World War II and the Vineyard

With Memorial Day just passed, and the 250th Independence celebration soon upon us, I realized D-Day is squeezed in between. This made me wonder how folks here felt about the global conflict during that momentous period. How was the Island touched, if at all?

I discovered that the Vineyard was not so far from the madding crowd after attending a talk by the M.V. Museum’s research librarian, Bow Van Riper. Apparently, keeping the world at bay on the Vineyard was not possible during World War II.

If you have been to Peaked Hill or seen the signs about the bombing ranges at Long Point or other beaches on the Island, you know that there was a military presence on the Vineyard. But the small remnants don’t hint at the extent to which the war impacted the Island.

One of the most significant impacts was bringing people to our somewhat sleepy little shores who had never been here before. Van Riper notes, “Military camps sprouted up across the Island. Tents were pitched on the top of Peaked Hill in Chilmark for a radar station; the keeper’s house at the Cape Poge Lighthouse was taken over by the Coast Guard beach patrols that spent the war marching up and down East Beach on Chappaquiddick and watching for rubber rafts coming ashore from German submarines.” 

There is no official documentation on the subject, but a lot of folklore exists about Germans coming ashore from U-boats. Van Riper recalls one story in which a woman returning home from running errands found that the pie she left on the windowsill was gone. However, there was a package of German cigarettes on the kitchen table. The idea of a German presence on our shores is central to Martha Hall Kelly’s recent novel, “The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club,” which is mostly based on her mother’s childhood memories of the Vineyard during World War II.

The center of our Island was a center for military activity. The Navy cleared a section of what is now the State Forest to build the U.S. Navy Auxiliary Air Field Martha’s Vineyard. The airfield was a smaller branch of the main one at Quonset Point in Rhode Island. It was used to train naval pilots, dive bombers, torpedo bombers, and fighter pilots. Pilots from Quonset Point flew over the water to the Vineyard, practicing navigation along the way, firing at targets on East Beach in Chappaquiddick and Long Point on the south side of the island, as well as at the gunnery range at Katama. In addition to pilots, hundreds of personnel supported these activities by working at refueling stations, aircraft hangars, and touch-and-go landing areas on the runways.

The Vineyard, however, didn’t just host military personnel. Civilian workers who had long made a living on the waterfront were thrust into the war effort. The U.S. government commissioned the Martha’s Vineyard Ship Building Co. (now the Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard at 164 Beach) to build wooden vessels to assist in the conflict. “The shipyard worked two shifts a day throughout the war, turning out barges, launches, and utility craft that did the unglamorous work that kept the fighting fleet operating,” Van Riper explains. “The shipyard workers, who had spent decades building yachts and fishing boats, were now tasked with constructing barges to deliver supplies between shoreside depots and ships anchored offshore.”

Even our steamships were called into action. Two of the four vessels in the fleet at the time, the Naushon and the New Bedford, were requisitioned by the Navy in 1942, carried troops across the Atlantic, and remained in the European theater for the next three years. The Naushon was in the heart of it, outfitted as a hospital ship, and stood by off the invasion beaches on D-Day to receive wounded soldiers.

Van Riper’s family played a significant role in the war effort. His grandfather’s Van Ryper ship model shop, near what is now Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway, was asked to produce, among other things, exact scale models of the entire German navy, followed by those of the Japanese and Italian navies. These models were designed as recognition tools that proved vital for training American pilots, including those here, to identify enemy ships from various angles from 10,000 feet in a plane loaded with bombs.

After V-J Day on Sept. 2, the war on the Vineyard gradually wound down. Van Riper says, “The gunnery and bombing ranges fell silent, although people would be digging unexploded ordnance out of the sand for decades to come. The production line for barges and launches at the shipyard was shut down, and the barbed wire fences around Peaked Hill were rolled up and hauled away.” 

Within a year, the Naval Auxiliary Airfield was turned over to Dukes County and became the Martha’s Vineyard Airport, where today thousands of visitors pour in every summer. The barracks that had served the naval aviators at the airfield was initially used as the headquarters of the Martha’s Vineyard Youth Hostel. Van Riper recounts, “The gunnery range at Long Point has long since returned to nature. The one at Katama was mostly bulldozed, and where there had been barracks and equipment sheds, the Katama Shores Motor Inn was built. Mary Jo Kopechne and her friends stayed there on the ill-fated July weekend in 1969 when Ted Kennedy’s black Oldsmobile went off Dyke’s Bridge.” 

Interestingly, one of the remaining remnants of the war is the ArtCliff Diner, founded in 1943 by two guys named Art and Cliff to feed shipworkers and employees at the model shop. But as Van Riper reflects, “In a diminishing number of Vineyarders, you can still find memories of what it was like between 1941 and 1945, when a very small Island became involved in a global war.”