I have today signed a document implementing the agreement of September last for the leasing of United States Bases in Bermuda and elsewhere and I wish to express to you my strong conviction that these bases are important pillars of the bridge connecting the two great English-speaking democracies. You have cause to be proud it has fallen to your lot to make this important contribution to a better world. Winston ChurchillBermuda, a small British island territory located just 600 miles off the North Carolina capes, anchored the center of the United States’ Atlantic defenses. Charles Hendricks, ‘Building the Atlantic Bases’, 1992When, on March 27, 1941, Sir Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister for war-racked Britain, made his one and only speech to the House of Assembly here at Bermuda, few here could have foreseen the consequences of his signature on the agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States for the planting of US military bases on the Island and in British islands in the Caribbean.The larger of the two Bermuda bases was originally to be composed by bulldozing much of the parish of Warwick into the sea towards Darrell’s and Ports Islands to create a landing field for airplanes and a US Army base, as opposed to the US Navy one that eventually formed a peninsular at the western end of Southampton Parish by the levelling of Morgan’s and Tucker’s Islands.Such a base would have divided Bermuda in two and West might have only met East by returning to boating, the first mode of transportation in the Island. Such a situation may yet be seen at the airfield that runs from sea to sea and forms a barrier between Gibraltar and neighbouring Spain. Fortunately for much of Bermuda, that plan struck the rocks of public opinion and the site for the base was moved eastward to islands in Castle Harbour.Mention has been made of late of the appropriation of lands in Tucker’s Town in the 1920s for a major tourist resort, but in a similar acquisition of private lands in 1941 for the air base, it is perhaps unlikely that the owners and occupiers of ancestral lands on Longbird, St David’s and Coopers Islands had ‘cause to be proud it has fallen to your lot’ to make the ‘important contribution to a better world’ by giving up home, hearth and Easter lilies fields unto the sterile landscape of a military airfield. Perhaps they were proud to make such a sacrifice, as others had made in previous centuries for lands for forts, army camps and the dockyard; perhaps history does somewhere record the conflicting emotions of such a requisitioned transfer of one’s private land unto government hands.Be that as it may, work progressed afoot after the arrival of the American forces and battalions of engineers and other constructors, within weeks of Churchill’s speech, for the US Government had been checking out the Island late in 1940. Later called Kindley Field after World War One flying ace Capt. Field Kindley, the ‘Stars and Stripes’ were hoisted at Longbird Island appropriately on July 4, 1941, though perhaps few, as suggested, celebrated the ‘liberation and independence’ of their homelands thereabouts.A separate landing field was begun for Fort Bell, the Army base, but by mid-1942, the two were connected to give the airfield configuration that survives to this day and was of immeasurable value in the expansion of tourism by aeroplanes after the war. Meanwhile, the Naval Operating Base in Southampton was constructed with a staging area for seaplanes that would begin to patrol for German submarines, thus extending the American East Coast 600 miles to sea, plus the range of those flying boats out of NOB.The coast defence of Bermuda was assumed by the United States in 1941 and a number of the gun emplacements were constructed under the supervision of one Lt Charles Beaudry, whose family has lately given his Bermuda photo albums to the National Museum. ‘Charlie’ had a ‘good war’, for he was not transferred for whatever reasons and spent almost three happy years in Bermuda, making lifelong friends with the brothers Talbot and a Trimingham or two. Churchill might have ultimately referred to pillars of the ‘bridges’, plural, for Bermuda was the central of three ‘air bridges’ in the Atlantic Ocean, that to the north being through Iceland and that to the south, Ascension Island, volcanic entities all by happenstance. Britain already possessed Ascension and Bermuda, and early in the war occupied Iceland to prevent its capture by Germany, for that would have supplied Hitler with a Norway-Iceland-Greenland bridge to bring the air war to the doorsteps of Newfoundland and Maine.The northern bridge had several tracks, two out of Gander in Newfoundland, the one direct to Britain and the other south to the Azores and Africa. More northerly in Canada, planes left Goose Bay for US bases in Greenland, for onward flights to Iceland and Britain. The central bridge brought planes out of Miami to Bermuda and then to the Azores and Britain, though not until 1943, as neural Portugal would not allow use of its airspace in 194142. In the southern Atlantic, planes from Florida island-hopped to Puerto Rico and Trinidad, then along the northeast coast of South America, until flying direct to Liberia, or transiting Africa via a stop at Ascension Island. It was through these routes and the industrial capacity of the United States that a plethora of planes were ferried to Britain and other European countries, as well as to Russia, to prosecute the air war against Hitler.Decades after the war, the author Simon Winchester, in his sometimes unflattering views of the place, described Bermuda during the Cold War as a ‘fixed aircraft carrier’, and that in a sense was indeed its role from 1941 until 1995, when the fall of the Soviet Union relegated the Island to the same military value it had before the American Revolution, that is to say, none at all. Ascension, on another flight, has ascended to prominence as a bridge to that outpost of democracy in the far southern Atlantic, the Falkland Islands. Iceland, on the other aerial endeavour, seems bent on disturbing British airspace in a manner that Hitler may not have imagined, but would have perhaps much enjoyed, as volcanic ash permeates the stratosphere.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments may be made to director[AT]bmm.bm or 704-5480.