RAAF Base Townsville (formerly RAAF Base Garbutt) is a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) air base located in , west of Townsville in Queensland, Australia. It is the headquarters for No. 1 Wing Australian Air Force Cadets and, along with Lavarack Barracks, establishes Townsville as a key military centre. The base uses the Townsville Airport.
Arms The RAAF Base Townsville symbol is that of a brolga, superimposed upon a castle; surrounded by the words Royal Australian Air Force; surmounted by a crown; with the motto "Guarding the North" on parchment below it.
History An airport on the location now known as RAAF Base Townsville was first established in the late 1930s for civil aviation, and was then further developed as part of Australia's military preparations for the coming war. Plans were being drawn up for the RAAF base well before the commencement of hostilities in Europe, and the field was fully operational with a squadron of fighter aircraft in service fourteen months before Japan entered the war. The base still functions with many of its early buildings performing their original purpose nearly 70 years after their plans were first drawn up.
Early use of the land The municipality of Townsville was created in 1866, but it took in only a small area encircling Castle Hill. The land which now comprises RAAF Base Townsville became part of the new Thuringowa Division (later Shire) in 1879, and was first surveyed in an extension of the Townsville urban survey in 1884. In 1918 the local government boundary changed, and the land was incorporated into the City of Townsville.
The RAAF site was never privately owned, but remained vacant Crown land until taken up by the Commonwealth in 1940. The site was considered too low-lying and swampy for residential or other development, and was proposed in 1868 to be set aside as Town Common under the trusteeship of Townsville City Council for public grazing. Local people cut firewood in the scrub. As late as 1939 when the RAAF first investigated acquiring the site, much of the land was still thick forest.
Civil aviation The beginning of aviation on the land was also an initiative of Townsville City Council. The first airfield established in Townsville was an east–west strip in the Thuringowa Shire, on the floodplain south of the Ross River in what is now the Townsville suburb of Murray. In use from the 1920s, it was licensed by the Department of Civil Aviation in 1930. The Garbutt site was adopted a few years later because it was better drained than the Ross River site, and it provided space for runways orientated into the prevailing winds to the north-east and south-east. Townsville City Council carried out construction work on two gravel runways on the new site, and the new airport was licensed on 26 January 1939. Civil aviation operations commenced on 1 February when a Stinson airliner of Airlines of Australia landed in front of a mayoral reception, although there were as yet no hangars or fuelling facilities, and not even a formed road to the airfield.
RAAF Base Townsville Almost immediately, there were moves to base military aircraft on the site. In 1938, the Department of Defence, realising the likelihood of war between Japan and the US, had begun planning to improve Queensland's northern defences, and in late January 1939 while the runways were under construction an RAAF officer was sent to Townsville to select the best site for a military airfield. The proposal to establish an air force base at Townsville arose as part of a general move in 1938–39 to improve defence preparedness by establishing or upgrading military establishments across northern Australia, particularly at Darwin and Townsville. The principal function of the base was to provide for the fighter defence of Townsville, and an early plan of the base layout shows three hangars, apparently to house three fighter squadrons. This was revised by late 1939, and scaled back to a one squadron base, staffed by 140 Citizen Air Force and 132 RAAF personnel. This was a substantial base for the time, with an establishment of nearly 10% of the RAAF's total strength. Darwin was planned to be about twice that size.
The Commonwealth approached Townsville City Council to negotiate for the acquisition of the new airport land in April 1939. Defence had hoped the State would donate the land, but negotiations with the State and Council over the purchase price and compensation for improvements dragged on for some time, and the land was compulsorily acquired by the Commonwealth in December 1940 in exchange for a payment of £2,500 to the Queensland Government. The Commonwealth entered into an agreement with Townsville City Council whereby Council would supply water, sewerage and electricity to the base. Under the agreement between Commonwealth and Council, civil aviation activities were to continue on the site.
War in Europe The impact of World War II on Australia occurred in two phases. Australia was automatically drawn into the war against Germany in September 1939 as the dominion's foreign policy was dictated by Britain's, and for the next two years Australian forces fought in the European Theatre, and the Mediterranean and Middle East Theatre in circumstances very similar to those of World War I. It was during this phase that RAAF Townsville was constructed.
