The SKIES of ALEXANDRIA #1

S O M E   B A C K G R O U N D

For a few brief years, the 58th Air Division ruled the skies from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.  Alcoa, Tennessee, has, since World War II, been a strategic asset to the United States or three reasons: a power grid, fissile atomic material, and aluminum.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was a Roosevelt initiative to provide electricity to the southern Appalachians.  Ostensibly, this was a good works project for the region.  It was also a good way to support the Alcoa company in their mining and processing of aluminum for the aircraft industry.  Aluminum was, at that time, vital to the production of aircraft.

Even more vital, but never discussed -- it was above TOP SECRET -- was the need to produce weapons grade Uranium.  There were two ways to do this.  One in Alcoa; the other in Hanford, Washington.

In 1907, the Pittsburgh Reduction Company changed its name to the Aluminum Company of America - AlCoA - and began looking for a place in eastern Tennessee to open a large smelting operation.  By 1919, Alcoa had established a community of 150 company houses in North Maryville, and the village incorporated itself as Alcoa, Tennessee.  To smelt aluminum, Alcoa needed power.  They bought the Knoxville Power Company for their holdings on the Little Tennessee River.  Soon, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) came along, and this part of the country had plentiful electricity.  Then, under the Manhattan Project, a nuclear refinement facility was built nearby.

It was not until after World War II was over and U.S. intelligence began looking through captured Nazi documents that a plan was discovered whereby a German U-Boat would sneak up the Mississippi River and travel as far as they could navigate and dispatch saboteurs to disrupt as much as they could of the valuable war effort taking place in and around Alcoa.  This was how important Alcoa was.  But this plan never materialized.  Meanwhile, a new threat emerged. 

Crest of the 58th Air Division, Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio.

With this in mind and as the Cold War dawned, the newly formed Air Defense Command needed to defend Alcoa, Tennessee.  Any bombers, the brass decided, would come over Ohio or Indiana. By the 1950s, the 58th Air Division was formed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.  This unit was responsible for protection of Alcoa.  The Division had 4 fighter squadrons, six ground radar sites, and a host of Ground Observer Corps (GOC.)

One of my close friends grew up in the Baltimore, Ohio, area just south of Licking County and Kirkersville.  As a Boy Scout, the troop pulled their national duty by supplying a shift at the Kirkersville GOC.  His memory was the boring nature of the shift.  Their targets were always identified as airliners heading to and from Port Columbus --today's Eddie Rickenbacker International, my friend never detected an enemy bomber.  He would go on to be an Air Force radar technician in the 1960s.  Thank you, my friend.  You know who you are, Gene.

As a youth, I would have sworn tha I saw an F-89 Scorpion break the sound barrier just south of Alexandria.  I was probably mistaken, but the sonic boom was real.

By 1959, the 58th Air Division was done.  ADC begins to restructure for the coming Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) which will introduce computers into the air defence equation.  After SAGE came the Sector Operations Control Centers, in which I spent five years.

Southeast Air Defense Sector, Tyndall AFB, Florida