Google Earth: Hidden History

Snooping around in Google Earth the other night, I started trying to solve a little mystery. In the northern reaches of Eglin Air Force Base southeast of Crestview, there's a field of small circular sites lined by roads. When I first saw it in 2006, I called it the Mystery Flower.

Google Earth didn't allow much zooming at the time, let alone Street View, so I just put a placemark pin there and went on to more interesting sights.

Now I can zoom in close enough to see the buildings in each site and travel the nearby roads to look at signs. My "Mystery Flower" is Test Area C-72, but I still don't know much about its purpose.

The really interesting item here, though, is the triangular airfield across Bob Sikes Road from here. If you get down into Street View at the side road leading to the field, you find a plaque (photo credit: Mark Sublette):

This is Wagner Field, where Jimmy Doolittle and his Raiders practiced for their 1942 mission to kick the Japanese in the tail. It was more of a morale-booster than an effective campaign, but it showed the Japanese that the US could reach across the Pacific.

After WW2, a V-2 rocket launch ramp was built just southeast of the field. The rusty ruins are still there.

Wagner was also used to test an oddball C-130 Hercules project called Credible Sport. In September and October of 1980, a heavily modified Herc fitted with 30 rockets was put through several test landings and takeoffs. The idea was that as the plane's on its final approach to the runway, some of the rockets would fire and slow it down significantly, allowing it to land in a short space--say, a soccer field in downtown Tehran, Iran, right next to the US Embassy.

This was during the Hostage Crisis, in the aftermath of a failed rescue attempt.

The other half of this plan would involve firing more rockets on the Herc to help it into the air with a load of rescued hostages. From there, it and its sister planes would head to the Persian Gulf and land on the carrier USS Nimitz. The test plane crashed at Wagner Field October 29, 1980 and was buried somewhere nearby.

More recently, Wagner was used in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle test flights.

Paul Freeman has an interesting writeup of Wagner at his "Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields" site.

Pic of the Day: A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy

Hard to believe the 35th Anniversary of the original Star Wars is coming up in a few weeks (May 25). I might unbend a bit from my self-imposed Luca$ boycott to watch it.

Here's a Google Earth capture of the little building in Ajim, Tunisia used for exterior shots of the Mos Eisley Cantina.

The place hasn't been touched since 1976; I read somewhere that it's being used to store bicycles.

Here are some fan sites with shots of the building with and without the set dressing and production blueprints of the set.

Adventures Suck While You're Having Them (Sweetwater Creek, 9/16/2006)

The title is something Neil Peart says a few times in his travel book "Roadshow." Man, is that ever true.

The worst kayak ride I've ever had was one of those sucky adventures.

I found a guidebook to Northwest Florida rivers a few years ago. It's pretty out of date as far as roads and landmarks, but still usable, since the rivers are still there.

I wanted to try a different run from the usual one I took with the Movie Freak; this would be the first time one of his trumpet students came along, so we wanted a short ride.

According to the guidebook, the ride along Sweetwater Creek would be about 2 miles, with plenty of shade. We dropped Movie Freak's car at the take-out spot, piled all our stuff into my Tracker, and headed up to the Highway 4 put-in, a bridge over the creek. It was about 11 a.m.

I parked behind the southwest guard rail and we made our way down a kind of steep slope to the creek. Plenty of trees around, so the water was almost icy cold even in mid-September.

We had played up the whole tubing/kayaking experience for the kid, and all three of us were looking forward to it.

We hit a snag within 100 feet of the bridge, but didn't think anything of it. There had been plenty of hurricanes in the previous couple of years and deadfall was common even on Juniper and Coldwater Creeks (our usual). The kid and Freak had it easier; they were riding inner tubes and could just crouch down and float under it.

I had to maneuver the boat to a shallow spot, lever my fat ass up out of the seat (even 6 years ago, my legs were starting to give me trouble), and drag the boat around the snag. Saw some raccoon tracks on the bank, a first.

Back in the boat...and within a couple of minutes the way was blocked again. We voted to keep going, hoping that it'd be better.

It didn't.

There was a Lowe's worth of lumber downstream, and we had to go over, under or around it all. We really should have turned back, but that didn't happen. Each snag was a sucky adventure in itself; one was bad enough that I left the boat, climbed the west bank, and found myself looking across someone's pasture. I went a few yards downstream past the snag, climbed back down, and retrieved the boat, long since having given up on riding it. I pulled it along like an unwilling burro.

