The Base That Never Was
Written by Robert W. Wells
Photographs by George Burns
Saturday Evening Post Magazine
August 19, 1961
**Parenthetical notes have been inserted in this article to adjust dollar amounts to 2017 amounts via CPI Calculator. If you find a mathematical error, please let notify me.**
The Air Force official leaned back in his Pentagon swivel chair. He frowned at the ceiling. “I wish,” he told me, “I’d never heard of Bong.”
A lot of people in Washington wish they’d never heard of Bong Air Force Base. That sentiment also prevails in southeastern Wisconsin, where work on the unfinished base was halted on October 2, 1959, after $29,000,000 (nearly a quarter of a billion in 2017 dollars) had been spent on it. Especially bitter are those families who had to sell their farms to the Government and then, after the rich topsoil had been scrapped away, learned that Uncle Sam didn’t really need their land after all.
Bong is now a ghost base. It consists of nearly nine square miles of scarred countryside fifty-five miles north of Chicago. No one lives there. No crops grow. It is a no man’s land of rutted roads, sagging utility poles, abandoned buildings. Red-and-black fire hydrants stand forlornly in deserted fields. A $250,000 ($2 million in 2017 dollars) railroad spur awaits trains that do not come. Slashing diagonally across the area is a partially finished runway, two and a half miles long. No plane has ever used it. Probably none ever will.
To build huge Bong Air Force Base, the Government displaced scores of old Wisconsin families and ruined 5000 acres of rich farmland. Never finished, it now lies abandoned.
In the tiny farming communities near the base a visitor can find ready explanations for what happened. “Typical military stupidity,” a grocer told me. “Politics — and us taxpayers get caught in the middle, like always,” said a tavern customer. A farmer reported he had the basic explanation: “Nobody cares how much money gets wasted, if it’s not his own money.”
The real story is a good deal more complex — and frustrating. Bong was to have been the last Air Force base built for manned aircraft. Instead, it became the first large postwar air base to be closed before it was completed. What happened there is not likely to happen again in precisely the same way. But the problems which Bong’s shutdown has caused in Wisconsin will certainly be repeated elsewhere, as revolutionary changes in military requirements cause other bases around the country to be closed.
In the continental United States the Defense Department owns 27,000,000 acres of land — an area five times as large as Massachusetts. The Air Force alone holds 11,000,000 acres. Three of its major bases — Mitchel on Long Island, New York; Chennault at Lake Charles, Louisiana, and MacDill at Tampa, Florida — will be closed eventually, perhaps in 1963, resulting in the transfer of 12,000 airmen and the end of 1800 civilian jobs. Donaldson Air Force Base, Greenville, South Carolina, with 4000 airmen and 500 civilians, will drop to reserve status.
As war planes become less numerous, owing to mounting reliance on missiles like the Air Force’s new Minuteman, additional base closings become inevitable. President Kennedy, in fact, had barely settled in the White House before he ordered a new survey to spot obsolete bases that should be abandoned. As a result of this survey, he announced in March that seventy-three bases, fifty-two of them in this country, would be closed entirely or sharply reduced in size during the next three years.
The relationship between air bases and the local civilian communities has rarely been wholly idyllic. An Air Force general put it to me this way:
“When we build a base, people raise hell be-cause we’re taking land off the tax rolls. When it’s operating, they raise hell because we’re making noise. And if we shut it down — then they really raise hell!”
While Bong never actually got into operation, the reaction in Kenosha and Racine counties ran true to pattern. There was opposition from the start. Criticism continued as the bulldozers crunched across the land. Then, when former Air Force Secretary James H. Douglas announced Bong’s closing in 1959, the cries of outrage could be heard all the way from Wisconsin to Washington. They haven’t subsided yet.
The story of Bong began about ten years ago, when the Air Force started looking for a site to base interceptor planes to protect the Chicago-Milwaukee area. In 1954 it settled on an area about midway between the two cities, eighteen miles inland from Lake Michigan. The following year Congress appropriated $16,608,000 ($130 million in 2017 dollars) to start construction — a mere down payment on the estimated $103,000,000 ($843 million in 2017 dollars) it was to cost to build and equip the base.
