Battleship Missouri guns may retire on Eastern Shore

Alan Stanz became the visitor services manager at a wildlife refuge on the Eastern Shore in August 2009.

He knew the difference between a refuge and a national park, having spent a few years in the Southwest as a seasonal volunteer, moving between parks.

He knew the Eastern Shore of Virginia National Wildlife Refuge was all about providing food and shelter for migrating birds and butterflies, rather than providing a great tourist experience.

But in the past few months, the refuge system has started to encourage historic preservation and interpretation on its lands, with an eye to bringing in more human visitors who will, it is hoped, begin loving the refuges the way they love the national parks.

When that happened, Stanz, who calls himself a "visionary," knew what to do.

It was time to bring in the big guns.

To be precise, the big gun barrel.

The 16-inch barrels Stanz has his eye on are 68 feet long and weigh 120 tons each. Three of them were on the battleship Missouri in 1945, when the Japanese surrendered on its deck at the end of World War II.

For much of the past 50 years, eight gun barrels - from the battleships Missouri, Iowa and New Jersey - have been sitting on a grassy spot at the Navy's St. Juliens Creek Annex in Chesapeake, gently rusting away.

For longer than that, the tip of the Eastern Shore has harbored its own relics of the war: concrete bunkers embedded in earth and a four-story fire-control tower. They were part of the refuge's predecessor on the site: Fort John Custis, a Coast Artillery base that had 16-inch guns like those on the battleships, plus other weaponry, all ready to defend the Chesapeake Bay from enemy vessels.

The empty bunkers called to Stanz, and so did Terrance McGovern, who last summer had emailed the refuge official on behalf of the nonprofit Coast Defense Study Group. McGovern told Stanz that the Navy was preparing to scrap the gun barrels at St. Juliens, unless good homes could be found for them.

Both men thought the wildlife refuge would be a very good home.

The national wildlife refuge is a "come-here" on the Shore. It has existed only since 1984, in a beachfront location settled by Europeans in the 1600s.

The military also has some history there. During World War I, Fisherman Island was host to 5-inch gun batteries. Around 1940, as another world war loomed and the nation started gearing up its coastal defenses, Fisherman Island became part of the brand-new Fort John Custis, which joined Fort Monroe and Fort Story in harbor defense.

The new fort, as was customary, was named after a deceased Army officer, in this case Brigadier Gen. E. Eveleth Winslow, a military engineer who fortified Honolulu and the Panama Canal. But the name was soon changed to Fort Custis in honor of local John Parke Custis, son of Martha Custis Washington and her first husband.

But Fort Custis was easily confused with Fort Eustis, so the name quickly changed again to Fort John Custis. which it remained until after the war and the big guns were removed. The Air Force took it over around 1950 and established the Cape Charles Air Force Station.

In 1980, the armed forces left, and within five years the land took on a new mission as a national wildlife refuge. Still in place were the remnants of its old one - concrete bunkers and empty gun batteries.

The Navy also has remnants of World War II, and in recent years it decided the battleship gun barrels stored at St. Juliens and in Hawthorne, Nev., no longer were needed, McGovern said during a recent phone interview.

The Northern Virginia resident - who has written a small, heavily illustrated, reference book about the local forts called "The Chesapeake Bay at War!" - began contacting various historical organizations and agencies, explaining that the Navy would arrange a long-term loan of the gun barrels to an appropriate home, if transportation and funding could be found.

And there's the rub.

Moving a gun barrel requires heavy-duty cranes capable of lifting 120 tons spread out over 68 feet, then a truck able to move such a load, then a nearby railroad that can support the weight and get it past power lines, intersections and bridges.

To get a barrel to the Eastern Shore would mean a trip across the Chesapeake Bay on a rail barge, then a short train ride, then another heavy-duty crane and truck to get it a few miles down U.S. 13 and out to the bunker.

Stanz estimates that it would cost $200,000 to move and install one barrel, money the refuge doesn't have and the federal government isn't going to spend.

So now he has started fundraising.

Edward Richardson has lived on the Eastern Shore all his life. He was 10 years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, on a cool Sunday morning as the Baptist church bell rang.

He remembers the buildup at Fort John Custis and walking the beaches in hopes of finding discarded military K and C rations that he could plunder for chewing gum and candy.

He also remembers the only time the big guns fired, a half-power test load heard clearly all across the lower Eastern Shore.

"Oh, yeah," Richardson said recently. "Windows rattled. I don't know how many broke. It just rattled everything."

