Vineyard Gazette
The airfield on the central plain of Martha’s Vineyard is beginning to shape up as something more than raw earth, mud, and the destination of building materials trucked over the roads from the st
World War Two
Naval Auxiliary Air Facility
Martha's Vineyard Airport
Vineyard Gazette
The well-kept secret of the Army's experimental base at Katama during the fall and early winter of 1943 is disclosed at last, in this issue of the Gazette. Ten miles of heavy pipe were delivered, with other equipment, beginning in August, and during the following months five one-mile lengths of pipe were laid in the ocean with the aid of tugs, and welded together into an experimental pipeline under conditions similar to those which would be encountered in laying a gasoline supply line under the English Channel.
World War Two
South Beach

1943

The Navy has taken a leasehold right for the duration of the war from the commonwealth of Massachusetts and others on that portion of Squibnocket Pond which lies west of a line drawn north and south through the westerly shore of Beachgrass Island, so called. This line is marked by a series of buoys. The area around the pond has been conspicuously posted, warning people off the waters of the pond.

As the planes swooped and roared past the windows of his home, the young Army officer, seeing the big red suns which marked them - for the great power which sent them on their errand still thought then that the sun was rising on the land it ruled - cried out: “It’s Japan! It’s war!”
 

Four men of the Engineer Amphibian Command lost their lives in the boiling and racing currents in back of Skiff's Island, off the South Shore of the Vineyard, before daylight on Wednesday morning. The bodies of three have not been recovered. The tragic accident occurred when a staff boat of the familiar cabin cruiser type, accompanying a number of so-called invasion craft which had been dispatched from the Cape on a maneuver problem, struck a shoal in the heavy seas near Skiff's Island. The accident took place at approximately 2 a.m.

Edgartown was invaded at about supper time last Friday by a force whose numbers are not accurately known, but which many believe to have been large as the year-round population of the town. No casualties were suffered and the inhabitants, not a Quisling among them though, seemed to enjoy their conquest.

The airfield on the central plain of Martha’s Vineyard is beginning to shape up as something more than raw earth, mud, and the destination of building materials trucked over the roads from the steamboat landing. The time has arrived, also, when the United States Navy feels that the public may know something of this project which has brought life and a strange new pattern to a domain where only the hawks, rabbits and wildflowers have dwelt for many generations.
 

1942

The steamer New Bedford of the New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Steamboat Line, is being requisitioned by the government as of noon today. This is the second boat to be taken from the line under the war power of the government, and her departure follows by little more than three weeks the requisitioning of the line’s flagships, the Naushon.
 
Every assurance has been given, it is learned, that no more steamers will be taken from the Island line.
 

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