Naval Air Station South Weymouth was an operational United States Navy airfield from 1942 to 1997 in South Weymouth, Massachusetts. It was first established as a regular Navy blimp base during World War II. During the postwar era the base became part of the Naval Air Reserve Training Command, hosting a variety of Navy and Marine Corps reserve aircraft squadrons and other types of reserve units. Like most BRAC sites, environmental contamination was detected in 1986, and since 1993 numerous remedies and long term monitoring of ground water are in place. Since 2005, over 600 acres have been transferred to the affected towns for reuse, and in 2011 the Navy signed a $25 million contract to transfer its remaining land.
World War II
In 1938, the site was surveyed as a possible location for a municipal airport, which was never built. Construction work on the base began in September 1941 and the base was commissioned as the United States Naval Air Station South Weymouth on 1 March 1942. During World War II the base's primary mission was to provide support for anti-submarine blimp operations. In its original as-built format South Weymouth's main facilities consisted of two gigantic blimp hangars, the earlier (LTA Hangar One or "The Big Hangar") of steel construction and the second (LTA Hangar Two) of the more common World War II standardized design of nearly all-wooden construction employed to conserve rationed metals. The base also had a Macadamized blimp landing mat, six mooring circles, and a cinder-surfaced turf runway.
Throughout the war with Germany, NAS South Weymouth served as the home base of airship patrol squadron ZP-11, which operated up to twelve K-class blimps employed on ASW patrols and convoy escort missions in and around Massachusetts Bay and the Gulf of Maine. Some historians and former Navy personnel allege that a ZP-11 blimp, the K-14, which crashed with loss of life off the coast of Bar Harbor, Maine on 2 July 1944 was actually shot down by a German submarine.
In addition to ZP-11, NAS South Weymouth also hosted wartime detachments of airship patrol squadron ZP-12 based at NAS Lakehurst, New Jersey and airship utility squadron ZJ-1 based at Meacham Field in Key West, Florida. ZJ-1 was unique, being the only airship utility squadron in the Navy. ZJ-1's South Weymouth detachment (Detachment 1) flew K and G-class airships in support of electronics research projects conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, performed aerial photography missions, and helped to recover test torpedoes for the Navy torpedo station in Newport, Rhode Island. A sub-detachment operated from Elizabeth Field on Fisher's Island, New York.
In 1944, NAS South Weymouth was the starting point for the first transatlantic crossings of non-rigid airships. United States Navy K-ships (blimps) K-123 and K-130 from Blimp Squadron 14 (also known as ZP-14, Blimpron 14, or "The Africa Squadron") left South Weymouth on 28 May 1944 and landed at Argentia, Newfoundland about 16 hours later. The two K-ships then flew approximately 22 hours to Lagens Field on Terceira Island in the Azores. The last leg of the flight was a ~20-hour flight to their destination with Fleet Air Wing (FAW) 15 at Port Lyautey, French Morocco (now Kenitra, Morocco). Blimps K-123 & K-130 were followed by K-109 & K-134 and K-112 & K-101 which left South Weymouth on 11 and 27 June, respectively, in 1944. These six blimps initially conducted nighttime anti-submarine warfare operations to complement the daytime missions flown by FAW-15 aircraft (PBYs and B-24s) using magnetic anomaly detection to locate U-boats in the relatively shallow waters around the Straits of Gibraltar. Later, ZP-14 K-ships conducted minespotting and minesweeping operations in key Mediterranean ports and various escort missions including that of the convoy carrying Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to the Yalta Conference in early 1945.
Post-war demobilization and Cold War use
South Weymouth was downgraded from a naval air station to a naval air facility on 9 August 1945 after Germany surrendered, thus ending the U-Boat threat to the east coast, and was thereafter used to store surplus naval aircraft that were awaiting final disposition. Many of these aircraft, especially Eastern/Grumman TBM/TBF Avengers, were subjected to elaborate cocooning and preservation methods in the two huge blimp hangars. During this period of South Weymouth's history the base was known as a naval aircraft parking station or "NAPS". Naval Air Facility South Weymouth was placed into caretaker status on 30 June 1949 and downgraded again to an auxiliary landing field or "ALF".