Seventy-three years have elapsed since Bermuda entered a new phase in the evolution of the Island and its inhabitants, for on September 3, 1939 Britain declared war on Hitler’s Germany, a conflict that would directly claim the lives of 35 local personnel enlisted in various services around the world.The new phase would affect the military and social life of the Island, as well as its topography, and would lay the foundation for the development of air tourism in the 1950s. In the next decade, we will lose most, if not all, of the Bermudian eyewitnesses of the beginnings of those fundamental changes, for anyone signing up for the conflict at the age of 18, would be 91 years old in this year of 2012.Given such passage of time, we perhaps even now have no one to call on personally to ask about the extraordinary turn of events that took place just before the War that would lay the foundations for the establishment of a United States military base in British Bermuda. Apparently the America and the British governments had agreed that in the event of war Bermuda would be of first importance to the Allies and therefore land there should be acquired for a naval base for the United States.A site was chosen that belonged to a member of a Devonshire family and so one Bayard Dill was dispatched to the United States to have his sister, married to pharmaceuticals magnate John Seward Johnson, sign a lease for Morgan’s and Tucker’s Islands in the Great Sound, a task completed several days before September 3. The point of the timing was that the United States could therefore establish such a base in Bermuda at any time thereafter without being declared a belligerent by Germany, as the agreement for land was sealed before a Declaration of War.That is exactly what happened, for in early April 1941 American Forces arrived at Bermuda to establish the Naval Operating Base on the two islands in Southampton, eight months before the US declared war on Germany. In addition to those lands of Ruth Dill Johnson, islands on the northern perimeter of Castle Harbour were added to the war chest of appropriated property to form Fort Bell, later Kindley Field. All that real estate was transferred to the US Government on a 99-year lease for ‘free’ (along with property in Newfoundland) and were not part of the “Bases for Destroyers” contract that gave the United States the right to bases in Antigua, British Guiana, Jamaica, St Lucia, and Trinidad.Between the ‘free’ lands to the north and those bought with gunboats to the south, the coast of the United States was extended some 635 miles eastward into the Atlantic, in the case of Bermuda, plus the range of air cover from the bases to come. That imaginary coastline, formerly the line of defence against the United States by the Royal Navy, began in Newfoundland, passed through Bermuda, and ran through the British Caribbean islands to terminate in British Guiana.With the construction of Kindley Field for land planes, Bermuda was poised for the coming era of aeroplane tourism, as was perhaps no other island in the Americas upon the cessation of war.Thus while the American bases were partly an ecological and social disaster, the one for Bermuda itself, the other for the displaced inhabitants, they brought considerable blessings which developed, under watchful and clever eyes and hands, into the premier island destination for tourism into the early 1980s. Until the departure of the American Forces at the end of the Cold War in 1995 (we should all dislike “Glasnost” Gorbachev for messing up a good thing), the landing field for Bermuda’s successful air tourism was supplied free of charge by the US, perhaps a wonderful return for the original ‘free’ land.After the late 1970s, pro-”international business” and anti-tourism sentiments did much to destroy the fatted calf, the golden goose and her eggs, the Midas of the mid-Atlantic. For example, the 1981 troubles were recently described as Bermuda’s “Arab Spring”, but the immediate decline in air tourism numbers suggests that it was not a breath of fresh democratic air, but the beginning of a long-term tropical depression that has “disappeared” much of our tourism trade into a vortex of the Bermuda Triangle. That and other ‘winds of change’ bode ill weather for the island and its fundamental trade of tourism.We seem to have managed to negate much of the good that the American Forces and their transformation of our landscape did for the people of Bermuda through the use of their military facilities for tourism. Now, through the proposed reuse of the military lands at the old US Naval Operating Base in Southampton (former Premier Alex Scott’s good idea for a “free” land swap for “Southlands” in Warwick) we have a new opportunity to benefit once again from Bermuda’s heritage of war. Let us hope that all those who will venture much into the new tourism project will succeed and that all in Bermuda wishes them well.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480.