We hit another one like that a few hours later, the worst of all--a high, thick wall near what looked like a picnic area on the east bank. We scaled the bank and stopped for lunch, joking that this was a little more fun than we usually had. There really was no going back at this point; we had no idea how far we'd come (not far at all, as it turned out) and just wanted to keep moving forward.

From the picnic spot and a little trail running south, we could see that we could get around three sizable snags...and as soon as we were in the water again, we had to deal with another one.

We killed six hours doing this. By 5 p.m., the three of us were worn out. My shins burned from where I'd banged them on underwater branches. We wearily passed by a picnic area on the west bank, this one with a table and benches.

I don't think there was any discussion of stopping there; we kept going through/over/around several more snags before coming up against another wall of trees and branches. It looked like the creek stopped right there--and for us, it did. We turned around and hiked for that last picnic stop, rested a few minutes, and followed the nearby trail north away from the creek. The trail became a loose dirt road bordering that same pasture I'd seen from the other side, then finally led to a paved road.

At the second house on the right, we stopped to ask for a ride back to the Tracker. Big family, really nice folks. They explained that the creek had been left uncleared by whatever State or County office, and that it had been like that since Hurricane Opel in 1995.

Nice.

We were loaded into the family truck and off we went, maybe a quarter mile to Highway 4. The Tracker was parked barely 300 feet away.

After more than 6 hours, we'd gone maybe 3/4 mile down the creek (the middle push-pin in the picture).

"Idiots" tag is for us, for not turning back.

Forte di Monte (Fort Mollinary)--Monte, Italy

One of the more eye-popping features in Google Earth is 3D terrain. I keep forgetting about it--and then I stumble over a place like this:

This little fort was built by Austrian occupiers (1849-1852) trying to block Italian attempts at independence. It's 410 meters up a spur on Mount Pastel. It went from Austrian to Italian in 1866, eventually modified in 1844 to point its guns north instead of south. If the Italian Wikipedia got translated right, there was a powder explosion in 1945 (maybe set off by retreating German troops?) that heavily damaged the place.

Forte di Monte is odd-shaped, with high walls along the north and east flanks as a landward defense. Two levels of rifle loopholes cover the switchback path coming up the mountain face to the north and the approach from a small village to the east. Going by Lynne Otter's picture of the sally port (2nd pic, from inside the fort), there's at least one flanking cannon embrasure to the right.

The western and southern walls look to be lower. It was built to hold 5 primary guns and 2 mortars when the fort was active, but there were actually 20 guns of various calibers.

The view from up here is incredible--photographer Lynne Otter has a few pics on her blog; lucky65vr has a few more.


Location: Northern Italy, southeast of Caprino Varonese.
LAT 45°34'1.24"N
LON 10°49'50.87"E

Google Earth, Basic Training: GRENADE!!

I always seemed to miss out on the "fun" days in Basic.

I was on KP the day our Company went into the gas room; we kitchen-cleaners were run out to the site about the time everyone else was staggering out of the building, a line of poor bastards with their gas masks off and snot, tears, puke and phlegm pouring out of them in varying amounts.

I got a whiff of the stuff, but for whatever reason we KP warriors didn't get to play. I don't feel bad.

I can't remember whether it was KP or Company Driver duty that nearly made me miss grenade day. If I wasn't enthusiastic about the instant sunburn and mucus overload, I can't say the same about the grenade range.

A handful of us were driven out to the range and given the sketchiest walk-through of the care and feeding of the various grenades. We could hear the efforts (BOOOM!!) of the group ahead of ours. Thumb goes on (BOOOM!!) the "spoon," pull the pin, throw (BOOOM!!) the damn thing and duck. They shuffled us out (BOOOM!!) to the range, where we lined up in a concrete (BOOOM!!) bunker, put on heavy flak vests, and led us (BOOOM!!) out in (BOOOM!!) twos.

Now I and my "buddy" were in a big concrete box taller than our heads (or maybe we were just ducking and covering?), open to the sky. The sergeant reminded us how to hold, how to pull, how to throw. My "buddy" yanked the pin and did a straight-armed John Wayne toss over the wall...BOOOM!!

My turn. Thumb goes here, pull the pin--

The impatient sergeant grabbed the baseball-shaped grenade (the "spoon" flew off...and now the damn thing was armed) and hefted it over the wall...BOOOM!!

It's not like I was taking my damn time with it. Maybe he just wanted to be done. *shrug*.

We were herded back to our jobs and that was that.

A few nights ago, spying on Ft. Jackson, I found a pair of grenade ranges side by side, one looking unused and maybe falling apart, the other much cleaner. The older one is scarred mostly by rain runoff from the higher ground surrounding the pit. The newer one is pocked with craters:

Haven't found the gas house yet.

