History
The base was originally 29 parcels of land, a simple stretch of tobacco farm that was purchased for $64,502 in 1941. Officials at Camp Lejeune investigated the area in search of an existing airfield for hosting aircraft in support of amphibious operations. Capt. Barnett Robinson, a member of Marine Glider Group 71, concluded in his search that the farmland would suit the Marine Corps’ needs.
The location was placed under the command of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and received its first squadron, VMSB-331 from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point on March 9, 1943. On June 1, VMSB-331 was divided in half to create VMSB-332 however both squadrons were soon after relocated to Bogue Field. From mid-1943 through August 1944 the PBJ squadrons VMB-433, VMB-443 and VMB-612 were stationed there. On April 26, 1944, the area of land around New River and Peterfield Point, named after the original owner of the farmland that was part of the government purchase, was commissioned Marine Corps Auxiliary Airfield Camp Lejeune. This delineated the airfield from Camp Lejeune, and marks its official birth as a Marine Corps installation. Over the next few years, paratrooper Marines, glider troops and air delivery personnel where trained in King Air hangar, the Stations’ first hangar, which was transported from Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina.
As World War II came to an end, MCAAF Camp Lejeune was closed and reverted back to caretaker status as an outlying airfield of MCAS Cherry Point. This didn’t last long, however, as in 1951 the installation was reactivated and became Marine Corps Air Facility Peterfield Point, Camp Lejeune. Only one year later the name was changed again, this time to Marine Corps Air Facility New River. July 1954 marked the arrival of the first operational Marine Aircraft Group, MAG-26, which was transferred from MCAS Cherry Point.
The area faced another major name change in 1968, where it was recommissioned as Marine Corps Air Station (Helicopter) New River, marking its growth from a small training area to a major operational airfield.
Read more about this topic: Marine Corps Air Station New River
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)