Before the U.S. military stepped foot on Boca Raton soil in 1940, the tranquil backwater town boasted just 723 residents. In less than two years, though, 16,000 Army Air Corps soldiers worked on a top-secret testing facility in their backyard.
Their “backyard” was a 5,820-acre chunk of scrubland. That scrubland was uprooted and replaced by an airstrip called the Boca Raton Army Air Field. That airstrip eventually became Florida Atlantic University’s main campus.
But why were Army operations so classified? In a word, radar. It was a landmark gadget – roughly the size of a washing machine – that could not only pierce through thick cloud cover on air missions where human eyesight could not, but target exact enemy locations overseas for bombing raids.
“The Army Air Force didn’t want the word out that this kind of technology would allow the U.S. to totally control air space,” says Sally Ling, author of Small Town, Big Secrets (History Press), one of the authoritative texts on the airfield’s secret testing.
Initially, the Royal British Navy laid claim to developing radar technology, but the 1940 London air raids forced the program out of England and into safer territory – southeast Florida. Between 1942 and 1945, a research facility called Rad Lab (which also helped build the atomic bomb) quietly shipped radar devices from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Boca Raton.
Meanwhile, radar cadets funneled in from Wisconsin and Illinois, the sites of electronic and radar mechanics prep courses. Once on base, they were forbidden to speak a word about radar to family, friends or even fellow classmates.
“For a radar cadet to disclose that kind of information either meant an automatic court-martial or you were shipped to the frontlines with a gun,” says Ling.
The T-Buildings
The same year that 16,000 Army Air Corps cadets flooded the base, 800 T-Buildings were constructed in less than four months. They weren’t exactly crafted from sturdy materials, and in 1947 two Category 4 hurricanes proved just that: half of them were washed out.
The rest were bulldozed by FAU over the last 45 years. However, five miraculously still stand, but they’re in horrible structural shape. Even worse, previous FAU President Anthony Catanese didn’t seem to care. That’s why three preservation groups formed: to protect against the demolition of the last remnants of World War II and radar.
Four of the five buildings – two radar classrooms and two officers’ quarters – aren’t just sitting on the northeast corner of campus abandoned and decaying. Actually, they’re getting more use now than they did 65 years ago.
And that’s another reason preservation groups are fighting: they need repairs.
