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    JB McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, NJ History

    JB McGuire Dix Lakehurst was formed from three military installations, McGuire Air Force Base, Fort Dix, and Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst, in 2009.

    Fort Dix was established in 1917, as Camp Dix, named for Major General John Adams Dix, who entered Army service as a 14 year old cadet in the War of 1812 and mustered out as a captain in 1828; he later re-entered service as a Major General in the Civil War. Camp Dix served as a staging base for soldiers being sent to fight in World War One, and later as a separation center for returning troops. Between the wars, the camp served various Federal functions, including a period as a Civilian Conservation Corps base. In World War Two the renamed Fort Dix became a basic training center, mobilization point, and later a demobilization point. Training at Dix continues through to the present day; currently training Army Reserve and National Guard units. Units from Fort Dix have served in every major conflict since World War One.

    McGuire Air Force Base began as the Fort Dix Airport in 1938, which became an Army Airfield in January 1941. With the onset of World War Two, the field became the home of observation units, mainly anti-submarine patrol squadrons. Soon the field was being used for various training operations, and for air unit deployments to North Africa and Europe. With the end of the war, the Fort Dix Army Air Base was used for receiving and demobilizing returning units.

    After the war the base was inactivated until 1948, when the Air Force activated the base and renamed it McGuire Air Force Base, in honor of Medal of Honor recipient Major Thomas McGuire. Major McGuire was the second high scoring American ace of World War Two; his Medal of Honor was for actions over multiple days, including leading 15 P-38s against 20 Japanese Zeros, aggressively defeating the enemy through direct interventions, and superior piloting and gunnery in his last combat.

    McGuire AFB was upgraded from its World War Two temporary building status, with considerable improvements to runways, housing, and administrative buildings, and briefly placed under Strategic Air Command before a longer term as an Air Defense Base, with jet interceptors and later surface-to-air missiles to protect the Mid-Atlantic air space against possible Soviet attack. In the 1950s the base shifted to a military airlift mission. In the early 2000s McGuire became the home base for the 21st Expeditionary Mobility Task Force, and in 2009 merged with Fort Dix and NAES Lakehurst to make a three-service base.

    Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst was opened in New Jersey in 1916, originally a munitions testing site for the Imperial Russian Army. This did not last past the fall of the Russian monarchy, and the US Army acquired the land during the US involvement in World War One, and named it Camp Kendrick, and used it for typical training, and for a short period based the 1st Gas Regiment, a chemical weapons unit, here.

    The US Navy bought the land from the Army in 1921, and renamed the site Naval Air Station Lakehurst. The Navy used Lakehurst for fixed wing and lighter-than-air aviation; this is where the Navy program developed large rigid airships (the USS Shenandoah, USS Los Angeles, and USS Akron), and squadrons of blimps. The airship hangars at Lakehurst were the largest hangars, and largest rooms, in the world at the time. Hangar One could house three (giant for the era) skyscrapers side-by-side. Some of these hangars are still in use at Lakehurst, housing other aircraft. Airships were considered the wave of the future in the 1920s and 1930s, and Lakehurst was the primary East Coast facility for domestic and foreign airships, including the German zeppelins Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg.

    In 1937 the Hindenburg burned and crashed at the airship landing field at Lakehurst. The Navy's large airship program crashed immediately after this disaster, but the blimps remained, and were used extensively in World War Two for air anti-submarine patrol of the US coastline and for convoy protection. Blimps may be big, but they have an unrivalled loiter time (they float): no ship overwatched by a Navy blimp was ever lost in the war. Navy blimp activities followed in the Cold War for various missions, and in 2006 blimp activities resumed for four years as a modernization of the program before being again inactivated in 2010.

    NAS Lakehurst was also the first station for Navy helicopter squadrons and related helicopter training, starting after World War Two. Lakehurst engineering was also instrumental in developing aircraft carrier launch systems, and flight deck systems. The station was NAES Lakehurst in the late 1970s, and merged with nearby Fort Dix and McGuire AFB in the later 2000s, and continues providing engineering services for the US Navy.