Wallblake Airport and Tintamarre During WW II

 

I have been asked if the original airstrip at Wallblake in Anguilla, built in 1943 during WW II, resulted from the Lend-Lease Agreement between the British and US governments during the War.  The answer is no, but the story is complicated.

Most of my information comes from the author, Patrick Leigh-Fermor.  Bored with England, he took off as an 18-year-old in 1933 to walk from the Hook of Holland across Europe to Constantinople in Turkey.  He finally ended up in Greece where he remained until war broke out and he returned to England to join up.  Because of the fluency he had developed in Greek, he was soon recruited as an intelligence officer by the Special Operations Executive.  The SOE parachuted him into Crete behind the German lines.  His best-known exploit was his role in the kidnapping and evacuation of the German commander, Major General Heinrich Kreipe, from Crete to Mersa Matruh in British-held Egypt.  These events were the subject of the 1957 film Ill Met By Moonlight, in which he was played by the actor Dirk Bogarde.

 The Traveller’s Tree

Shortly after the end of the War, in 1948, he accompanied his friend the Greek photographer, Costa Achillopoulos, on a trip to the West Indies.  Leigh-Fermor came along as interpreter for Costa who had a commission to publish a book of Caribbean photographs.  Leigh-Fermor was to write the captions for the photographs.  For the Leeward Islands segment of their trip, they chartered the Rose Millicent from Anguillian sloop-owner, Zylphus Fleming, and explored the islands in it, with Zylphus at the helm.  He took profuse notes of what he saw, and these notes were the basis for his first book, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1951.

 

Remy de Haenen

Leigh-Fermor appears to have had access as an ex-SOE officer to confidential intelligence files in London.  These files were the source of his description of Remy de Haenen’s leasing of Flat Island from its owner, Leo Constant Fleming of Marigot in French St Martin.  Flat Island, or Tintamarre as it is known by the French, lies two miles to the east of St Martin.  It was then uninhabited, but the previous owner, Diederick Christian van Romondt (DeeCee) of Mary’s Fancy in St Martin, lived on it in the first three decades of the twentieth century and farmed cows, sheep, and goats on it.  The ruins of his home are still visible.  DeeCee sold the island to LC Fleming in 1931.  The 500-acre Mary’s Fancy Estate is of particular interest to Anguillians.  DeeCee left it to his mistress, Miss Josie, in his Will.  She in turn willed it to Ronald Webster, who was employed by her on the Estate.  He broke it up and sold it off to fund the 1967 Anguilla Revolution.

 

Ruins on Tintamarre

According to Leigh-Fermor, De Haenen was a German intelligence officer, an agent of the Abwehr.  His mission was to secure a replenishing base for any German U-Boats that might become active in the Caribbean Sea in the event of War.  His cover was that he was a French pilot in the service of the French post office.  He obtained the contract to collect and deliver the mail by air among the French West Indies.  Leigh-Fermor describes how de Haenen delivered the mail to St Martin.  He writes, probably from first-hand observation, that there was no air strip in St Martin.  De Haenen would circle his single engine aeroplane around the football field in Marigot, playing out a rope with a hook at the end of it holding the bag of mail he was delivering.  When the bag became almost stationary in the middle of the field, the postmaster would run up to it, drop the bag and then hook up the return mail for delivery to Guadeloupe.  De Haenen would winch the bag up and fly off, job done.

Edgar Oliver Lake recalls that up to the early 1950s de Haenen occasionally used a similar system to deliver mail to Anguilla.  Either to save fuel or the inconvenience of a Wallblake airstrip landing, he would lower his speed and altitude over the old Courthouse/Treasury/Post Office building on Crocus Hill and no doubt compensating for wind drift drop a packet of Anguilla’s mail in the courtyard.

Wallblake airstrip in 1967

With the permission of Mr Fleming, de Haenen cleared an airstrip on Flat Island and constructed a small forge on it.  The ostensible need for the airstrip was to train learner pilots to land and take off.  The forge was used for minor U-Boat repairs carried out at night when the Boats could surface unobserved.  For the use of the crews, he collected and stored fresh Dominican fruit and vegetables and flew in tinned foodstuffs from Puerto Rico.  Fleming’s permission was subsequently formalised in 1945 in a lease, and de Haenan used Flat Island as the headquarters of his short-lived airline company, Companie Aerienne Antillaise (CAA).  He taught several young men of the region to fly using the 500-metre long dirt track until operations of CAA ceased in 1952.