The 5500-acre field was named for Richard I. Bong, a Poplar, Wisconsin, farm boy who shot down forty Japanese planes in World War II, won a Congressional Medal of Honor, then was killed in California while testing a jet. When the base was planned, our defense depended largely on airplanes. No one could then be sure when missiles would replace them.
The fact that the base was to be built on $300-an-acre farm land and beneath one of the nation’s busiest air corridors brought grumbling from farmers and airline officials, backed up by some congressmen, state legislators and newspaper editorial writers. But it was hard to argue with a military decision that here was the best place to locate planes which might someday rise to save Chicago and Milwaukee from destruction.
In the spring of 1955, all was uncertainty around Kansasville, Wisconsin. Some of its 100 residents hurried over to look at a marker that had suddenly sprouted behind home plate in the town baseball field. It warned of a $250 fine if anyone tampered with this symbol that the United States Government was surveying the land. As farmers planted corn, they weren’t sure that they would ever harvest the crop. Leo Walker, whose 150 acres had been in the family for four generations, recalls how he turned his mower just in time to save a mallard’s nest in his field that spring, then wondered whether the duck would soon be driven away by bulldozers.
In the town of Brighton, south of Kansasville, Mrs. Matt Weiss remembered how she had once cajoled a highway department crew into sparing the hand-some old oaks in front of her farmhouse. Now the trees were threatened again. Her husband wanted to know how, at seventy-nine, a man could put down new roots elsewhere. He looked out toward the roll-ing hills that he loved and demanded, “Where else can you get a view like that?”
At a meeting that fall, 800 farmers filled Dover Town Hall, standing five deep around its walls and overflowing into an adjacent garage. Each had one question to ask Brig. Gen. William H. Wise, head of an Air Force information team: “Will you take my farm?” But Wise didn’t know. The Government would require a little over half of the 9000 acres being surveyed. Most of the farmers, he told them, would be able to harvest their winter wheat next summer.
As it turned out, many, of them were still working their land two years after that meeting. The Air Force ran into problems. The Civil Aeronautics Board, concerned about the effect Bong’s planes would have on commercial air traffic, held a series of conferences with the military. It was agreed to move the site about a mile south to reduce interference with civilian flying, particularly on the Milwaukee-St. Louis run, and to redesign the runway pattern. Even so, the CAB approved the plans reluctantly, capitulating to the necessity of defending the cities from attack.
It was early 1957 before the Government began buying land from fifty-nine owners, most of them Brighton farmers. Nearby residents still had misgivings, despite assurances by an Air Force colonel that the jets would “just go swish” over the cities and that cows and chickens could get used to the noise. The colonel admitted that minks could no longer be raised near the base — minks are more sensitive than they look. And turkeys, alarmed by jet engines, are apt to pile themselves against a fence and smother.
Some of the neighbors were all for Bong. They could see prospects for profit, with 5000 airmen to be stationed there, plus dependents and civilians. Estimates of the total population increase resulting from the base ranged as high as 20,000.
As the land for Bong was gradually acquired, nearby residents found their property taxes increasing. The town of Brighton lost nearly one fourth of its tax base, and the remaining property owners had to help make up that loss. Brighton elementary school district №1 lost more than 27 per cent of its taxable land. A century-old one-room school which the district had hoped to replace was kept in service. After the base was closed, the Air Force sold the district a $100,000 ($818,000 in 2017 dollars) building, built for Bong engineers, for just one dollar. But no one could predict such a windfall then, and at one point schools were so crowded and money was so scarce that children of construction workers attended classes in an old bus, fitted out with seats and desks.
It is now clear that even before the land was bought, a major decision had been made in the Pentagon. Bong was no longer to be used primarily for fighter planes. The Strategic Air Command’s bombers, our principal means of fighting a nuclear war, were to be dispersed to minimize results of a sneak attack on the United States. Bong would be used by these bombers.
