|
New Boston Air Force Station is a United States Air Force facility located in Hillsborough County in south central New Hampshire. It occupies more than 2,800 acres (11 km²) in three towns: New Boston, Amherst, and Mont Vernon. It was established in 1942 as a practice area for bombers and fighter planes from nearby Grenier Army Air Field (now Manchester-Boston Regional Airport). Starting in 1959, it was turned into a satellite-tracking station. New Boston AFS is operated by the 23d Space Operations Squadron (23 SOPS), a geographically separated unit (GSU) of the 50th Network Operations Group, 50th Space Wing, Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado. == History == The New Boston Air Force Station dates back to 1942, when Grenier Field - now Manchester-Boston Regional Airport - was preparing to meet the demands of World War II. On Sept. 5, 1941, Col. John Moore, commanding officer of the U.S. Army Air Corps at Grenier Field, wrote a letter proposing the government create a bombing range in New Boston near Joe English Pond. "The nature of the terrain around the pond is such that aerial bombing thereon would offer the elements of surprise, concealed approach and navigation to a point," Moore wrote. "It is believed that Joe English Hill (altitude 1,245 feet) would be a satisfactory stop for any ricochet bullets from ground machine gun targets." Eventually, land belonging to 16 families, 12 of them in New Boston, was taken at a cost of $23,200. There was no electricity on site, and water had to be brought from Dodge's store in the center of New Boston. Nail kegs were used as chairs. Locals felt so sorry for the soldiers that they donated used furniture. During World War II, local residents remember watching fighters and bombers train at the Air Force station and learned to recognize the sounds of strafing and bombing as they went about their tasks. "I'd watch from the kitchen window," 89-year-old Evelyn Barss told the ''Nashua Telegraph'' newspaper in a 2005 story. "They would come in across the hill and drop their bombs and we would see them. These little black specks would go down, and you would hear a small discharge - they didn't use a lot of powder because it was scarce during the war." Roland Goodwin worked at the base on and off for three decades and he remembers seeing the tail fins of bombs sticking out of the pond. Planes at one time practiced dropping depth bombs for sinking submarines. "Every building we built down there in the early days . . . we usually ran into a buried bomb of some kind. We'd have to bring people up from Fort Devens (in Massachusetts) to detonate it," After the war, the station took a lower profile. The bombing range was deactivated and after a long debate about the site's future, it became home to new satellite tracking antennas. The first antennas went up around 1960 and remain, protected by a geodesic dome resembling a golf ball about six stories high. In previous years portions of the station have been open to fisherman, hunters, and loggers, but the station has been closed to most non-military personnel since the attacks of September 11. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「New Boston Air Force Station」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|