An elderly Anguillian friend of mine, the hotelier David Lloyd, was a sailor before and during the War.  I knew him as one of the founders of the Anguilla Rotary Club in 1978, and we often spoke.  He told me of the many trips he and other Anguillian sloop owners made for de Haenen, fetching foodstuffs, fruit, and water to Flat Island.  He thought at the time that they were for smuggling into St Martin.  St Martin was then in French Vichy hands until the British sent four armed policemen from St Kitts to capture it.  It was only after the War that the sloop owners learned what the purpose was of their visits to Flat Island.

Eden Rock Hotel in its prime

After the War, De Haenen converted his home in St Barths into the famous hotel, Eden Rock.  He went into local politics and became Mayor of St Barths.  In the early 1980s he was my client.  When he visited my law chambers, I would press him on the truth of the stories of his exploits during the War.  He always denied them, and claimed they were invented by his enemies.  But it seems to me that Leigh-Fermor had no reason or opportunity to become his enemy, as he was just passing through the West Indies.

The details of the clandestine arrangements between de Haenen, the German Abwehr, and LC Fleming, as described by Leigh-Fermor, could only have been written by an Intelligence Officer who had access to secret files.  As a result of his agreement with de Haenen, LC Fleming reputedly became the richest man in St Martin.  His family still to this day enjoy the proceeds of the Nazi gold he was paid for the use of Flat Island.

As I recall it, this bit of Second World War history written by Leigh-Fermor was where I first read a very short account about the construction in Anguilla of the grass-covered airstrip by the US Army Corps of Engineers after the US joined the War in late 1941.  Leigh-Fermor describes it as having been built as an emergency landing strip in early 1942 for the use of US ‘planes flying on their way to and from Puerto Rico and the Coolidge Air Base in Antigua.  It was only ever intended as a place where ‘planes could land if they experienced an emergency in mid-flight.  If any of them landed in Anguilla during the War, I never heard.  There was no air service to Anguilla until LIAT started one in the 1960s.  LIAT’s founder, Frank Delisle, my mother’s cousin, told me that he was one of those taught to fly on Flat Island by de Haenen shortly after the War.  Still visible on Flat Island to this day are engines and other parts of disabled aeroplanes dating back to the time when de Haenen taught West Indians to fly.

The Anguillian air strip, originally known as Wallblake Airport, was not part of the 1941 Lend Lease program.  The 1940 Destroyers for Bases Agreement was an earlier project in which the British received moth balled First World War US destroyers in exchange for long leases of land to the US Army, Air Force and Navy for bases in Trinidad, St Lucia, Antigua, and other British colonies in the West Indies.  The US had not yet entered the War, and Roosevelt was blocked by Congress from giving the British military aid.  So, he and Churchill hit on this exchange of assets device as a way round Congress.  When the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 was passed by Congress it officially sanctioned the earlier agreement between Roosevelt and Churchill.

By 1941, Britain and its Empire was the sole holdout against the Nazi armed forces.  More British shipping was being sunk in the Caribbean Sea by U-Boats than was sunk around the entire coast of Europe.  This was due to the importance of the Panama Canal to the British for trade, and the oil fields and the oil refinery of Trinidad for fuel.  The Texaco oil refinery in Trinidad was at the time the largest in the Empire.  Indeed, the Battle of Britain was fought on Trinidadian aviation fuel.  Wallblake and Flat Island were part of these wartime events, not that you will read about them in any official account of World War Two.

Gender Studies

 

Gender studies is a perfectly respectable area of social study in academia, first coming to prominence in West Indian intellectual circles in the 1970s and 1980s and continuing.  It approaches our deep-rooted gender inequalities in the Caribbean demonstrated, for example, in the types of jobs women are in.  It studies and explains sexism, racism, classism, and other systemic inequalities.  It attempts to explain the irony of the patriarchy coexisting within a system of matriarchal families, and our long tradition of female economic autonomy.

Distinguished Caribbean academics such as Christine Barrow, Edith Clarke, Keith Hart, Donna P Hope, Patricia Mohammed, Rhoda Reddock, Olive Senior, Catherine Shepherd, Raymond Smith, and Kevin Yelvington, to mention a few, have researched how sexual orientation and gender in the West Indies are conceived, studied, discussed, and experienced.

There are hundreds of books and dozens of academic journal articles on the subject.  “The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies”, is a highly thought of journal of the University of the West Indies, focusing on publishing research on gender studies.

Perhaps the most threatening area of all this research has been the study of how dominant masculinity has persisted and resisted the extending of civil rights to women.  The patriarchy is not happy with gender studies.