Word of the decision leaked out of Washington in early 1957. The local farmers were too busy feuding with the Government over how much their land was worth to pay much attention. But Bong’s critics, some of them in Congress, began asking why it was necessary to build the base so near Milwaukee and Chicago if it was to be used mainly by SAC. In Northern Wisconsin, they pointed out, there was plenty of nearly worthless land where bombers would not interfere with civilian planes and a base would not destroy a prosperous farming area.
But once a project like Bong gets rolling, its course is not easily altered. By autumn of 1957 the site had taken on a new look. Farms were deserted. Silos were empty. Pens on a nearby mink farm had been cut into sections and moved away. Even those farmers who were still dickering with the Government knew they would soon have to move. They hated to go. With many it wasn’t just a question of money.
“Some of these farms have been in the same families for generations,” said a farm wife, Mrs. John A. Kerkman. “City people have no idea what that kind of separation (from the land) can mean.”
Some families found new homes in the area, but most moved a considerable distance away. Some were bitter over the prices they got for their properties, although Washington could point out that it spent $1,700,000 ($13 million in 2017 terms) for real estate with an equalized assessed valuation of only $1,240,891 ($10 million adjusted for inflation). Condemnation proceedings were necessary to force the last families from their land. And a Federal court order was obtained so 100 skeletons in a pioneer cemetery on the site could be moved elsewhere.
In mid-1958, finally, a Minneapolis firm made the low bid of $13,500,000 ($110 million in 2017) to construct the runway and associated facilities. A vantage point for sidewalk superintendents was established on a hilltop. Homes and other buildings were razed, except for a few used as temporary offices. Several minks, inadvertently left behind when their pens were moved, were seen hiding among the few trees left standing.
Then Congress appropriated another $18,500,000 ($151 million in 2017) for Bong, but only after listening to some harsh words about the base. Rep. Melvin Laird, Marshfield, Wisconsin, Republican, considered it “ridiculous” to build there. The late Charles A. Boyle, Democratic congressman from Chicago, demanded, “How in the name of heaven can you throw money into a project that is obsolete and superannuated before it leaves the drafting board?” Another Democrat, Rey. Henry S. Reuss of Milwaukee, predicted Bong would be a “white elephant” and asked President Eisenhower to investigate whether construction should be halted.
But such critics were in the minority. Congressman Gerald T. Flynn, the Racine Democrat who represented the Bong area, had at first opposed the base, but changed his mind after he became convinced it would benefit his district. Harry R. Sheppard, California Democrat, chairman of a House appropriations subcommittee, called the base a key installation in the SAC dispersal plan. The Air Force insisted its Bong-based bombers would not seriously interfere with civilian flights.
By the fall of 1958, 500 men were working around the clock at Bong. Money was being spent at the rate of $1,250,000 ($10 million in 2017) each thirty days. More than 14,000,000 cubic yards of earth had to be moved. The target date, once mid-1958, became 1961.
As the months wore on into 1959, the base began to take form. Wells were drilled, sewers laid, huge storage tanks made ready to hold fuel for the giant planes. Construction started on a power station. With the base rapidly becoming an accomplished fact, even Congressman Reuss despaired of being able to halt its construction. So he shifted his attack. He spoke out against “frills” planned at Bong — an indoor swimming pool, a steam room, a squash court — making headlines with the slogan: “Billions for defense, but not one cent for squash courts.”
Flynn hurried to Bong’s defense. Funds for recreational facilities, he said, would be well spent. Airmen with a convenient place to relax after hours were more apt to re-enlist. Reuss countered by telephoning the Turkish Embassy and sharing with Congress the information that in all of Turkey’s military installations there was not a single Turkish bath. “If the Turkish Army can get along without Turkish baths,” Reuss thundered, “certainly American airmen can.”
The Air Force, unknown to Reuss, was also considering an eighteen-hole golf course for Bong, but this fact never be-came public. Finally a compromise was worked out. The indoor pool and squash court were eliminated. In turn, Reuss withdrew his opposition to the steam room after he was told it was needed to reduce nervous tension and fatigue after long missions. He also agreed to allow any airmen who wanted to play squash to do so as his guest at Milwaukee’s University Club.
