Adak Army Airfield On June 6/7, 1942, the Japanese Navy and Army participated in the only invasion of the United States during
World War II through the
Aleutian Islands of
Kiska and
Attu as part of the
Aleutian Islands Campaign. Despite the first loss of U.S. soil to a foreign enemy since the
War of 1812, the campaign was not considered a priority by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. British
Prime Minister Churchill stated that sending forces to attack the Japanese presence there was a diversion from the
North African Campaign and Admiral
Chester Nimitz saw it as a diversion from his operations in the Central Pacific. Commanders in Alaska, however, believed the Japanese occupiers would establish airbases in the Aleutians that would put major cities along the
United States West Coast within range of their bombers and once the islands were again in United States hands, forward bases could be established to attack Japan from there. The establishment of
Adak Army Airfield (Code Name
A-2, also "
Longview") on 30 August 1942 gave the
United States Army Air Forces a forward base to attack the Japanese forces on
Kiska Island. The landing was made in a storm and within a week additional forces, including the 807th Engineer Aviation Battalion were landed on the island at Kuhluk Bay. However, the island had not been properly surveyed to find a suitable site to build the airfield. A very quick survey of the coast located a tidal marsh which had a firm foundation of sand and gravel beneath it. Work began on 2 September with the construction of an enclosing dike around the marsh and a system of drainage canals drain off the water, followed by scraping off the topsoil to reach the gravel underneath. Additional gravel and then a sand runway was laid down. By 10 September enough construction had been completed that a 73d Bomb Squadron
B-18 Bolo successfully landed on the runway. A 5,000 ft
Pierced Steel Planking was laid down shortly afterward and the transports from the
42d Troop Carrier Squadron arrived the following day, landing on compacted sand next to where the matting was being laid. The station was designated a
National Historic Landmark and listed on the
National Register of Historic Places in 1987 for its role in the Second World War, even though little remained of the period facilities. Of some note was the detection of highly classified U.S. submarine operations off the Soviet submarine base at
Petropavlovsk despite a belief among some submariners the system could not pick up U.S. submarines. The array at Adak twice caused significant awareness SOSUS could. In 1962 NAVFAC Adak contact reports went to Commander,
Alaskan Sea Frontier and that command published a secret report containing the Petropavlovsk contacts presuming they were Soviet.
Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet (COMSUBPAC) recognized the contacts as their very highly classified operations and immediate changes were ordered for the reporting procedures. In 1973 such contacts were again almost published and stopped only when contact information was matched, on advice by a visiting civilian expert who recognized the signatures, by NAVFAC people to one of the submarine's logs when that submarine put into Adak for a medical emergency. In 1968 a tap on the Adak array for the
Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC), a nuclear event monitoring system, combined with AFTAC hydrophones in the Pacific provided time delay analysis for localizing the GOLF II Class Soviet SSB
K-129 loss. That location provided the information leading to
Project Azorian and the attempt to raise the lost submarine. The
Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) directed closure of the Naval Air Facility and dictate that no military facilities could remain on the island forced the closing of NAVFAC Adak; the only SOSUS facility closed directly as a result of BRAC. Acoustic data from the Adak array was routed to the Naval Ocean Processing Facility Whidbey Island (a tenant of
Naval Air Station Whidbey Island) and the Adak facility was decommissioned on 30 September 1992 after thirty years of surveillance. ==Education==