Three U. S. Bases Overseas
HARRIGAN, ANTHONY
Outposts in Spain, Morocco and Germany raise serious questions Three U.S. Bases Overseas By Anthony Harrigan TORREJON, SPAIN Most Americans are still unfamiliar with the names of such far-away...
...Air cargo moves through here to U. S. bases in this part of the world: cables for a base at Asmara, Eritrea...
...Sentries patrol the area...
...airbases in Europe and North Africa...
...In the modernistic base hotel, airmen and their dependents order hamburgers and chocolate milk in wax-paper cartons...
...The base is in a constant state of alert...
...Certainly, there is no talk here now of creating a 100-division European army, composed of units from the free nations...
...Radar stations spaced across the Spanish peninsula keep a constant watch on the sky...
...Troop strength is being cut as the NATO nations turn to missiles and nuclear warheads...
...RHEIN-MAIN AIR BASE, GERMANY RHEIN-MAIN is little America...
...While Torrejon and other bases are geared to mounting an atomic attack, there seems to be no planning for protection against enemy air or missile attack...
...Bases Overseas By Anthony Harrigan TORREJON, SPAIN Most Americans are still unfamiliar with the names of such far-away places as Torrejon, Moron, San Pablo and Zaragoza in Spain, or Ben Guerir, Boulhaut, Nouasseur and Sidi Slimane in Morocco...
...Yet in these places, the giant airstrips of the Strategic Air Command represent U. S. policy's vaunted power of nuclear retaliation...
...And within fifteen minutes from the first sound of the klaxon, the aircraft must be aloft...
...Coils of barbed wire surround the aircraft...
...At any hour of the day or night-during mealtime, in the quiet of the late afternoon-and in any weather, the klaxon horn may blare across the base...
...The thousands of men and hundreds of millions of dollars invested in this and the other airbases strung across Spain and North Africa, are there for the purpose of getting aloft these jets, equipped with atomic bombs, should the Soviet Union start a war...
...officer's club and well-stocked PX-do little to relieve the dullness of life in this semi-desert country where it is dangerous to stray beyond a fixed perimeter...
...There is a strange contrast between these people and the Americans with their gadgetry of modern warfare and modern life...
...The SAC crews who man these bombers occupy the same quarters...
...Some military planners speak of a new kind of "limited war" to check Soviet peripheral aggression...
...The only U. S. superiority is in creature comforts for service men and their dependents...
...Also, there seem to be no shelters for personnel...
...Alongside the sleek fuselages of the B-47's stand the generators needed to start the engines...
...The Moroccan flies are thick and pestiferous, but the airmen brave them while downing root beer and Cokes...
...And the entire area was deserted when I walked around...
...The few amenities of American life-the base movies...
...At the hase of the hill, bare rock crops out of the dusty soil...
...The passengers, including two veiled women in gray robes, laugh...
...Why this fabulously costly transplanting of modern America to an area that is only 70 miles from the Iron Curtain...
...One wonders what would become of the large group of women and children in case of a land attack...
...But only last summer did SAC receive its first missile-equipped B-52G's, which can deliver an air-to-ground "Hound Dog" missile hundreds of miles from a heavily defended target area...
...Torrejon, to American eyes, resembles New Mexico...
...But, then, pleasure has nothing to do with the basic purpose of Nouasseur and the other Moroccan airbases...
...The Truman Doctrine has been discarded...
...If any aircraft is not identified promptly, the silver F-86 jetfighters on the flight line scramble immediately to intercept...
...A 20-foot-high panel of blue plexiglass, behind locked doors, plots the course of any aircraft picked up by the radar stations...
...Later, the Truman Doctrine officially stated U. S. determination to contain the Soviets in Europe...
...The Moroccans have learned a sort of pidgin American, larded with Air Force slang...
...There are the same endless vistas, with copper-colored mesas rising from the plain, turning red and purple at sundown, and the misty view of high mountains in the distance...
...Yet, while these outposts of American defense maintain their watchful status around the clock, there are some troubling questions as to their ultimate effectiveness...
...The existing ground forces in Europe could not halt a Soviet land attack...
...Americans never seem to learn the language of the country in which they serve...
...It is only reasonable to assume that the Soviet Union has similar highspeed interceptors...
...The answer, of course, lies in the complexity of U. S. policy...
...Originally, Rhein-Main served the American garrison forces in Germany...
...He shouts at the animal in Arabic...