While the winds of controversy were blowing in Washington, the bulldozers were having their problems in Wisconsin. Some of the peat bogs on the air base turned out to be twenty feet deep, and costly extra work was required. Estimates of Bong’s total price climbed from $65,000,000 (half a billion dollars in 2017) to $83,000,000 (a little less than three quarters of a billion dollars in 2017), plus an additional $20,000,000 ($160 million in 2017)to equip it.
Not that it really mattered, for the base’s history was rapidly approaching a climax, although no one yet knew it. As late as September 16, 1959, President Eisenhower signed a military appropriations bill including another $16,000,000 ($130 million in 2017) for Bong.
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Then, barely two weeks later, came the moment referred to by local bar-room comics as “the day Bong went boin-n-n-n-g !” On October second, with no advance warning, Air Force Secretary Douglas announced that the base was canceled, effective at once. Money already appropriated for it would be used elsewhere. The B-58’s would be accommodated at bases to be made available by elimination of certain obsolescent B-47 wings. Bong was no longer needed.
Word reached the air base at 2:30 P.M. that Friday, while work by 800 men was going full speed. Lt. Col. Stanley Wilber, base engineer, took the call from SAC headquarters in Omaha. He was acting base commander in the absence of Col. Charles E. Lancaster, who was on leave. Wilber; understandably surprised, telephoned 2nd Air Force headquarters in Shreveport, Louisiana, to ask for orders. But 2nd Air Force didn’t yet know the base was closing.
Colonel Lancaster, on a hunting trip in northern Wisconsin, got the news on a radio broadcast. He jumped into his car and headed back toward the base that had been shot out from under him. As for Bong’s neighbors, William Beyer, chair-man of the Racine County Board, spoke for most of them when he said, “I’m flabbergasted.”
Ted Kostro, a former Milwaukee house painter, felt an even more acute sensation. He had sold his home, borrowed heavily and built the Bow and Arrow drive-in restaurant on a road that would have been used by Bong personnel on their way to nearby Burlington, Wisconsin. By an ironic coincidence, the gala opening of his $60,000 (a little less than half a million in 2017) gamble was scheduled for the night of October second, a few hours after the bubble burst.
Congressman Flynn, soon to be engaged in a losing fight for re-election, in which the Bong situation played a secondary role, blamed high-level politics for the closing. He declared that the base was now a “blight on Racine and Kenosha counties.” Representative Reuss credited the Air Force with an intelligent decision, but regretted it hadn’t come earlier. With admirable restraint he avoided the phrase, “I told you so.”
Only a few nearby residents were able discern silver linings. Robert Ruedebusch, president of the Burlington Chamber of Commerce, pointed out that few business places had gone up on a speculative basis, perhaps because the predominately German residents of Southeastern Wisconsin are cautious with their money. A Burlington filling-station operator, Frank Voss, said he was glad the base had been canceled, even though he’d expected his business to boom when it opened. “I was in the service,” Voss said. “I saw what big bases did to small towns nearby. I like this town the way it is.”
The largest proposed private development in the area was a $50,000,000 ($400 million dollars in 2017) community to be called Upland. It would have been built from scratch on 1800 acres between Kansasville and Union Grove, Wisconsin, by an Evanston, Illinois, firm, Scope Associates, Inc. Three thousand houses were planned, plus a thirty-three-store shopping center, a golf course and an industrial park.
The cancellation came the day before Scope Associates had intended to start buying land it had optioned. Even so, ac-cording to M. J. Becker, a Wisconsin real-estate man associated with the venture, several thousand dollars had already been spent on plans for Upland.
When I went to Washington to ask questions about Bong, so many months had elapsed since the afternoon when the base was canceled that I was surprised how vividly that Friday was still remembered around the Pentagon. John M. Ferry, for example, recalled it at once as the day “we got a lot of static.” A veteran of both World Wars, Ferry was special assistant for installations to Secretary Douglas and his successor, Secretary Dudley C. Sharp, and was responsible for construction of all Air Force bases during the Bong controversy.
