Fire in Goose Bay

[conehead]

Looks pretty bad…

https://ntv.ca/state-of-emergency-rcmp-warn-of-uncontrolled-fire-near-explosive-material-in-happy-valley-goose-bay/ 

[J.O.]

The control tower shown in the pictures is not the one that is currently in use at Goose Bay airport. It looks like there's a Canadian flag on the side of it - maybe an old military tower?

[bm330]

CBC reported it being the original tower at the airport. Full wood frame construction and well before built-in fire suppression. 

[W5]

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/fire-destroys-edmonton-hangar-11-happy-valley-goose-bay-hangar-8

'History going up in flames': Fire destroys Edmonton's Hangar 11 and Happy Valley-Goose Bay’s Hangar 8 just days apart

Eight decades after they were built, Edmonton’s Hangar 11 and Happy Valley-Goose Bay's Hangar 8 were razed to the ground within a few days

Author of the article:

Jackie Carmichael

Published Apr 24, 2024  •  6 minute read

 

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Edmonton's Hanger 11 (above) went up in flames Monday, April 22, 2024 while its eastern Canada counterpart, Hangar 8 (below) in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador, was razed to the ground Friday, April 19, 2024. Postmedia, HVGP Fire

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Canada’s Second World War military aviation heritage took two huge hits this week.

 

Edmonton's historic Hangar 11 at Blatchford goes down in flames

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Eight decades after they were built to the critical centre of a sky ferry route for thousands of newly minted warplanes, Edmonton’s Hangar 11 and Happy Valley-Goose Bay’s Hangar 8 were razed to the ground within a few days.

 

 

Edmonton authorities believe the fire that levelled the historic American air base on Blatchford Field may have been deliberately set.

 

In a strange twist of fate, 5,000 kilometres away in Labrador, the counter-matched Hangar 8 went up in flames last Friday, April 19. The cause of the blaze is unknown for now.

 

Close kin, the two were linchpins in North America’s bid to help the Allies defeat Nazi Germany in Europe. Each contained an U.S. Air Force base and a Canadian Air Force base, separated by a runway. They had nearly-identical plans and purposes. Thousands upon thousands of planes flowed through both sites.

 

Now tattered in smoking ruins, they are each left with co-ordinating halves that together tell a whole story of international co-operation and resolve.

 

Good Allies

 

“The loss of these two hangars in my mind is a gutting of our important contributions during the Second World War,” said Tim Cook, chief historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

 

“History going up in flames … it’s the fragility of built history in this country. I have seen this in preserving artifacts and stories, the chanciness of fate… how quickly they can be lost,” Cook said.

His new book, The Good Allies, explores the relationship between Canada and the United States in the Second World War. A huge part of that was the two staging routes: Edmonton-to-Alaska and the Soviet Union — and Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, to Great Britain.

 

“We have forgotten today just how closely the North Americans worked together to protect North America and then to fight abroad against fascism and Nazis,” Cook said.

 

Between 1939 and 1945, 232,000 men and 17,000 women enlisted in Canada’s Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), operating 86 squadrons, including 47 overseas, according to warmuseum.ca. By 1945, the RCAF was the world’s fourth-largest air force.

 

Bombers, fighters, reconnaissance, transport — if it had wings and would help win the war, Canadians would be part of the journey.

 

Thousands of Canadian air crew and many Canadian fighter planes joined Britain’s Royal Air Force in the 1940 Battle of Britain. Then it was Europe, and patrolling the coasts of Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador, Iceland and Britain for German U-boats.

 

Over 21 months, the Americans poured millions of dollars into Edmonton, a crucial part of that Aerial Highway, a phrase they used at the time to correspond with the Alaska Highway, where thousands of young Albertans were carving a road through the wilderness at break-neck speed — a land route the Allies couldn’t wait for.

It was discouraging to load planes in bunches on merchant ships and send them across the Atlantic, only to have them taken down in bunches by torpedoes from German U-boats.

 

“They realized it was much, much more effective — even if you’re flying thousands of kilometres north to get them to Alaska, and then hand them over to the Soviets in that place, and then to have the Soviets fly them almost to the battlefront,” Cook said.

 

“With the war on the Eastern Front, Stalingrad and the defence of Moscow, the Soviets desperately needed North American weapons and supplies,” he said.

 

Ultimately Canada manufactured some 16,000 aircraft for that war effort — and America far more.

 

The summer of ’42

 

In August 1942, the Northwest Staging Route was set in motion, and Edmonton’s air base became the critical middle of the Alaska-Siberian Air Road (ALSIB), an integral part of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Aerodrome of Democracy.”

