Four airmen of the 854th Engineer Aviation Battalion began surveying the limestone plateau at Pati Point on 13 November 1944, four months after American forces retook Guam. The battalion, under Colonel Herbert E. Brown Jr., had reached the island on 9 October from Kwajalein. Its work on North Field was afterwards counted out in raw quantities: 847 acres of jungle cleared, 1,231,700 cubic yards of earth moved, 828,000 square yards of asphaltic concrete laid, 181 Quonset huts and 902 frame buildings raised.

The first asphalt went down on 17 January 1945 and the field was declared operational on 3 February, when a C-87 of the 314th Bombardment Wing landed and Major General Curtis LeMay followed in an F-13A. Two parallel strips were graded 10,500 feet by 500 feet and paved 8,500 by 200 feet with 1,000-foot overruns. The northern one is today’s runway 06L/24R; the southern is 06R/24L.

The 314th brought four B-29 groups — the 19th, 29th, 39th and 330th — and bombed Tokyo for the first time on 25 February 1945. On 12 April Staff Sergeant Henry E. Erwin threw a burning phosphorus bomb out of his aircraft with bare hands and earned the only Medal of Honor awarded for B-29 operations. On 7 October 1949 the base was renamed for Brigadier General James Roy Andersen, lost with Lieutenant General Millard F. Harmon on a Pacific flight in February 1945.

On 18 June 1965 B-52F Stratofortresses of the 7th and 320th Bombardment Wings flew from Andersen against a Viet Cong base area north of Saigon, the first Arc Light mission. Accounts of the launch differ: the Air Force Historical Support Division says 27 aircraft, while other Air Force summaries say 30. Two of the bombers collided in cloud some 250 miles offshore while orbiting for tankers. Eight crew members were killed before a single bomb fell.

Arc Light became the longest bombing campaign in Air Force history, with more than 126,000 sorties between June 1965 and August 1973 flown from Andersen, U-Tapao in Thailand and for a period Kadena. Monthly rates climbed from about 800 in mid-1967 to 1,800 by February 1968, when the bombers put roughly 60,000 tons around the Marine base at Khe Sanh. The last Arc Light mission was flown on 15 August 1973.

The ramp filled during Operation Bullet Shot, begun in February 1972 when bombing of the north resumed. More than 15,000 men were sent to Andersen on temporary duty inside ninety days; the barracks ran out and crews lived in tents, working eighty-hour weeks. The result was the largest concentration of bombers anywhere since 1945, with published counts at Andersen ranging from 152 to 155 B-52s parked along about five miles of pavement.

Linebacker II ran from 18 to 29 December 1972, with a stand-down on Christmas Day. B-52s flew 729 effective sorties out of 741 dispatched and dropped about 15,000 tons on the Hanoi and Haiphong areas, against 26 SA-2 sites and roughly 1,240 surface-to-air missiles. Andersen launched 87 bombers on the opening night. The force on Guam is variously counted at 152 to 155 aircraft, against 54 B-52Ds at U-Tapao.

The third night was the worst: six of 99 bombers sent did not come back. The Air Force eventually settled on 15 B-52s shot down, ten falling in North Vietnam and five reaching Laos or Thailand first, with nine more too badly damaged at U-Tapao to fly again. The number is contested. Early American statements admitted 16, the press was told 17 and Congress later 13, and a 2007 analysis by Drenkowski and Grau argued the real total lay between 22 and 27.

Of the 92 crew aboard the lost aircraft, 26 were recovered, 33 became prisoners of war and 33 were killed or never found, usually divided as 25 missing and eight dead. Other aircraft lost over the eleven days included two F-111As, three F-4s, two A-7s, two A-6s, an EB-66, an RA-5C and an HH-53. The Paris Peace Accords were signed on 27 January 1973 and 591 American prisoners came home within sixty days.

Operation New Life ran from 23 April to 1 November 1975 and made Guam the reception point for South Vietnam’s exodus. Roughly 2,600 orphans and children flown out under Operation Babylift had already transited the island on 3 and 4 April. The Army after-action account puts the number of Vietnamese housed and processed on Guam at 111,919; Andersen’s own public affairs office says more than 100,000, of whom more than 39,000 were housed on the air base.

C-141 Starlifters and C-130 Hercules unloaded on Andersen’s ramp around the clock. Steel dormitories put up in 1966 were turned into a camp everyone called Tin City, on ground now occupied by the fields around the Top of the Rock club; a stone staircase is about all that survives of it. Nearly every refugee bound for the American mainland was processed through the base.

The largest camp was not on the air base. Seabees raised tents for 50,000 at Orote Point on Naval Base Guam, where occupancy peaked at 39,331. The island’s refugee population peaked at 50,450 on 13 May 1975 and the camps closed on 23 October. Not everyone went on: 1,546 Vietnamese sailed from Guam on 16 October aboard the merchant ship Thuong Tin 1, having demanded to be returned to Vietnam. Its captain was imprisoned for twelve years.

Andersen stands on a plateau about 600 feet above the sea in one of the most typhoon-prone stretches of water on earth. Super Typhoon Karen crossed Guam on 11 November 1962. The Navy anemometer on Nimitz Hill measured a gust of 150 miles per hour, and post-storm estimates for the south of the island ran as high as 174 to 183. Eleven people were killed, 95 per cent of Guam’s homes were damaged or destroyed, and the runways at Andersen were left unusable.

Paka came on 16 December 1997. A hot-wire anemometer at Andersen recorded a gust of 205 knots, about 236 miles per hour, which would have been a world record; the National Weather Service assessment says flatly that the reading is not supported by post-analysis. Nobody on Guam or Rota was killed and damage ran above 600 million dollars. Super Typhoon Pongsona followed on 8 December 2002, with the northern end of the island inside the eye for nearly two hours.

Pongsona cost more than 700 million dollars, injured 193 people by the Guam Department of Health’s count and killed one indirectly — a woman cut by flying glass who suffered a fatal heart attack when help could not reach her. The Doppler radar at Andersen failed when power went and the backup generators did not carry it. Typhoon Mawar hit as a Category 4 on 24 May 2023; aircraft had been flown out or hangared, nobody was killed, and the airfield was working again inside 48 hours.

The ground Andersen occupies was Chamorro land. After the recapture of Guam on 21 July 1944 the military took about 52,000 acres of privately held land, and holdings eventually exceeded 85,000 acres, some 63 per cent of the island. Compensation was worked out from 1941 land values applied to takings made in 1948, with no adjustment for inflation. Guampedia records 25 acres bought for 850 dollars that had changed hands for 750 dollars in 1928.

Some has come back. The Guam Excess Lands Act of 1994 directed the General Services Administration to hand unneeded federal property to Guam at no cost, and fifteen deeds covering more than 2,767 acres had been delivered by 2011. The Guam Ancestral Lands Commission, created in 1999, passes ground on to original owners or their heirs. The Department of Defense still holds roughly a quarter of the island, about 36,000 acres, on which Andersen’s share is 14,600 acres.

The buildup is not finished. Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz, activated on 1 October 2020 and named for Brigadier General Vicente Tomas Garrido Blaz, is the first new Marine Corps base since 1952; about 5,000 Marines are moving from Okinawa at a cost near 8.7 billion dollars, of which Japan pays about 3.1 billion. Andersen will also host part of the Guam Defense System, counted at 16 sites in August 2024, with the first element due in fiscal year 2027 and the last in 2032.