FORT SILL, Okla. -- The Army Air Defense Artillery museum will host a reopening ceremony Nov. 26 at 9 a.m. at the south end of Building 1506, just north of Randolph Road at Bateman Road.
Jonathan Bernstein, ADA Museum director, is excited about finally having a better facility for the museum, so that visitors will be able to view the collection.
"This is actually the reopening of the Air Defense Artillery museum here at Fort Sill," said Bernstein. "We are calling it a 'reopening' rather than a 'grand reopening' because we want to save that for the new building that we are planning to build. This is the first time the ADA museum will be open as a museum, with exhibits, interpretation and a coherent storyline since the collection was moved from Fort Bliss, Texas to Fort Sill in 2009, as part of
BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure)."
The museum now occupies 20,000 square feet in buildings 1505 and 1506 on Bateman Road, and will have 60 large artifacts on display, which is about one-third of the collection's large artifacts.
"We are pleased to have this museum open and some of the artifacts on display but we won't be really satisfied until we have the permanent museum building constructed. Our target date is October 2017, which will mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of air defense in the U.S. Army," Bernstein said.
"Brigadier General (then Col.) James Shipton established an anti-aircraft training school at Arnouville-Les-Gonesse, France on Oct. 10, 1917, for the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. That was the beginning of what is now air defense artillery. So we are throwing down the gauntlet, so to speak, to get the new building built by the anniversary," he said.
The new proposed museum will have close to 50,000 square feet.
Many of the exhibits on display in the new museum tell stories of the role that air defense played in critical battles throughout the past century.
"We have the entire collection of Coast Artillery Corps units that will be displayed, including a significant number of uniforms, documents and photographs from the New Mexico 200th Coast Artillery Battalion, which was first to fire in World War II at Clark Airfield in the Philippines. We have Colonel Charles Sage's uniform, who was brigade commander of the 200th Costal Artillery Regiment," he said, "And, we will also have artifacts from the 60th Coast Artillery Regiment, which was the last to fire at Fort Mills, the Philippines, when Corregidor fell to the Japanese.
"We also have a captured German V-1 rocket that is part of our Antwerp-X exhibit. That's one of the unsung victories for air defense during World War II. The German's launched over 2,400 rockets at the city of Antwerp, Belgium, as part of an attempt to destroy the port and deny the Allied forces use of the port. Our anti-aircraft batteries shot down 2,100 V-1s during that battle," he said.
Visitors to the new museum will travel through exhibits that mark the historic evolution of air defense, from the very first antiaircraft machine gun battalions in World War I, to the coastal artillery corps between the world wars, to anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) battalions deployed during World War II and Korea, and later developing into the Air Defense Artillery Branch during Vietnam and to present day.
"We have several artifacts that saw combat action, and we know their history. One is a towed M167 Vulcan anti-aircraft gun that saw combat action in Panama and an M6 Bradley 'Linebacker' which saw significant combat action in Iraq in 2003 and 2005, until it hit an IED (improvised explosive device) and was too badly damaged to be put back into service. We also have a pretty significant artifact from air defense history - pieces of an Iraqi Scud missile that was fired at a coalition base in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. It was shot down by a successful Patriot missile intercept by an air defense artillery battery," Bernstein said. "The museum has six examples of the quad .50-cal. multiple machine gun anti-aircraft units in our collection. These were used extensively in World War II, Korea and into Vietnam in three different configurations mounted on a halftrack, truck mounted and as a towed system. These guns were also used as direct fire weapons to provide fixed defensive fire for field artillery positions."
Parking for the reopening ceremony will be along Bateman Road. Both buildings 1505 and 1506 will be open during the ceremony. Normal operating hours for the museum are Tuesdays through Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 580-442-0424.
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