History
Spangdahlem Air Base has been a military presence in Germany for over five decades. With the creation of NATO in response to Cold War tensions in Europe, USAFE wanted its vulnerable fighter units in West Germany moved west of the Rhein River to provide greater air defense warning time. France agreed to provide air base sites within their zone of occupation in the Rheinland-Palatinate as part of the NATO expansion program. The base was constructed between 1951 and 1953 at a cost of roughly $27,000,000 using French and German contractors, working under the supervision of a French government agency.
The initial USAF military presence began on 1 September 1952 with the arrival of the 7352d Air Base Squadron on 1 September 1952 from Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base near Munich. The mission of the 7532d ABS was to prepare the facility for an operational wing.
Read more about this topic: Spangdahlem Air Base
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)