“No one came right out and said they thought we were stupid when we canceled Bong,” he said, “but they sure intimated it.”
He admitted it is now clear, with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, that Bong was a mistake. “I’m sorry we ever started the base,” he told me. “But at the time we began it I thought we were doing the right thing. Maybe we should have shut it down sooner. If it wasn’t very good judgment, you will have to attribute it to just one thing — the human fallibilities.”
“How can we prevent such mistakes from happening?” I asked.
Ferry allowed himself a wry grin. “Get smarter people,” he said.
If the future could have been predicted more accurately, the base would not have been begun or would have been canceled sooner, he said. “We started Bong for what we thought was a need that had to be filled. Then the need evaporated. Hindsight is easy. But foresight — foresight is so obscure. Who could have told us four years ago that we’d be building Minuteman right now?”
“Couldn’t Bong have been used for missiles?” I asked.
“Missile sites are dispersed around — not necessarily on — existing Air Force bases. The personnel commute between the sites and the parent base. At Bong there wasn’t yet a completed base on which missile installations could be centered. Besides, there are special problems in converting a base for missile use. The water table is important. The silo for a missile goes down 185 feet below ground.”
Admitting that the decision to close the base was correct, hadn’t there been a temptation in 1959 to let the work go on and avoid criticism?
“There would’ve been no criticism if we’d spent the rest of the money, because no one would have known it was being wasted,” Ferry said. “It was an unpopular decision, closing the base; a courageous decision. But I’m convinced it was the right one. It was not easy. It really tore the secretary to have to make it, with the implications of all that money wasted.”
I’d heard various versions of how the decision was made. Maj. Gen. Augustus M. Minton told me what happened. As Air Force director of civil engineering, he is responsible for spending $1,500,000,000 ($12 billion dollars in 2017) annually on construction projects.
While Bong was being planned and built, the general said, the possibility of canceling the base was discussed a half dozen times. On each occasion but the last it was decided the base was needed. Then, late in September, 1959, the question came up again. Lyle S. Garlock, Assistant Air Force Secretary for Financial Management, asked General Minton for recommendations on how to pare expenditures to meet the soaring cost of new programs, particularly missiles.
“I made several suggestions,” the general said. “Bong was the biggest. I was told to find out how much we’d save if we closed the base out. Several of us flew to Wisconsin to inspect Bong. Secretary Douglas wanted to find out how far construction had gone.
“I came back and reported there were important potential savings. The grading had been done, but the big dollar cost was just ahead. They were almost ready to pour concrete on the runway. A delay of three or four weeks would mean we’d have another ten million dollars committed.
“Bong would have been in minimum operation by July 1, 1961. But by then we knew our manned-aircraft facilities would be cut back. We would be dedicating Bong at a time when we’d be announcing the closing out of other bases. It left us no alternative.”
With the report from General Minton on his desk, Secretary Douglas discussed the matter with other top Air Force brass, asking for advice. By the Wednesday after the Saturday inspection trip, the word came back: Close Bong. Douglas advised Defense Secretary Neil H. McElroy. Then he announced the decision to Wisconsin congressmen and the press.
Reaction varied. Representative Flynn threatened to seek a court order to force resumption of construction. Reuss asked the Federal Aviation Agency to study conversion of Bong to an international jet airport, with helicopters ferrying passengers to Milwaukee and Chicago. The FAA let it be known that it had been ready to schedule hearings on whether to permit B-58’s to use Bong at all. And those hearings, it was pointed out, would have given Bong critics, notably the airline spokesmen, a chance to speak up.
Within a week Douglas was in Racine, trying to explain what had happened. The decision to cancel Bong, he told a meeting there, had been “one of the most difficult and unsatisfactory ones” he’d ever been required to make.
“I wish the decision had been made sooner,” he said. “But I am confident it is the right decision today in the interests of national defense.”