 

Over the next 21 months, 7,983 aircraft made their way from North American manufacturers to the Soviets. Fewer than two per cent of those were lost.

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  Aerial image of the Edmonton Blatchford airfield in 1942. PHOTO BY SUPPLIED PHOTO /City of Edmonton Archives

 

ALSIB technically started at Gore Field in Great Falls, Montana — and in Minneapolis, Minnesota — where American-manufactured airplanes were flown to start their air trek to the Soviet Union.

 

The route was dotted with airfields every 160 km (100 miles, at the time) on a route that, once it hit B.C., followed the nascent Alaska Highway.

 

Some were emergency landing strips — in places like Okotoks, Carstairs, Innisfail, Lacombe, Ponoka, Mayerthorpe, Whitecourt, Fox Creek, Valleyview, Debolt and Beaverlodge.

 

Others were refuelling, servicing airfields in RCAF Lethbridge, RCAF Claresholm, Nanton, High River, Calgary, Olds, Innisfail, RCAF Penhold, Edmonton, Namao, Birch Lake,  Grande Prairie, RCAF Station Dawson Creek, before heading through northern B.C. and Yukon territory before reaching Alaska and Ladd Field near Fairbanks, where they were transferred to Russian pilots.

 

(In many places, the infrastructure would form the basis of modern municipal airfields.)

 

In Calgary, Edmonton and Namao, there were American bases as well. The main ones included Bell P-39 Airacobra, the Bell P-63 Kingcobra. There were bombers — the Douglas A-20 Havoc and B-25 Mitchell, and transport aircraft — the Douglas C-47 Skytrain.

There were some others that went through the system in smaller numbers.

 

From Fairbanks, it was off to Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and points south and west in a desperate bid to repel Nazi forces.

 

The route also ferried diplomatic pouches from Washington, D.C., and Moscow, and everyone from Vice President Henry Wallace to Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov hitched a ride now and then.

 

The Minneapolis-Edmonton route brought planes from the northeastern and midwestern U.S., flying a similar dotted line from Minnesota and North Dakota through Manitoba and Saskatchewan to emergency landing fields in Vermilion and Vegreville.

 

The long-term impact was significant on Edmonton, home to the Alaskan Wing of the Air Transport Command.

 

“The Edmonton population skyrocketed just from 1942 to 1943 by almost 40,000. About 10,000 U.S. soldiers and 38,000 American civilians went through that airfield during the war,” said Craig Baird, host of Canadian History Ehx.

 

“A lot of Americans actually stayed in Edmonton and moved here afterwards.”

 

Flames engulf Labrador counterpart Friday

 

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Meanwhile in Labrador, fire razed Edmonton’s twin, the historic Hangar 8 in Happy Valley-Goose Bay last Friday, hurling large explosive canisters from an on-site oxygen plant hundreds of feet.

 

 

Canada’s largest Christian radio station was knocked off the air by the fire as well. The fire started at a nearby abandoned commercial property.

 

The cause of the Happy Valley–Goose Bay blaze remains under investigation, said Fire Chief Brad Butler.

 

The Labrador base was twins with the Edmonton base — Canadians on one side of the runway, Americans on the other.

 

When the Americans pulled out, the RCAF went over to the American hangar, so there’s a near-mirror image hangar to the one that was burned in Edmonton left standing in Labrador.

 

“When I looked at the old pictures, your dome structure before your roof caved in and all that, the one that we have here is still standing and still being used by a private airline,” Butler said.

When granny was a Rosie the Riveter

 

Hangar 11 was one of a few rare reminders of Edmonton’s history in the Second World War and post-war era.

 

It had a sentimental connection for Edmontonians whose grandmothers and great-grandmothers were the Rosie the Riveters of their day — half of the 2,000 war workers were female — their hair tucked under bandanas, muscled up from “man’s work” toiling on gleaming warbirds before heading out to dance the Jitterbug to swing bands playing Glenn Miller.

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“It was a really interesting place because they were employing women in a lot of very non-traditional roles, like doing sheet metal repair or working rewiring aircraft, that kind of thing,” said Ryan Lee, curator of the Alberta Aviation Museum.

 

The city has on the table a proposal to transfer museum building ownership to the museum, so the museum could raise funds for repair.

 

“This Hangar 11 fire shows how quickly things can go when they’re not taken care of. I think it’s really time for the city and the province and the feds to come together and say, ‘This is the last hangar left at Blatchford Field, which was the first municipal registered air harbour in Canada,’” Lee said.