On December 9, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl ...



On December 9, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, members of Company A, 101st Infantry, 51st Brigade, 26th “Yankee” Division of the US Army National Guard, which had recently returned from North Carolina and was quartered at Camp Edwards, were sent to coast patrol at three locations on Cape Ann: Annisquam Light, Halibut Point, and Emerson Point, each in a squad of six privates in the charge of a corporal termed “acting” sergeant. Besides lookout duties, the squad was charged with setting up defensive positions along the coast. The men had M1 rifles, carbines, bars, light machine guns and 60mm mortars, supplemented by 105mm howitzers situated on Pigeon Hill, the highest elevation on northeastern Cape Ann. This information was gathered from the personal recollections of those who served in these squads on Cape Ann in this contingent which stayed until the end of January, 1942, when they were relieved by another regiment from Cape Edwards.

By January 1944 the US Army Corps of Engineers had completed construction of station 136 for the harbor defense of Boston at Halibut Point, making it the end base station for Battery Seaman in Portsmouth, NH and Battery Murphy in Nahant, MA as well as an anti-aircraft intelligence post. The tower was constructed with a steeple on the back corner intending to disguise it as a church. From what we gather, the site likely wasn’t Coastal Artillery Corps operational for a long period of time, the improvement in radar and site’s construction well along into the war

Perhaps the more significant military role played by Halibut Point was after World War Two -

POST WORLD WAR TWO HISTORY:

The Cold War between the spheres of influence of the United States and Soviet Union began, in effect, almost immediately after the war and American domestic military concerns revolved around two factors: a worry about the ability of Soviet bombers to penetrate U.S. air defenses and the fact that in World War Two the Battle of Britain was won with only five percent attrition of enemy bombers. Still early on in the “radar era,” the U.S. Army continued radar research at Halibut Point until well into the Korean War. We don’t have a lot of information about what exactly was going on at Halibut from the mid to late 1940’s until December 1951 when site control was transferred from Eastern Army Anti-Aircraft Artillery Command to the U.S. Air Force 6520th Aircraft Control & Warning Squadron (Experimental) recently set up to operate out of Hanscomb Air Force base in Bedford, MA. The Squadron’s mission was “to test and assist in the development of experimental techniques in the operation of aircraft control and warning systems and to operate an Air defense Direction Center in support of Project Lincoln, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” Project Lincoln was precursor to Lincoln Laboratory, which was formed shortly after, when the U.S. government finally convinced the president of MIT to formalize and codify the institution’s relationship with the U.S. military. MIT President Killian, in his autobiography The Education of a College President, details his initial reluctance to establish such a relationship between an educational institution and the military. MIT had played a heavy defense role in World War Two, particularly with its nascent Whirlwind computer and Radiation Laboratory, but school officials had concerns about involvement in large and long-term military projects. The U.S. government predicated that development of such a new laboratory with its significant backing in Massachusetts would serve as a stimulus for the nation’s electronics industry

and this new laboratory would emerge as its center. President Killian, seeking a

way to have MIT involved without being seen as too much a part of the military

complex, proposed the development of an MIT spin-off; a private corporation

away from the Cambridge campus, a corporation wholly owned by the school that

by charter served but one client, the U.S. government. In 1952, this new entity was christened Lincoln Lab and in the ensuing years the government’s prophecy became true with the computer and technological research coming out of Lincoln Lab creating the famed, “America’s Technology Highway,” along Route 128.

