„CFB Gagetown“ – Versionsunterschied

Canadian Forces Base Gagetown, also referred to as CFB Gagetown, is a large Canadian Forces Base located in southwestern New Brunswick.

Construction of the Base

At the beginning of the Cold War, Canadian defence planners recognized the need for providing the Canadian Army with a suitable training facility where brigade and division-sized armoured, infantry, and artillery units could exercise in preparation for their role in defending western Europe under Canada's obligations to the North Atlantic Treaty. The facility would need to be located relatively close to an all-season Atlantic port and have suitable railway connections.

Existing training facilities dating from the First and Second World Wars in eastern Canada were relatively small (see CFS Debert, CFS Aldershot, CFB Valcartier, CFB Pettawawa), thus a new facility was considered. At the same time, regional economic development planners saw an opportunity for a military base to benefit the economy of southwestern New Brunswick.

The area under consideration was an expansive plateau west of the St. John River between the cities of Saint John and Fredericton, measuring approximately 60 km in length and 40 km in width; more accurately it runs between Oromocto in the north to Welsford in the south, and between the St. John River in the east and the South Branch of the Oromocto River in the west.

Only 3,000 people inhabited the area, primarily in subsistence agriculture and forestry communities, and the terrain was variable, providing mixed Acadian forest, swamp and marshland, as well as open farming areas similar to the northern European plain. The influence of the St. Croix Highlands, part of the Appalachian Mountain range, creates hilly terrain and valleys in the southern and western part of the region close to the Welsford and Oromocto Rivers.

The expropriation of lands began in the late 1940s and early 1950s, although the base was surveyed so as to not affect existing historic communities along the western bank of the St. John River; the expropriation began several kilometres west of the river. This remains the largest single land expropriation in the history of New Brunswick.

The base headquarters were chosen for the northern part of the base adjacent to the small (then) village of Oromocto. In preparation for the influx of service personnel, Oromocto was redesigned as a "planned" town, with buried electrical utilities and residential and commercial clustering typical of larger planned towns such as Richmond Hill, Ontario. Oromocto's futuristic design became a source of conversation throughout the centuries-old Loyalist towns and villages spread throughout the St. John River valley.

Construction of the base facilities in Oromocto benefitted from convenient railway connections provided by Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways. A new alignment of the Trans-Canada Highway was built on the eastern bank of the St. John River, opposite from Oromocto in the early 1960s (see New Brunswick Highway 2) and a new highway bridge across the St. John River connected the Trans-Canada Highway to the village of Burton, just south of Oromocto and near the east gate for the base.

The Gagetown Military Camp (or Camp Gagetown) opened in 1952 and was named after the village of Gagetown, although the base was located west of this historic village and was headquartered to its north in Oromocto. The base's territory measured 112,900 hectares (1,129 km. sq.) and included numerous live-fire ranges for infantry, armoured, and artillery units, as well as aerial weapons ranges. At the time of its opening in 1952, until the opening of CFB Suffield in 1971, Camp Gagetown was the largest military training facility in Canada and the entire British Commonwealth.

Operations

Initially, Camp Gagetown was the home base for many army regiments, including the Black Watch and the Royal Canadian Regiment, however defence cutbacks in the 1960s saw a gradual reduction. On February 1, 1968, the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy, were merged to form the Canadian Armed Forces. Following this unification, Camp Gagetown was renamed Canadian Forces Base Gagetown (CFB Gagetown).

In the post-unification armed forces, CFB Gagetown functioned as the primary combat training centre for Force Mobile Command (renamed Land Force Command in the 1990s). In the late 1980s, CFB Gagetown began to simultaneously refer to itself as Combat Training Centre Gagetown (CTC Gagetown) and many also still refer to it as Camp Gagetown.

Increased defence spending in the 1980s saw numerous new training facilities built and ranges modernized, and this continued into the 1990s as the Canadian Forces closed obsolete bases. CFB Gagetown continues to function as the army's primary training facility, although due to risk of forest fires in recent years, live-fire training has been pushed primarily to the fall-winter-spring seasons.

External link

• CFB Gagetown - official website