Edit: non-hotlinking pictures removed for now.... Sorry

In the summer of 1941, the British were battling Rommel's Afrika Corps and they needed help repairing battle-damaged aircraft.  They asked the United States for help, but the US was technically neutral in WWII at that point.  The US, however, could use the justification of Lend-Lease to hire the Douglas Aircraft Company to send repair technicians to the captured Italian air base in what is now Gura, Eritrea.


Gura's location is shown on this map of Army hospitals in Africa during WWII:




Edit: pic removed


"At a secret meeting held at the War Department November 19, 1941, it was decided that the United States would establish an air base at Gura, Eritrea to support the Royal Air Force in the ongoing battle with Rommel's Afrika Korps in Libya. Being outmanned and outgunned, the RAF was taking heavy casualties while Rommel pushed ever closer to Egypt. Five days after the inception of the Gura project, Rommel's armor plunged into Egypt and it was only the persistence of the RAF which forced a retreat. But the price of temporary victory was paid in damaged aircraft. A repair depot was urgently needed to keep the RAF flying. The location in Eritrea was sufficiently removed from the combat zone to be safe from ground attack, yet close enough that damaged aircraft could be shipped down the Red Sea, repaired and returned to the fighting with minimal delay. Since the United States was still nominally neutral, the base was to be staffed by civilians and managed by Douglas Aircraft Corporation. Its highly-classified designation was Project 19.

Douglas began immediately to recruit aircraft engineers from commercial firms all over the country. Prospective employees were enticed with promises of well-equipped shops, high salaries, recreational facilities (golf course, tennis courts and swimming pool) and a contract that provided that no one would be employed in active combat zones.

The 120 engineers recruited to staff the Gura base were assembled in New York in December, 1941. Each of them had been thoroughly screened by the F.B.I., yet the project was so highly classified that very few knew the group's destination. Douglas also marshaled an impressive housekeeping staff: 20 American doctors, including neuro-surgeons and a psychiatrist, 24 nurses, two chaplains, three dentists, two lens grinders, seven chefs, 20 cooks and bakers, eight barbers, two shoemakers, five dry cleaners, three tailors, ten laundrymen and a bevy of welfare personnel which included athletic directors. There is little doubt as to the ebullience of those engineers upon learning the extent to which Douglas had gone to create what one wartime journalist called «an African Shangri La.»

Due to submarine activity and related perils, the embarkation was delayed for a time, but Project 19 finally got underway in a 20-ship convoy. Although no Douglas employees were lost, two of the ships were torpedoed and sunk off the Cuban coast, and at least eight men were plucked from floating rafts. At a refueling stop in Cape Town, those that didn't already know learned the details of the project from Lord Haw Haw, who ranked with Axis Sally in the vanguard of German radio propagandists. His broadcast identified them with unsettling accuracy, elaborated on the folly of the Eritrean venture and assured them that their remaining vessels would be torpedoed at the first opportunity. In the end, his predictions were only partially true, yet fully half of the specialized equipment was lost to U-boats enroute to Massawa.

Gura proved to be a great disappointment. In place of the swimming pool and air- conditioned billets they expected, the new arrivals found only the remnants of an Italian base, which had been decimated by RAF bombers, and crate upon crate of RAF P-40's riddled with bullet holes and spattered with dried blood. Mr. Harold W. Jensen arrived in Gura with the first Douglas contingent. The following is his own description of the Gura base:

«Arriving there late one afternoon, we found the base in rather bad shape; by that I mean not fully cleaned up after the fighting to take possession of the area. Even the water wells were contaminated with bodies. It was several days before one could relish eating. At night the hyenas roamed the camp laughing and screaming as they tried to break into the cook house. It required a week or so to polish them off, along with the baboons.»" (1)


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Boeing (who later absorbed Douglas) has a description on their website as well.


"Under an oath of strictest secrecy, volunteers were drawn from the principal U.S. airplane manufacturing centers -- Seattle, the Midwest, and Southern California.

The Boeing and Douglas men who rode the first trucks from Massawa, winding up hundreds of curves to Gura, saw a mile-high desert valley that reminded Californians of the upper Mojave. They also saw a pitted airstrip, surrounded by a rubble of bombed-out barracks and shop buildings -- the remains of the Italian plant, blasted by Allied bombers months earlier.

Awaiting them was a field littered with ruined aircraft, along with crates of battered wings, fuselages, empennages, and engines. The Americans regarded them with dismay. Their task was to make these aircraft battleworthy. But how, they asked themselves. And with what tools? Bereft of even the barest necessities, they responded with the only resource available to them -- Yankee ingenuity.

Tools were improvised and salvaged from ship cargoes. Barrack walls and roofs were patched, bomb craters filled in. There were forests of propellers to be straightened, but no hydraulic press to do the job. The machinists contrived a simple vice to hold the bent props, then proceeded to unbend them manually with the longest available two-by-four.

They made a crude but accurate level steel table and a homemade protractor to check the pitch and curve of the blades. They improvised a balancing stand and pit. From junk steel, aluminum, and rubber, they built a working bench to test the flow of oil through pitch controls.

One day on the docks of Massawa, the Americans discovered a new German milling machine, crated and bound for Japan. With part of the group creating a suitable diversion, the milling machine was gleefully liberated, then trucked over the hills to Gura. As the days went by, proper machine tools arrived, one by one, to replace the original makeshifts.

Soon, the members of Project 19 were fixing every kind of American plane that limped or was hauled in from nearby North African fighting fronts. They serviced and assembled P-40s, C-47 Skytrains, C-54 Skymasters, B-24 Liberators, B-17 Flying Fortresses, Havocs, Hudsons, and a host of others. Those that couldn't be repaired were dismantled for spare parts.

On October 23, 1942, the third and final battle of El Alamein commenced with continuous attacks from RAF aircraft. Many of the Allied planes had been patched together by Project 19. By November 4, the Axis forces in the Western Desert were in full retreat. No fuel had succeeded in reaching Rommel's forces for six weeks. Air interdiction -- made possible by Project 19's field maintenance and repair -- had tipped the balance in the Allies favor.

On March 9, 1943, a group hanging around the wireless heard the news first: Rommel had abandoned North Africa. Soon after, in groups large and small, the exodus back to the U.S. began -- some by airplane, some aboard ship by way of Australia. One day in late 1943, a small group of machinists -- the last remnant of 2,500 civilians and 500 soldiers -- nailed the final crate, heaved it on the bed of the last truck, and rode the six-wheeler down the escarpment road to the Red Sea." (2)


(1) http://www.kagnewstation.com/history/chapter2/index.html
(2) http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_01/textonly/ps01txt.html


ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Project 19 - A Mission Most Secret, John W. Swancara, Spartanburg, SC: Honoribus Press, 1997.


Gura is also mentioned in the series-  UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II

The Middle East Theater: THE PERSIAN CORRIDOR AND AID TO RUSSIA, T. H. Vail Motter, CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY, UNITED STATES ARMY, WASHINGTON, D. C., 2000  Online at: http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/persian/index.htm#contents

Indeed. I do so enjoy learning about what was happening around the fringes, so to speak, during WW2. Fascinating.

Never knew of it. Thank you!

Enjoyed that!
Thanks!

My grandfather was a meteorologist for the Army Air Corps at Robert's Field Liberia...  It wasn't a great vacation spot, according to him!  I've still got a pistol he picked up in Oran, Algeria.