The result in recent years has been a public onslaught on the so-called “gender ideology”.  These attacks are backed by extremist Christian and Muslim clerics and organisations.  The one thing these groups agree on is that the traditional family is under attack.  They believe children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.

Evangelicals and other fundamentalists make such incendiary claims to defeat what they see as “gender ideology” or “gender studies”.  They object to “gender” because it is said to deny biological sex, and it undermines the natural or divine character of the traditional family.  They fear that, if we start thinking along gender lines, men will lose their dominant positions.  They believe that children are being told to change genders.  They preach that our children are actively being recruited by gay and trans people, and our boys and girls are being pressured to declare themselves as gay in educational settings where an open discourse about gender is caricatured as a form of indoctrination.

These extremists worry that if something called “gender” is socially accepted, a flood of sexual perversions, including bestiality and paedophilia, will be unleashed upon the earth.  Anyone who listened to or participated in the Constitutional Reform Town Hall Meetings held in Anguilla over the past several weeks, will recognise this language.  It captures the rhetoric and the reasoning used by the Christian fundamentalists who addressed the meetings.  Our Christian fundamentalists make the outlandish demand that any new Constitution must contain a clause confirming that the only marriage that will ever be recognised in Anguilla is one between a man and a woman.

The principal aim of this woman-hating and homophobic movement is to oppose progressive legislation won in the last decades by the gay, lesbian and feminist movements all over the world.  In attacking “gender” they oppose reproductive freedom for women and the rights of single parents.  They oppose protection for women against rape and domestic violence.  They deny the legal and social rights of homosexuals.  They oppose legal and institutional safeguards against gender discrimination.  They support conversion therapy, forced psychiatric internment, brutal physical harassment, the killing of gays, and the criminalisation of abortion.

It is easy enough to debunk and even ridicule many of the claims that are made against gender studies or gender identity, since they are based on thin caricatures.  The truth is there is no single concept of gender.  Gender studies is a complex and internally diverse field that includes a wide range of scholars.  It does not deny sex, nor does it threaten any unbigoted male.  It tends to ask how sex is established, through what medical and legal frameworks.  It explains how our understanding of sex has changed through time.  It examines what difference it makes to the social organization of our world to disconnect the sex assigned at birth from the life that follows, including matters of work and love.

We generally think of sex assignment as happening once.  But what if it is a complex and revisable process, reversible in time for those who have been wrongly assigned?  To argue this way is not to take a position against science, but only to ask how science and law enter the social regulation of identity.  “But there are two sexes!”  Generally, yes, but even the ideals of two distinct forms of male and female that govern our everyday conceptions of sex are in many ways disputed by science.  Research has shown how vexed and consequential sex assignment can be.

Fundamentalists and extremists claim that the very concept of “gender” is an attack on Christianity or traditional Islam.  They accuse those who discuss “gender” of discriminating against their religious beliefs.  And yet, it is evident that the enemies of freedom do not come from the outside.  Acceptance of blind dogma is to be found on the side of the would-be censors.

Opponents of “gender” seek recourse in the Bible and Koran to defend their views about the natural hierarchy between men and women.  They push the distinctive values of masculine and feminine (although progressive theologians have pointed out that these are based on debatable readings of the early texts).  They claim that assigned sex is divinely declared, suggesting that contemporary biologists and medical doctors are curiously in the service of 13th-century theology.

Chromosomal and endocrinological differences complicate the binarism of sex.  The evidence is that sex assignment is sometimes revisable.  The anti-gender advocates wrongfully claim that “gender ideologists” deny the material differences between men and women.

The anti-gender movement is not a conservative position with a clear set of principles.  It is a fascist trend.  It mobilizes a range of rhetorical strategies from across the political spectrum to maximize the fear of infiltration and destruction that comes from a diverse set of economic and social forces.  It does not strive for consistency, for its incoherence is part of its power.

It is depressing to see that there are even a few women who have joined this homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-liberal movement.  No freedom loving Anguillian should be opposed to gays and lesbians having the same marriage rights as we heterosexuals.  Thankfully, there is hope in the coming generation of leaders.  They generally do not subscribe to two-thousand-year-old views on sex and gender.  As always, the youth are the future.[1]

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[1]     With thanks to an article by Judith Butler, visiting distinguished professor of philosophy at the New School University in New York, and published in the Guardian Newspaper of 23 October 2021, the source of much of this article:  (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/judith-butler-gender-ideology-backlash).