In 1941 the Royal Canadian Air Force went looking for flat land at the head of navigable water on the Saguenay and found it. The region had cleared farmland, geographic isolation, the deepwater port of Port-Alfred nearby and a railway. Construction started that summer on two fields: RCAF Station St-Honoré near Chicoutimi, which opened in June 1942, and RCAF Station Bagotville at La Baie, which opened on 17 July 1942 with St-Honoré as its sub-base.

What made the Saguenay worth defending was aluminium. The Alcan smelter at Arvida was one of the largest industrial plants in Canada and produced a substantial share of the metal the Allied air forces were built from, and the hydro-electric stations that powered it sat in the same valley. In 1942 German U-boats were sinking shipping in the Gulf and the lower St Lawrence in what became known as the Battle of the St Lawrence. Bagotville and Mont-Joli were stood up together to counter the threat and to calm local fear, which was not a trivial part of the task.

The station had two jobs at once. No. 1 Operational Training Unit trained fighter pilots from across the Commonwealth under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan on Hurricanes, Kittyhawks, Harvards and Lysanders; it was the only Hurricane fighter training base in the country. Alongside it sat 130 "Panthère" Squadron, an operational air defence unit for the smelter, whose motto "Défendez le Saguenay" was later adopted by the whole base. 129 Squadron took over the air defence task on 24 October 1943, and two months later 1 OTU absorbed it.

The arithmetic of the training is sobering. In 29 courses over 28 months, 1 OTU graduated 940 fighter pilots and 41 men were killed. As the demand for aircrew fell the station ran down: 1 OTU ceased operations on 28 October 1944, was disbanded in November, and Bagotville and St-Honoré were closed and mothballed on 5 January 1945.

425 Squadron was formed at RAF Dishforth in Yorkshire on 22 June 1942 as the Royal Canadian Air Force’s first French-Canadian unit, flying Vickers Wellingtons with No. 6 Group. It went to war on the night of 5/6 October 1942 against Aachen. In 1943 it deployed to Kairouan in Tunisia and operated against Italy and Sicily before returning to England in November, converting to the Handley Page Halifax in December and flying its first Halifax sortie in February 1944.

Its last operation of the war was on 25 April 1945, against gun batteries on the Frisian island of Wangerooge. It then re-equipped with Canadian-built Avro Lancaster Mk X and flew home in June to prepare for Tiger Force and the invasion of Japan. The atomic bombs made Tiger Force unnecessary and 425 was disbanded at RCAF Station Debert on 5 September 1945, less than three weeks after the Japanese surrender.

The squadron re-formed at St-Hubert in October 1954 on the CF-100 Canuck, became the operational training unit for the CF-101 Voodoo at Namao in late 1961, and moved to Bagotville in the summer of 1962, where it has been ever since. It converted to the CF-188 Hornet on 1 July 1984. In 2008 it received its first battle honour since the Second World War, for Operation Allied Force over Kosovo.

Its recent history is mostly eastern European. Four aircraft went to Câmpia Turzii in Romania in 2014 as part of NATO’s assurance measures after the annexation of Crimea; a detachment of four with about 100 personnel deployed to Mihail Kogălniceanu in March 2016 for Exercise Resilient Resolve; and the squadron returned to Mihail Kogălniceanu in 2022 for enhanced air policing in the Black Sea region. That is the practical meaning of a fighter base on the Saguenay in the 2020s.

Bagotville was reactivated on 1 July 1951 as the Korean War and the Cold War hardened, first as a training base for squadrons destined for Europe. 413 and 414 Squadrons worked up here on Sabres before both deployed to Europe on Exercise Leapfrog III in March 1953. 431 Squadron re-formed on the Sabre in January 1954 as a stopgap and was deactivated nine months later. In 1954 the CF-100 Canuck all-weather fighter arrived with 432 and 440 Squadrons, and in 1957 the CT-133 Silver Star joined them as a trainer.

The Voodoo changed the base’s character. 416 Squadron formed at Bagotville on the CF-101 in 1961 and moved on to Chatham the following year; 425 arrived in the summer of 1962 with the same type. Those aircraft were modified to carry the AIR-2 Genie, an unguided air-to-air rocket with a nuclear warhead designed to destroy whole formations of Soviet bombers, and the warheads were stored at Bagotville under the custody arrangements that followed the crisis which brought down the Diefenbaker government in 1963.

