AIRCRAFT
WARNING POST
At Middle Island during World War II
excerpt from
My Long Island
by
Mrs. Eleanor Ferguson
Aircraft warning post at top of the hill in Middle
Island, west of the Bayles home. Photo from the
collection of Donald Bayles.
World
War II crept up on us gradually, as it did for the whole
world. Slowly but inexorably, it reached out for us all.
In mid-1941, the Army Air Corps (predecessor of the U.S.
Air Force) came to Don with a request to organize an
aircraft spotting post. The newly formed Ground Observer
Corps consisted of a network of spotting posts all along
the eastern seaboard, each manned by civilian volunteers
who reported every aircraft flying over. Sightings were
reported by telephone to a Filter Center where aircraft
movements were tracked on a map. The purpose was to
provide early warning in case of a possible German
suicide strike against our coastal cities.
So Don
rallied half a dozen young fellows and decreed that the
field across the road from the stand was indeed a
spotting post. It was manned for a few hours now and then
when the Air Corps planned to send out flights for the
sole purpose of being spotted. In 1941 air traffic was
not what you could call congested. The boys had to run
across the road to our house to phone in their reports on
the party line. It was Don who made the first report-a
flight of B-10s in the south.
Then
came Pearl Harbor and the whole United States went to
war. The enlistment centers were mobbed, the young men
disappeared, and old men, very young men, and women came
forth to take over the home front jobs. And the Ground
Observer Corps went on around-the-clock duty. Thanks to
those few dry runs, there was an organization to call on,
and a few who knew what was expected of them and how to
do it. Don was Chief Observer and got it all organized.
It is
a matter of great pride to me that I took the first
wartime watch of Dudley-92. For a few days, all we had
was a post in the ground with a board on top to hold the
reporting forms. Then a shelter was thrown up and then a
windbreak of brush. Loring called this the Boma. Any good
African knows that a boma is a defensive enclosure. Ours
was a defense against the north wind.
Everett Pfeiffer Sr. when the spotting station
was just a post in the ground. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne
Nauman
Finally,
a small building contributed by the Highway Department
was erected higher on the hill, west of the Bayleses, and
we used the phone in the Bayles kitchen. A wood stove
appeared. Eventually we had a direct phone line to the
Filter Center. In time, Donald Bayles built us a tower
that took us some thirty feet up in the air and gave us
much better coverage. A twenty-four-hour,
seven-day-a-week schedule was worked out and men, women,
girls and boys came from Coram and Selden as well as
Middle Island to serve their two, or four, or six hours a
week. As service-age men disappeared, other people took
over.
The first aircraft spotting post in 1942. Photo from the collection
of Mrs. Anne Nauman
Don Bayles building the new observation tower. Photo from the
collection of Mrs. Anne Nauman
The finished observation post. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne
Nauman
Coast Guard and A. L.Volunteers Combine In Airplane Spotting
Chain of Army AirDefense Fields Is Proposed for Suffolk County