One
of the remnants of World War II in eastern North Carolina is the Navy’s
Weeksville dirigible hangar (a big blimp garage) in Pasquotank County, about 9
miles outside of Elizabeth City.
The
site is now owned and operated by TCOM, L.P., an airship manufacturing company
based in Columbia, Md., and used as a manufacturing and testing location. The
massive corrugated soft steel structure is 1,040 feet long, 150 feet high and
296 feet wide.
Writing
for Our State magazine in January 2012, freelancer Earl Swift described it this
way:
“One
moment the view from the two-lane road south of Elizabeth City is a predictable
album of soybeans, farmhouses and thickets of loblolly.” And then, all of a sudden,
dagnabbit, “an enormous, silver spacecraft – or something – looms.
“It’s
big beyond sense: 20 stories high, humpbacked and futuristic. Or rather, an
old-fashioned notion of what the future might look like. Its size defies
superlatives,” Swift said. “An arching roof relies on arching steel trusses,
rather than columns, for its support. A tractor-trailer becomes a toy on a
floor the size of six football fields.
“Designed
to shelter six of the Navy’s patrol blimps, it actually accommodated nine, with
room to spare. Three battleships would fit side by side, as would a platoon of
Statues of Liberty,” Swift said.”
“…The
structure is a monolithic monument to a mostly forgotten chapter of World War
II – a hangar for U.S. Navy blimps that helped defeat Nazi Germany’s infamous
U-boats,” Swift said.
The
hangar was commissioned as an LTA (lighter than air) Naval Air Station more
than 76 years ago on April 1, 1942, and the Navy’s first blimp mission out of
Weeksville in the Battle of the Atlantic occurred June 8, 1942.
Weeksville
was as “an ideal southern location” for a naval air station for LTA craft, the
second in the country, to complement New Jersey’s Lakehurst blimp base.
Weeksville beat out 42 other sites that were considered by the Navy, Swift
said.
He
said the U.S. government paid a little more than $100 an acre for the 822-acre
site.
In
the years before helicopters, Swift said, “the best vehicle to detect German
U-boats was the dirigible, commonly referred to as the blimp. Blimps could fly
slowly for extended periods, hover and carry the sensors and armament to
protect the shipping lanes off the East Coast.”
“From
the deck of a surface ship, a submerged sub was invisible. From the gondola of
a blimp, however, a U-boat at shallow depth was plain to see. A blimp could
stay in the air for two full days without refueling. If a sub dived deep, blimp
crews could sniff it out with an array of tools the Navy perfected – sensors
that detected the vibrations of turning screws and the magnetism of a hidden boat’s
steel hull,” Swift said.
“Once
found, a U-boat was in trouble. Blimp crews could summon warships to the scene
or tangle with the marauder themselves. Harmless and soft and quiet though they
seemed, Navy blimps were armed with depth charges and machine guns.
“To
see one blimp in flight was an occasion,” Swift said. “To see three or four
rise over the treetops and nose eastward into battle, their size belying their
speed, was jaw-dropping. They made an even bigger impression on U-boat crews.
“Once
deployed on patrol runs and as convoy escorts, the blimps all but halted German
sub attacks on Allied merchantmen,” Swift reported.
“The
blimps rarely mounted an attack, but their presence helped turn the Battle of
the Atlantic. Allied shipping losses off the coast fall to three in 1943, to
zero in 1944, to two the following year.”
With
the end of World War II in 1945, the blimps left. Weeksville was reduced to a
Naval Auxiliary Air Station, and the Navy used the facility for storage of
surplus fixed-wing aircraft, eventually housing a maximum of 576 aircraft.
On
the wall of the Ocracoke post office was a government-issued poster. It depicted
Uncle Sam pointing his finger, with the words: “Loose Lips Could Sink Ships.”
Coastal
North Carolinians heeded that advice to “hush”…and bring World War II to an
end. Hallelujah.
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