Plans for the buildings at RAAF Townsville were drawn up by the Chief Architects Office of the Department of Works during the second half of 1939. The hangars and workshops were to be welded steel-framed buildings, based on contemporary RAF designs for fighter airfields. In early 1940, while the land negotiations were still proceeding, construction commenced on two gravelled runways, hangars, workshops, accommodation blocks and messes. Construction of the runways and basic facilities was completed before the end of 1940. The base was officially formed on 15 October 1940, when the Townsville Daily Bulletin described the excitement in Townsville the previous day when an advance party of RAAF personnel arrived by train, and marched down Flinders Street, led by the municipal brass band.: "The main body of the Royal Australian Air Force squadron to be based on the Townsville aerodrome at Garbutt, arrived on Monday morning, and are now quartered in the fine new buildings on the aerodrome site." The Battle of Britain was still winding down, and for months the news had been full of the exploits of fighter pilots.
Within the next few days the CA-25 Wirraway fighters of No.24 Squadron were flown in to the Townsville field, and later supplemented by Hudson light bomber and reconnaissance aircraft. Newly built at the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation's Maribyrnong factory, the Wirraways were the state of the art in the RAAF's fighter arsenal, but were heavy, under-powered and poorly armed by international standards. The physical form of the base in late 1940 consisted of the two earth runways, accommodation blocks, messes, gymnasium, workshops and one hangar with a control tower, all recently completed or still under construction. In May 1941 RAAF Townsville became Northern Area Headquarters RAAF.
In the first twelve months there were changes to the base layout. There were doubts about Townsville City Council's ability to keep up electricity supply in an emergency, so in 1941 a powerhouse with its own diesel-powered generator was built on the base. Australia agreed to train pilots under the Empire Air Training Scheme, and a second Officers Accommodation Block was built at RAAF Townsville to house trainees.
Bigger changes were coming. As events moved inexorably toward war in the Pacific, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) became concerned about securing air routes to re-supply their forces at Clark Field and elsewhere in the Philippines. By September 1941, the USAAF was reinforcing its air bases in the Philippines with B-17 heavy bombers, and the Australian War Cabinet agreed secretly to an American request for space at the Townsville and Darwin air bases to develop their own ferrying facilities. USAAF officers arrived in Townsville in October 1941 to plan the expansion of the new airfield to take larger aircraft and heavier traffic than it had been originally designed for. The existing two gravelled runways were expanded into three sealed runways, and the south-east orientated runway was extended to long to take heavy bombers and transport aircraft. The expansion was undertaken in six weeks of round-the-clock effort, and was completed on 15 December 1941. Japan had entered the war a week earlier.
War in the Pacific
Defensive phase In the face of the Japanese threat, the development of Townsville's new RAAF base during the previous two years was now overtaken by even faster expansion, as Australian and American forces poured into Townsville from January 1942 onward. In recent years much has been made of the now-notorious "Brisbane Line" doctrine, based on the realisation that in the event of Japanese invasion, Australia had only the military resources to defend the industrial south-east of the continent between Brisbane and Melbourne. While the Australian government adopted this as a loose principle, it was always intended to hold Townsville as a military base north of this line. In January 1942 the command structure was re-organised, and RAAF Townsville became North-Eastern Area Headquarters RAAF. In April, General Blamey, commanding Allied Land Forces in the South-West Pacific Area, stationed two Australian infantry brigades in a defensive ring around Townsville, but one of these was sent on to Port Moresby a month later.
Air defences were strengthened simultaneously. The Wirraway fighters which had proved inadequate at Rabaul and Darwin were replaced by Bell P-39 Airacobras, and Townsville's aerial defence was supplemented by RAAF and USAAF Curtiss P-40 Warhawks. In the surrounding district, strips for dispersal, ferrying, supply and maintenance were built at Bohle River (or Mount St John), Woodstock, Antill Plains, Reid River and Macrossan. Ross River was occupied by the RAAF, and a USAAF heavy bombardment field was established at Breddan, north of the city of Charters Towers. It was planned to base a second fighter squadron, No.32, at Townsville, but the airstrip did not have sufficient space for two operational squadrons, and the second one was located first at Macrossan, then at Charters Towers. Although early plans of the Townsville base show three fighter hangars, only one was ever built, presumably because to base more than one squadron of aircraft there would have made the base both too crowded to operate efficiently, and extremely vulnerable to attack.
The role of the airfield now diversified well beyond the fighter defence of Townsville. North-eastern Australia became the operational theatre of the US Fifth Air Force, its headquarters in Brisbane, with the headquarters of its V Bomber Command in Townsville. The USAAF 435th Aerial Bombardment Squadron and 8th Photo Squadron carried out aerial reconnaissance missions from Townsville over the whole theatre of war from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands. Ground-based bombers and reconnaissance aircraft from Townsville played a part in the Battle of the Coral Sea, fought a few hundred kilometres to the north-east in May 1942. In the confusion that characterised the aerial engagement, B-17 bombers of the USAAF 435th Squadron from Townsville bombed an allied naval force including the Australian cruisers and , fortunately without inflicting damage.