In my adolescence I was an avid science fiction reader, and one of my favorite books was Ray Bradbury’s iconic collection of stories, The Martian Chronicles. It was published in 1950 at the beginning of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. One of the most poignant and quietly chilling of Bradbury’s tales is called “And There Will Come Soft Rains.”
It is essentially a description of the slow process of the decay of a house, full of high-tech automated systems, that continues to function long after its inhabitants have been vaporized by a distant nuclear blast, until the house, too, inevitably begins breaking down.
I think of this story every time I walk through the landscape of the now-defunct North Truro Air Force Base, just south of Highland Light, for I know of no better representation of what an American suburb might have looked like ten or twenty years after a thermonuclear blast or neutron bomb had killed off all its inhabitants but left the buildings standing. As one walks along its cracked and grass-invaded asphalt streets, one passes a row of cheap wood-shingled and asphalt-roofed ranch houses, one-story buildings with low hip roofs. The roof shingles are worn or missing; the uncut grass rolls up over the front concrete stoops, and the trees and shrubs all grow untamed and aggressive, lurching drunkenly against walls, scraping roofs, smothering broken and boarded-up windows. Overgrown ball fields and cracked-asphalt basketball courts stand in deserted silence. Wooden telephone poles and rust-stained street lamps still line the streets, but the wires dangle and loop slackly between the poles like tangled sleeves of black yarn, and the streetlight bulbs are shattered.
It all has the eerie look of an abandoned suburb, but of course these were never suburban houses except in appearance. Rather, they were cheaply-built housing for military families who lived on the base. Despite its official name, however, the North Truro Air Force Base, located on relatively flat and open grassland on Truro’s Highland Plains, was never an actual air force base. That is, it never had planes or runways. In 1951 it became part of the DEWLINE system, one of twenty-three Distant Early Warning radar stations established by the Department of Defense at the beginning of the Cold War. At its peak, the North Truro base had five hundred residents (including family members of married servicemen). Some of these were engaged in maintenance and support for the original four radar domes or “ray-domes” located on the base, but most were there to provide service and support to one of the so-called “Texas Tower” radar stations constructed on Georges Bank, 110 miles offshore.
These towers were part of the “first line of defense” for the North American continent against possible Soviet nuclear attacks. As one former base commander put it, the Texas Towers, or TT2s as they were called, were a critical defense “against a country that would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons in an atomic war,” and he credited the TT2 towers with providing us with “30 extra minutes to prepare for an atomic war.” When I read this, I thought, Thirty minutes? For what? To pile more cans of Campbell’s soup into the backyard bomb shelter? To have one last quickie with your spouse or girlfriend? To listen to Mozart’s Serenade for violin and viola? It brought back all the literal madness of the Cold War. When another Texas Tower located 84 miles off New York City was destroyed in a storm in 1961 with the loss of all hands, the other TT2s were dismantled and abandoned, and, presumably, we lost our thirty-minute edge to oblivion.
This begins a two-part essay on the old North Truro Air Force Base and its role in Cape Cod ‘s history. Next week, Bob will conclude his essay on the old North Truro Air Force Base.