Richardson works at the refuge now, and Stanz hopes to attract other WWII-era residents to help interpret the military history for visitors. He wants living history and a new walking trail that will lead past the tower used to search for enemy vessels offshore.

"There!" Richardson said, pointing out the window of his car toward the tower, which stands in an isolated part of the refuge off-limits, at the moment, to visitors. "Can you see it? You can't see it in the summertime."

Stanz the visionary, in his long-term dream for the refuge, also sees a segment of railroad track with a 8-inch rail gun standing on it, just like it used to in the 1940s.

Such small guns, Richardson recalled, were stationed on flatcars in what is now habitat for migrating birds. When the guns were fired, he said, they slid backward down the tracks even with their wheels locked.

The rail guns left when fort and firepower all became obsolete. Rail guns will cost money, too, and it is so true that time is money, and that both are in short supply.

By the time McGovern, acting for the Coast Defense Study Group, had notified people that the surplus gun barrels were available, the ones in Nevada had been turned into 3.6 million pounds of scrap metal, he said.

Auctioning of the St. Juliens barrels has been delayed to allow would-be adopters time to raise money. Fort Miles in Delaware, which began fundraising several years ago, is ready this spring to move its barrel. It wants one of the three that witnessed the Japanese surrender aboard the Missouri.

Arizona also wants a Missouri barrel, to go next to a gun from the state's namesake battleship, which was sunk at Pearl Harbor. If transportation can be figured out, the barrels together will represent the beginning and end of World War II.

Joint Expeditionary Base Fort Story in Virginia Beach would have liked to have a barrel, and the Norfolk Naval Station wanted the Iowa barrel to place next to a memorial for the 47 sailors killed in 1989 by an explosion in the ship's gun turret. But without a way to move the gun barrels, those plans have bogged down.

"If you go to see the Missouri or Iowa or Wisconsin now, you can see nine big barrels on the ships," McGovern said. "Those are not the ones that were in famous battles. You can only fire so many rounds before you have to replace it."

Most of the gun barrels on the ships were replaced during the 1950s, he said. The replacements are now on tourist attractions like Norfolk's battleship Wisconsin, while the original barrels from the war years lie in a row at St. Juliens.

"Once they're gone, they're gone," McGovern said.

In mid-January, Stanz drove up to what looked, at a distance, like a smoothly symmetrical hill covered with tall grasses and spindly trees.

"This is the World War II bunker," he said.

The bunker has two short tunnels, as it were, each bisecting a cold, dark passageway running the length of the hill. It is fenced off now, but he imagines it lit up, with tourists walking through it, past side rooms where arms were stored and maps read and ships plotted.

"Eventually I'd like to see that opened up, if it can be done safely," he said. "There's still enough here to tell a great story."

The gun turrets are semi-circles peering out of the hillside, empty now and echoing. This is where Stanz envisions a gun barrel on display, its massive muzzle angled upward and an inert projectile, 65 inches tall and weighing 1,750 pounds, mounted to appear as though it has just been fired.

He has stepped off the distance that a 68-foot gun barrel would cover if it were sitting in the turret.

"If the breech was in the middle of that circle, the barrel would have been here in the edge of the woods," he said. "Boom! That way," and he looked east.

An observation platform has been built on top of the bunker, with 69 steps leading to it. From it, visitors can see the ocean, the bay, the marshes and the migratory birds that the refuge was intended to protect.

This site, for many years, has been about protection.

"It was important for the military and important for the wildlife," Stanz said. "There's something to be said for location, location, location."

A second hill, which was once the communications bunker for the fort, has been completely covered with dirt. The railway spurs, which held smaller guns, are gone.

Four people with spotting scopes and binoculars - birdwatchers - moved to the side of the road as Stanz drove past.

"I know it's going to be hard," he said. "I know I've got a lot of hurdles. How in the world can we pull this off?"

Stanz has broached the subject with the Northampton County Board of Supervisors. He plans to pitch the idea to as many organizations and individuals as will listen.

"This will be a great tourism thing for the Eastern Shore," he said, back at refuge headquarters, surrounded by displays of carved duck decoys and stuffed specimens of the real thing, plus a sign leaning against a counter that read, "Working for Wildlife."

From its cold bunker set into the earth, the big gun of Fort John Custis could fire a 2,000-pound-plus projectile 25 miles.

In a way, it's exactly like the living history project Stanz has in mind. It's powerful, it's exciting and, until the fundraising gets rolling, it's a long shot.

Diane Tennant, 757-446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com