History
Ramstein Air Base is an example of international collaboration: designed by French engineers, constructed by some Germans but with imported help from workers of Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey (there were very few German men to work on construction projects after World War II) and operated by Americans. The area was nothing more than a swamp that had to be built up by two meters (six feet) in height level over the whole area. A train line was laid out from Einsiedlerhof-Kaiserslautern in a yoke shape around to the current base and back down to the Landstuhl spur in 1948 by agreement of the U.S. and French Occupational Forces. Trainload after trainload of earth was moved over the line and spread over the base current area to raise it to its current level. The trains ran 24/7 for over a year. Once the ground was level, building construction could be begin. A project designed and undertaken by the French Army and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1949 to 1952. Two bases were laid out. Landstuhl Air Base on the south side and Ramstein Air Station (station, no airstrip) on the north. From 1948 to the opening of the bases in 1953 it was the largest one spot construction site in Europe employing over 270,000 Europeans at one time.
Read more about this topic: Ramstein Air Base
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)