Aerial view of Kindley Field airport. The airfield was intended to be a joint US Army/Royal Air ...

Aerial view of Kindley Field airport. The airfield was intended to be a joint US Army/Royal Air Force facility, to be used by both primarily as a staging point for trans-Atlantic flights by landplanes. When the US Army occupied the area in 1941, it created Fort Bell. The next two years were spent levelling Longbird Island, and smaller islands at the North of Castle Harbour, infilling waterways and part of the harbour to make a land-mass contiguous with St. David's Island; this added 750 acres to Bermuda's land mass. The airfield was completed in 1943, and known as Kindley Field, named for First World War aviator Field E. Kindley. Most of the base was taken up by the US Army Air Forces. The Western end of the airfield was taken up by the RAF. RAF Air Transport Command, formerly based at Darrell's Island, re-located to the landplane base, leaving only RAF Ferry Command operating on Darrell's. After the end of the Second World War, the RAF closed its facilities in Bermuda. The Head of RAF forces in Bermuda, Wing Commander Mo Ware, was loaned to the Colonial Government to oversee the conversion of the RAF facility at Fort Bell into a Civil Air Terminal as the commercial flying boats which had provided the island's civil air links began to be superseded by landplanes, which could not operate from Darrell's Island.