Google Earth and Basic Training

I haven't been back to Fort Jackson, South Carolina since I finished Basic in 1987. I've visited a few times via Google Earth, looking for memories. The barracks building was easy enough, and the site of the church we got frog-marched to because some zealous sergeant wanted to watch a holiday gospel concert. The church isn't there, anymore.

I didn't do it.

It was more of a challenge to find some of the firing ranges way out to the east, places where we spent most of our time when we were learning the M-16, M-60, LAW anti-tank rocket, and grenades. The basic rifle ranges are arranged in a loop. The last time spied around, Google Earth's low-altitude imaging wasn't very good. This time, though, I could see foxhole positions on each firing line, blasted cars and trucks, and bleachers where green trainees are taught the basics of killin' stuff.

But I hadn't been able to find the Big One, where we'd had our "live fire" exercise.

For this one, we had to sit in the bleachers after dark, waiting for our eyes to fully adjust to the night. Then we marched along a dirt road and found our way into a long trench. I was somewhere near the middle.

"You're going to climb this wall and hit the deck," we were told. "If you stand up, one of those M-60's at the other end of the course might take the top of your helmet off, so stay the hell down! There's a barbed wire obstacle--all you have to do is roll over on your back and shimmy under it. Just remember NOT TO STAND UP."

Right around then, the 60's started firing, every 5th round a tracer. A bright red flare rocketed into the sky and burst, casting its light on everything (so much for night vision).

Showtime! We went up over the wall, yelling and crawling in the dirt. I could see a low line of sandbags ahead of me. There was a flash and a gut-liquefying BOOOM that earplugs didn't do much about. Those of us near those damn sandbags crabbed sideways in case those ball-breaking bastards set off another blast.

Stay low, keep crawling, rifle slung across my forearms...there's the BOOOM barbed wire (shit! there's another sandbagged pit to the right, so the guys on that end of the line get to crap themselves this time). My knees and elbows felt sandpapered. Stay low...keep crawling. Damn helmet kept riding down my forehead.

No idea how long it took to negotiate the course. It always seems like forever. Everything distilled down to staying low and crawling, ignoring the sand working its way down my sleeves and grinding into my knees. I could see the towers from which the machine guns were firing--and then I was past them, getting to my feet and leaving the course.

I never laid eyes on the place again until last night, when I finally found it in Google Earth. Not as big as it had seemed from a worm's-eye view:

(click to largify)

It's only 200 feet wide and 600 feet long; the starting trench is about 200 feet up from a long, high pile of red dirt (the bullet catcher); the three sandbag-ringed pits, zigzagged obstacles, and machine gun towers stand out much better in daylight.

I got a chuckle out of one detail in the picture: from the trench line, you can clearly see a few dozen belly tracks. It looks like quite a few trainees headed for that middle pit only to have it blow up on them--you can even see where they damn near backtracked to get around the thing.

The Fort Google Earth Project

I've been using Google Earth pretty heavily lately, organizing a massive collection of "Forts of the World" waypoints I found a few years ago.

The main batch wasn't an exhaustive list--only 4 from Japan, 10 on the island of Malta (there are more), only a few from the United States. I've still got some sub-foldered waypoints to look through, though, and I don't know how many more I'll find. The count is up to more than a hundred just with what I've finished so far.

After years of not dealing with the long, tangled mess of waypoints seemingly randomly dumped into a Google Earth "places" file--and after years of just not wanting to bother trying to organize it all, because GE doesn't make it easy--I set up subfolders and got to it. Some of the locations are spectacular, such as four French forts up in the Alps and a pair of Italian forts perched on sheer mountain faces with no way to reach them except switchback trails.

I found Germany's WW2 flak towers in Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna, lonely desert guardians like Masada in Israel, thickly overgrown batteries like those of Fort Saint Philip on the Mississippi south of New Orleans, fortified cities in the Netherlands, and the "Hermit Fort," Fort Fisher in North Carolina, where an old man named Robert Harrill took up residence in an abandoned WW2 bunker in the 1950's.

There are so many more! Rio de Janeiro, South Africa, Denmark, Sweden, France, Montenegro, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Canada. Makes me wish Mitt Romney would adopt me so I could get an allowance and travel the world just to look at forts and castles (forget about converting to Mormonism, though).

The next part of the project will be adding all of my own placemarks (mostly American forts) and adding new ones for batteries that were added during the late 1900s, WW1 and WW2. Once I've got a honking big batch of them, I'll figure out how to upload the placemarks file and make the world a better place for history buffs.