...The planes were surrounded by one roll of barbed wire, but it seemed to me that it would have been wiser to have a few checkpoints along the way, a few armored cars near the planes, and a few regular patrols...
...For one, the first B-47's were introduced into the Air Force in 1951...
...repair parts for a military mission in Pakistan...
...Meanwhile, the era of missile warfare has brought revolutionary changes in the past several years...
...And the Spanish countryside evokes the image of modern war-the cruel sun has scorched the earth as though it had undergone a nuclear holocaust...
...Servicemen, wise in the ways of good living, catch the Army bus into Frankfurt at 5 p.m...
...Moroccan laborers in blue jeans, T-shirts and ornamented skull caps that look as though they were made out of a piece of old carpet...
...They eat together, shower together, sleep together...
...A camel is tethered to a white house and next to it stands a hard-top coupe with an American blonde at the wheel...
...Why are we maintaining bases such as Rhein-Main and such units as are based here...
...youthful U. S. servicemen in civilian clothes-pink shirts and peg-legged black trousers...
...The bus, shuttling from the U. S. airbase to Casablanca, carries a strange assortment of people: French soldiers in khaki, with black overseas caps and black shoulder tabs...
...Each three-man team stays together every minute they are on alert status...
...A British Vulcan jetbomber, returning from North Africa, shows up as a yellow grease-pencil mark on the board...
...The hard punch necessary in land warfare does not exist at Rhein-Main...
...One wonders why the fighter control system and the SAC target-operations building, where missions are planned, are located above the ground in brick buildings...
...They simply represent hours of saved flying time should atomic retaliation be ordered by the President...
...While even neutral Sweden has taken its bases underground and provided vast shelter areas, U. S. air bases are no more equipped with shelters against blast and radioactivity than was Pearl Harbor in the pre-atomic days...
...Today, the Air Force has jetfighters that fly hundreds of miles faster than the B-47's...
...NOUASSEUR, MOROCCO THE MOROCCAN driver races the French-made bus down a long slope, swerving to miss a cow in the roadway...
...C-rations for the Indian Army...
...An American airman in the back of the bus yells: "Steak for supper...
...In the PX, American service wives in capri pants buy U. S.-made beauty creams and teenagers in blue jeans look over "progressive" jazz records...
...If war comes, would fliers jump into their planes and fly to Morocco or Spain while the wives and children stayed behind ? LOWEST OF THE LOW Give me the simple oaf who kicks a pup, The thief who filches from the blind man's cup, The man who beats his invalided wife, The craven mugger with the switchblade knife, The common thug, the body-snatching ghoul, Before the one who bombs a church or school...
...The air defense control headquarters in Torrejon, operated by the 16th Air Force, is the nerve-center of U. S. military power in Spain...
...Parked along the runway are six B-47 medium jetbombers-the ultimate reason behind this airbase...
...Why aren't these vital installations underground, shielded by thick layers of concrete such as the Germans used in their flak towers as far back as World War II...
...Perhaps never before has a people transplanted its own atmosphere of living so completely to another country...
...Secretary Dulles speaks of "massive retaliation," and the bases in Spain and Morocco are geared to this end...
...Richard Armour...
...Anthony Harrigan, of the News and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, just completed a tour of U.S...
...The base had armored cars, but they were parked at the motor pool, with their machine guns dismounted...
...A team of saboteurs would have no trouble reaching and destroying these aircraft...
...But Rhein-Main's connection with such a policy is obscure...
...Rhein-Main still serves that military function...
...The SAC jetboinbers are parked on runways less than two miles from the gate, and their is no checkpoint between them and the gate...
...Duty at the American airbases in Morocco does not seem very pleasant...
...On a hillside, a giant radar station sweeps the sky with its rotating antennae...
...Again, at Nouasseur, this writer was amazed by the apparent lack of ground security for this important base...
...Yet, except for these supply functions, the role of the Rhein-Main base remains unclear...
...Yet watching this scene, a question comes to one's mind: What are Americans doing here, 13 years after the defeat of Hitler Germany...
...The fuel storage tanks at Torrejon, Moron and Nouasseur are bunched together so that a single bomb or missile can destroy them in one hit...
...A troubling feature of Torrejon and other airbases is the location of key defense facilities...
...Except for the Autobahn beyond the big plate-glass window and the speeding German trucks with their distinctive trailers, this might be Pennsylvania or Ohio...
...tires for Navy trucks in the Azores...
...I discovered that it was possible to walk in and out of the main gate at Nouasseur without being challenged or called on to furnish identification...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 40
