Trawling through a dusty box of old magazines in a secondhand bookshop, there was a copy of the Illustrated London News that immediately caught my eye. On the cover was a photograph of an island bisected from end to end by a runway. The headline described it as “The RAF’s Loneliest Outpost.” That got me. I’ve always thought there’s something about an island airbase that promises either daring, seat-of-the-pants flights, or attempts to take over the world.
Perhaps it was Tracy Island from Thunderbirds that fed my imagination. Or maybe it was the lure of the villain’s lair in a James Bond film. Whatever the case, there’s a romance about an island airstrip that’s seductive. Like discovering that there really are dragons, it’s the appeal of fiction made fact. And, as often as not, the real-life stories of the world’s island airbases are as extraordinary and unlikely as anything that might spring from the imagination. A few of the most interesting ones are described on the next page.
International Rescue’s Thunderbird 1 launches from its hangar beneath Tracy Island’s retracting swimming pool.
0° 41’ 29” S, 73° 9’ 22” E
This is the one: “the RAF’s loneliest outpost.” Located on Addu Atoll in the Maldives, the airfield on Gan Island was built by Royal Navy engineers for the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War. Six hundred miles southwest of Sri Lanka, it’s little more than a speck in the ocean, fringed with palm trees and white sand. In 1957, however, it transferred to the RAF and became a vital staging post en route to Britain’s shrinking colonial commitments in the Far East.
One airman stationed there described it as “a cross between Devil’s Island and a holiday camp.” That just about nailed it. One station commander expressed a hope that his men would take more interest “in things like painting, pottery, and classical music.” It was a vain hope. As one airman pointed out, “Everything revolves round the beer can. What else is there to do?”
In 1970 there were 600 RAF personnel there and one woman, a WRVS volunteer. “They like to have a woman to talk to,” she said. I imagine the line to talk to her from men serving 101/2-month unaccompanied tours was a long one.
Diego Garcia
7° 18’ 48” S, 72° 24’ 40” E
It was the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Diego García de Moguer who gave his name to the largest of the Chagos Archipelago islands when he discovered it lying 2,000 miles east of Africa and 1,000 miles south of India. But it was the French who populated it with people they shipped from Madagascar in the eighteenth century to work the plantations that they established there. With the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, the islands became British and remain so.
Aircraft first arrived in 1942, when the RAF established a flying-boat base to counter the threat from German and Japanese submarines. But it was not until 1971, when the British government agreed to let the USA use Diego Garcia as a military base, that a runway was built. It grew rapidly over the next twenty years, until it was capable of sustaining large-scale raids by B-52s, B-1s, and B-2 Stealth bombers in support of US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Alongside around 3,500 American military personnel and support workers, the British presence is a token one. Fewer than fifty Royal Marines and sailors make up Naval Party 1002 and have responsibility for policing and customs, and for registering births, deaths, and marriages. But no descendants of the original plantation workers remain. The Chagos islanders were evicted from their home to make way for the airbase. They’re still fighting for the right to return to the island.
15° 0’ N, 145° 38’ E
Part of the Mariana chain found by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, Tinian Island lies in the Pacific, about 4,000 miles west of Hawaii. Since being claimed for the Spanish crown, it was also possessed by Germany and Japan before, in the summer of 1945, being captured by US forces.
Tinian’s original claim to fame was as the first place where napalm was used in the Pacific campaign. Then it became about the most important place in the world.
On July 6, 1945, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress with a modified bomb bay landed at Tinian’s North Field airstrip. A month later, the bomber, named Enola Gay after the pilot’s mother, dropped the first atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, called Bockscar, dropped a second atom bomb, this time on Nagasaki.
On August 14 Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender, but not all his subjects laid down their arms. The last Japanese soldier on Tinian wasn’t finally captured until 1953.
Ascension Island
7° 56’ S, 14° 22’ W
If you’re looking for a real-life Tracy Island, you won’t do better than Ascension. Rising in splendid isolation from the Atlantic Ocean about halfway between Brazil and West Africa, it’s got it all. The product of a now dormant volcano, this spectacular place is home to petrified lava flows, golden beaches, spawning turtles, giant land crabs, and a tropical cloud forest. Her history includes visits from Portuguese navigators, pirates, and Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle, and, in 1815, the arrival of a British garrison following Napoleon’s imprisonment on St Helena, 800 miles to the southeast.
Her runway was built by US Army engineers during the Second World War and first used by Royal Navy Swordfish biplanes. Later, after the sinking of the Laconia by a U-boat, it was used by American bombers. The high point of Ascension’s contribution to aviation history should have been her role as a diversion airfield for NASA’s Space Shuttle. But it wasn’t.
Her starring role finally came in 1982. On the night of May 31, a month after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a fleet of RAF aircraft roared away from the runway into the night sky. Sixteen hours and one cratered target later, the single Avro Vulcan bomber returned from what was the longest bombing raid in history.