They stayed until the weapon was withdrawn in the early 1980s. It is the part of the base’s history least visible to visitors and the part that most changes what the place was: for two decades a quiet Quebec fjord town lived next door to American nuclear weapons, and the arrangement was neither secret nor much discussed.

Unification on 1 February 1968 turned RCAF Station Bagotville into CFB Bagotville. 410 Squadron formed here for training that year and moved to Cold Lake in 1982; 433 arrived from the reorganisation in September 1969 with the CF-5; 434 "Bluenose" replaced 410 in 1982 and left for Chatham in July 1985. On 1 July 1984 425 traded its Voodoos for Hornets, and in 1985 the first two Hornets took up round-the-clock NORAD alert.

433 Squadron formed at RAF Skipton-on-Swale on 25 September 1943 and then sat for nearly two months with no aircraft. When Halifax Mk IIIs arrived it worked up and began operations on 2 January 1944, flying over the Continent by night for a year before converting to Lancasters in January 1945. Between January 1944 and April 1945 the Porcupines flew 2,316 successful missions. After the war they ferried troops and prisoners of war home from Germany and Italy until the squadron disbanded at Skipton-on-Swale on 15 October 1945.

It re-formed as an all-weather fighter squadron at Cold Lake on 15 November 1954, moved to North Bay in October 1955, flew the CF-100 on North American air defence and disbanded on 31 July 1961. It came back on 26 September 1969 at Bagotville as a French-language squadron of Mobile Command, flying the CF-5 Freedom Fighter in the tactical and reconnaissance role and converting to the CF-188 Hornet in 1984. It stopped operations in 1986 to restructure and came back on the Hornet in January 1988.

Then it was killed again. On 14 July 2005 the squadron was deactivated after 62 years and its aircraft and people were absorbed into 425, which became a bilingual unit. The Porcupines existed only as a memory and a badge — a gold porcupine on silver, with the motto "Qui s’y frotte s’y pique", roughly "whoever rubs against it gets pricked" — and the squadron’s people were scattered.

It was reactivated at Bagotville on 9 June 2015, restoring the Royal Canadian Air Force to four fighter squadrons. The commander of the air force at the ceremony, Lieutenant-General Yvan Blondin, had begun his own career on the CF-188 with 433 and had signed the order that retired its standard ten years earlier. Squadron members are known as "Ti-pics", and he used the word about himself.

Between 19 and 21 July 1996 two weeks of rain on saturated ground produced the largest overland flood in twentieth-century Canadian history. Over two days the Saguenay received rainfall described as the volume that goes over Niagara Falls in four weeks; more than two metres of water went through parts of Chicoutimi and La Baie. Ten people died in the flood and two more in the mudslides it caused, 488 homes were destroyed and 1,230 damaged, 16,000 people were evacuated and the damage ran to about CA$1.5 billion.

Bagotville became the region’s shelter. Under Operation Saguenay, one of the largest domestic rescue operations the Canadian Forces has run, the base hosted 4,189 evacuees and its kitchen served a record 15,000 meals. The base’s standing in the Saguenay is not a matter of recruiting posters; it rests on a fortnight in 1996 that most people in the valley can still describe.

In ordinary years the relationship runs through payroll and the air show. Around 1,700 military and civilian people work at Bagotville, making it one of the largest employers in the region. The Spectacle aérien international de Bagotville has been held on a roughly biennial basis since 1953; the 2024 edition on 22 and 23 June drew a record 151,000 people over the weekend, 83,000 on the Saturday and 68,000 on the Sunday, after a five-year gap. The Musée de la défense aérienne sits on the base with aircraft on display outside.

The future arrives as concrete. 12 Radar Squadron was stood up here on 1 March 1999 to replace the closed radar station at Mont Apica. 2e Escadre, the deployable expeditionary wing headquarters, was formed in 2012 and a $131 million facility for it began construction in 2023. In August 2024 Pomerleau began work on the $120 million NORAD quick reaction alert facility for the CF-35A: 7,400 square metres of hangar bays, offices and crew quarters inside a 17,000 square metre secure compound, due in 2027, sustaining over 600 regional jobs.