Angle or more commonly RAF Angle, is a former Royal Air Force station located on the Angle Peninsula Coast, 8 miles (13 km) west of Pembroke, Pembrokeshire, Wales. It was operational from 1 June 1941 to 11 July 1946, having been used by both the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.
Arthur Rowe Spurling, was a Bermudian who served during the First World War as an infantryman and an aviator, becoming an ace credited with six aerial victories. He later served as a ferry pilot during the Second World War.
Admiral Sir Charles Edward Kennedy-Purvis was a Royal Navy officer who went on to be Deputy First Sea Lord.
The Bermuda Flying School operated on Darrell's Island from 1940 to 1942. It trained Bermudian volunteers as pilots for the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm.
The Bermuda Volunteer Engineers was a part-time unit created between the two world wars to replace the Regular Royal Engineers detachment, which was withdrawn from the Bermuda Garrison in 1928.
Colonel Sir Richard Masters Gorham CBE, DFC, JP was a prominent Bermudian parliamentarian, businessman and philanthropist, who served as a pilot during the Second World War when he played a decisive role in the Battle of Monte Cassino, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Major Cecil Montgomery-Moore DFC was an American-born Bermudian First World War fighter pilot, and commander of the Bermuda Volunteer Engineers and the Bermuda Flying School during the Second World War.
The Bermuda Base Command was a command of the United States Army, established to defend the British Colony of Bermuda, located 640 miles off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. It was created in April 1941 when United States Army troops were sent to the island.
773 Naval Air Squadron was a Naval Air Squadron of the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm which was last active between September 1950 and March 1951. 773 Naval Air Squadron initially formed during June 1940, as a Fleet Requirements Unit in Bermuda, in support of ships on the North America and West Indies Station. It performed this role four almost four years and eventually disbanded, at Bermuda, in April 1944. The squadron reformed during June 1945 as a Service Trials Unit, at HMS Daedalus, RNAS Lee-on-Solent. Tasked with investigating pilotless aircraft as targets, it was known as the Pilotless Aircraft Unit (PAU). It moved to HMS Goldcrest II, RNAS Brawdy where it disbanded in September 1946. The squadron reformed at the start of 1949 as a Fleet Requirements Unit, out of 771 Naval Air Squadron, lasting around three months and repeated this at the start of 1950 and again at the end of 1950, into 1951.
HMS Castle Harbour was a civilian harbour vessel of 730 tons that was taken-up from trade (TUFT) during the Second World War by the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda for use by the Royal Naval Examination Service and later armed and commissioned as a warship, providing harbour defence from submarines.
Scaur Hill Fort, also called Scaur Hill Lines and Somerset Lines, is a fortified position erected in the 1870s at Scaur Hill, on Somerset Island, in Sandys Parish, the westernmost parish of the Imperial fortress colony of Bermuda.
RNAS Bermuda was a Royal Naval Air Station in the Royal Naval Dockyard on Ireland Island until 1939, then Boaz Island, Bermuda. Bermuda became the primary base for the North America and West Indies Station of the Royal Navy in the North-West Atlantic following American independence. It was the location of a dockyard, an Admiralty House, and the base of a naval squadron.
References
↑ The Air Force List. Hamilton, Pembroke, Bermuda: His Majesty's Stationery Office. 1 January 1935. pp.57–58.
↑ Pomeroy, Squadron Leader Colin A. (2000). The Flying Boats Of Bermuda. Hamilton, Pembroke, Bermuda: Printlink Ltd. ISBN9780969833246.
↑ "Bermuda sees for first time massed flying: Planes attached to Dockyard give formation exhibition". The Royal Gazette. City of Hamilton, Pembroke, Bermuda. 8 May 1934. p.1.
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