The transfer of the Halibut site coincided with the formation of the Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee, usually called the Valley Committee, within Project Lincoln. Their top priority was to find a solution to the “gaps” in low-altitude radar coverage and the inability of prevailing radar systems to consistently carry out detection, tracking, identification and interception of more than a few targets within the coverage of any one radar. At that point in history, “handover” from one low-level radar system site to another was done by voice telephone. The mission of the Valley Committee was to develop a “gap filled” radar system to fill the low-altitude “holes” between existing long-range radars. The search for an answer to this problem became embodied, in 1953, in the initiation of the Cape Cod System, the first attempt at engineering a semi-automatic ground environment low-altitude radar detection system. Halibut Point was one of thirteen sites, from southern New Hampshire to North Truro, Massachusetts, netted together in an attempt to create the first “gap filled” radar system in existence (Images: scan0005, scan0010). The goal was to knit together the low-altitude data from each site into a unified larger picture. The Air Force would fly low-level bombers across the system and the engineering challenge was to take the data gathered at each site and find a way to transfer it to the Whirlwind computer in Cambridge, then being an era when computers were rare, a single one taking up rooms, even floors of a building. It was one Project Lincoln engineer working in a research group charged with finding a way to transmit the multi-site data, who came up with an idea: since voice telephone was previously being used inn an attempt to “fill” the radar “gaps,” why not find a way to transfer the date by telephone to the Whirlwind computer, where they could form a complete picture garnered from the thirteen sites. That idea became fact with the development of first modem, invented by Project Lincoln engineers in early 1953.

The Cape Cod System went operational in October 1953, with Air Force B-17 flyovers out of Hanscomb Airfield, and the Halibut site was among the first in the world to transmit data via a modem. During that period Halibut Point had a staff of six: one staff sergeant and five airmen. The equipment onsite included a Hybrid I SCR-784 transmitter and an AN/CPN-18 receiver. Several levels of the tower at Halibut contained prototype state-of-the-science electronic equipment: the vacuum-tubes of the first computers were replaced by the first ferric-core signal switching system that used an alphanumeric mask in the path of an electron beam that was deflected to pass through the desired character of the mask, refocused and then deflected a second time to the desired location on the tube face. The console operator had a keyboard for data input and a light-sensing gun, which was used to recognize positional information, a creation that later led to the development of the computer “mouse.” In less then ten years after its construction, Halibut Point had gone from an observation post using azimuths and depression finders to one using computers, modems and electronic beams. Besides the technological innovations, Project Lincoln and the Cape Cod System personnel worked in an environment that used a management style that created an atmosphere where rapid progress was possible; although strict in setting goals and allocating resources, workers were no engulfed in bureaucracy. These technological and personnel factors contributed to the resounding success of the Project Lincoln and Cape Cod System experiment and by August 1954 the Cape Cod system went from the experimental phase to fully operational – in just under one year after it officially began.

In August 1955 a new series of Cape Cod System tests began using the original thirteen sites. This time, it was to develop a method to control manned interceptors and guide anti-aircraft operations. Using the concept of “remote servers,” computers were set up in trailers at each site in an effort to make each one able to function alone; instead of all sites sending data to a single source, the idea was to have each site exchange information with the other and all the sites able to store the entire realm of information, decentralizing the operational information and thus making less vulnerable in any enemy attack. Again, the experiments were a success.

But Lincoln Laboratory became a victim of its own success. The Operation Plan then developed by the Air Force called for a fully operational model, of which the Cape Cod System was only a simplified version. This document caused concern at both Lincoln Laboratory and at MIT. Both institutions felt that their charter called for research & development, not for producing a fully operational system. It wasn’t long after that when Lincoln Lab and MIT “clarified and adjusted” their role in defense research.

However, that did not represent the end of Halibut Point as a military research facility. In July 1958, MITRE (MIT Research) was founded as a private, no-for-profit corporation to provide technical services and research to federal government entities, the military included. The story of MIT’s role as a government contractor is too long and complicated to go into here, but not long after Lincoln Laboratory

re-focused their role in government research, a new MIT entity was formed to do

much of what Lincoln Laboratory was previously doing. MITRE provided

systems engineering to the semi-automatic ground environment radar system, just

what Lincoln Laboratory had been doing, and a large number of Lincoln

employees were transferred to MITRE. By the end of 1958, MITRE had

constructed a one hundred sixty-five foot transmission and receiving tower at

Halibut Point to continue research on the “operational” phase of the Cape Cod System, incorporating itself one month after the Cape Cod System became nationally operational at 23 sites around the country. MITRE’s research at Halibut was exclusively in the communications sector of the Cape Cod System, instead of the previous “gap filled” radar research, which by that time had shifted to the U.S. Air Force at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. By the end of 1961, MITRE ended their research at Halibut Point to branch into and focus on contracts with the Federal Aviation Administration and the development of a new National Airspace System. That ended Halibut Point’s twenty years use as a military-related facility.

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