In trimming the Air Force budget, Douglas explained, a number of “highly desirable” items had to be eliminated. One of these was the F-108 long-range fighter program, which cost the taxpayers seven times as much as had been spent at Bong, with $200,000,000 committed for development of a plane that probably never will be built.
Investigators for the House military-operations subcommittee reported some months later that FAA concern over Bong’s potential interference with civilian flying played a larger role in the decision than the Air Force would admit. The FAA, which had not been in existence when the base was begun, said it told the Air Force about a month before the base was closed that the change from interceptors to bombers at Bong might create “intolerable airspace problems” in the Milwaukee-Chicago area.
Every Air Force official I asked, however, denied that the FAA’s position played a determining role in the Bong decision. In any event, the decision was made. The base is closed. The problem now is: What can be done with it?
There has been no shortage of suggestions. It has been proposed that the nine square miles be used as a wild-goose refuge, a new state fairground, a Midwestern Disneyland, a national sports center with fifteen golf courses (but no squash courts), an airline maintenance center, a college campus. The one thing it can’t be used for, everyone agrees, is farming. As a Wisconsin assemblyman put it, the Air Force has stripped off the topsoil and created a “big, flat surface where you can’t raise anything but airplanes.”
A land-use committee; appointed by Wisconsin’s Gov. Gaylord Nelson, studied the matter. With bipartisan support, a bill was pushed through the state legislature enabling Wisconsin to purchase Bong or, if the area is bought by private interests, to control its redevelopment. A state corporation has been created, empowered to issue bonds and to buy or lease the 5500 acres. Governor Nelson and David Carley, director of the Wisconsin department of resource development, told me they view Bong as a potential blessing — in the long run.
“It’s the biggest single piece of undeveloped land between here and Texas,” Carley said. “It has a spur of the Soo Line Railroad. There’s a four-lane express highway just four miles east.” He envisions Bong as an industrial park, surrounded by recreation areas which would serve the most populous part of Wisconsin. If the state can acquire the base from the General Services Administration, the Federal agency charged with disposing of the property, Carley expects eventually to sell all but the park areas to private Beset or individuals, with strict zoning to make sure the redevelopment is orderly.
He considers it possible that Bong may eventually become a new Wisconsin city, its industrial area centered on a highway and the Soo spur line, with plenty of green space and housing developments on the outskirts.
Before such ambitious plans can be realized, the state and GSA must agree on a price. Negotiations are now under way. Details are still confidential, but it appears that Wisconsin may be able to obtain the nine square miles for about one third of the $1,700,000 ($14 million in 2017) the Air Force spent for the real estate alone. This would be less than the $860,000 ($7 million dollars in 2017) which state and local highway departments are asking from the Air Force to restore roads and highways on the base.
Acquisition of the land is the first major hurdle in the state’s plans to restore the Bong area to usefulness. Meanwhile, a similar plan to rehabilitate abandoned acreage is being tried at Malden, Missouri, where late in 1960 Malden Air Force Base was acquired from the Government by that city of 5000 persons. It has been converted into a 2800-acre industrial park. The Malden Industrial Development Commission, formed by local businessmen, is advertising the abandoned field as an ideal place to locate industry. The response has not yet been overwhelming, but Malden residents remain optimistic.
In the farming area around Bong there is skepticism that any ultimate good will come out of the $29,000,000 (a quarter of a billion dollars in 2017) mistake. Resentment lingers, resentment over the wasted money, over the inconvenience caused both those who left the land and those who stayed behind, and over the uncertainty that has racked the area for so many years. And there is something else that hurts worst of all.
I encountered it again and again, perhaps most memorably on a recent drive around the town of Brighton. I stopped my car to ask a farmer how he felt about Bong now. He pushed back his battered hat, put one foot on the wooden fence around his farmyard and gazed off across the fields.
“I’ll tell you the thing that gripes me most,” he said. “It ain’t the money. It ain’t having to drive out of my way to get to town because they’ve blocked off the roads. It ain’t even the extra taxes. It’s just that I can’t figure why they took all that good land and ruined it, when a few miles away there’s gravel land not worth a hoot.”
THE END
