The problem in 1941 was arithmetic. A single-engined fighter could not cross the Atlantic and even bombers needed a stop, and the route through Gander was crowded and weather-bound. On 1 July 1941 Eric Fry of the Dominion Geodetic Survey landed at the Grenfell Mission by amphibian, went upriver by boat and found a sand plateau above the Churchill River that would drain and carry weight. A United States Army Air Forces team under Captain Elliott Roosevelt, the President’s son, arrived three days later and found Canada had already chosen the ground.

What followed was a construction feat that nobody would attempt today. Under pressure from London and Washington the Canadian air ministry worked at a pace it never matched again, and by November three gravel runways of 7,000 feet by 200 feet were usable. The wartime codename was Alkali. The first aircraft movement was logged on 9 December 1941, two days after Pearl Harbor, and by the spring of 1942 the field was, in the official phrase, bursting with air traffic destined for the United Kingdom.

Roughly 22,500 fighters, bombers and transports staged through Goose Bay during the war, and the traffic was not only outbound: return ferry flights, weather reconnaissance, searches for aircraft that had gone into the Labrador bush and medical evacuation all ran from the same handful of buildings. Nothing about the place was comfortable. Labrador winters, blackfly summers and a supply line that ran by sea for part of the year made Goose Bay a posting people remembered, and the accident list from those years is long.

After the war the United States Air Force stayed, and Goose Air Base became a Strategic Air Command forward field with Aerospace Defense Command interceptors alongside. At its Cold War peak about 12,000 people lived and worked there, by far the largest community in Labrador.

In the summer of 1950 Strategic Air Command stationed eleven model 1561 Fat Man and Mark 4 atomic bombs at Goose Bay. The most public consequence came on 10 November 1950, when a B-50 flying one of them back to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona developed engine trouble, jettisoned the weapon over the St Lawrence and detonated its conventional explosives, scattering uranium-238 into the river. The bomb had no plutonium core fitted; the debris was real enough.

The permanent weapons storage area was finished in 1954 — two barbed-wire perimeter fences, six guard towers, three warehouses, five earth-covered magazines for non-nuclear components and four more for pit storage. Its design and layout were identical to the three Strategic Air Command sites built in Morocco at Sidi Slimane, Ben Guerir and Nouasseur in 1951 and 1952, which is as clear a statement as exists of what Goose Bay was in the American plan. An adjoining Air Defence Command magazine held components for the nuclear-armed Falcon air-to-air missile.

The last nuclear bomb components left the Goose Bay storage area in June 1971. By 1976 all Strategic Air Command assets had been stood down and only American logistics and transport support remained. The facilities handed to Canada were valued at more than 250 million American dollars at the time. The town of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, which had grown up around the payroll, was left looking for a replacement.

Soviet surface-to-air missiles pushed NATO air forces down to the ground in the 1970s. Flying at 100 feet was the answer, and it had to be practised somewhere with sparse settlement and terrain that resembled the target country. Labrador fitted, it was close to Europe, and Canada was willing. Through the 1980s the Royal Air Force, the Luftwaffe, the Aeronautica Militare and the Royal Netherlands Air Force kept permanent detachments at Goose Bay, and the base became the primary low-level tactical training area for several NATO air forces.

The scale is easy to underestimate. A multinational memorandum of understanding signed in 1986 raised low-level training flights from 6,300 to 18,000 a year for a ten-year period. The authorised training area covered roughly 130,000 square kilometres, larger than a long list of European countries, with altitude blocks available up to 60,000 feet and a practice target area 65 nautical miles south of the base reachable only by air, served by two strips of 5,200 and 1,500 feet.

Canada wanted more. Ottawa bid to host a NATO Tactical Fighter Weapons Training Centre at Goose Bay, which would have made the arrangement permanent and much larger. On 22 May 1990 NATO announced that it would not build it in Labrador. Within two years the Warsaw Pact was gone, precision weapons released from medium altitude had made contour flying look like a way to get shot down by a shoulder-launched missile, and the economics changed.

The Royal Netherlands Air Force detachment went home in the 1990s. In 2004 the Royal Air Force announced it would close its permanent detachment with effect from 31 March 2005, and the German and Italian agreements, which ran to 2006, were not renewed. All allied low-level training at 5 Wing ended in 2005. Foreign air forces still come — the Luftwaffe used Goose Bay in 2018 and 2019 for Airbus A319 and A340 type ratings and A400M night vision goggles work — but the business that supported the base is gone, and proposals to revive it surface periodically without becoming contracts.

The flight paths ran over Nitassinan, the Innu homeland, and over the country where families from Sheshatshiu and Davis Inlet hunted caribou and camped through the spring. The Innu said the noise drove the animals, frightened children in the tents and made their way of life impossible; they had never ceded the land and had signed no treaty for it. The Canadian and allied position was that the flights were lawful and that the environmental effects were unproven. Between those positions there was no room, so the Innu occupied the ground.

On 15 September 1988 about 75 Innu walked onto an airstrip at the base. A week later, on 22 September, around 100 protested at the military airport and several were arrested. Seven runway protests followed between September and December 1988, and the campaign ran on into the 1990s. Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue mobilised roughly 200 people for the protest camps on the bombing range. By the summer of 1989 more than 250 arrests had been made. In the early spring of 1989 a group of women, among them Rose Gregoire and Francesca Snow, refused the release conditions they were offered and served nineteen days in a provincial jail instead.

The legal outcome was extraordinary and short-lived. Four leaders — Daniel Ashini, Penote Ben Michel, Peter Penashue and Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue — were prosecuted for occupying the runway, and the trial judge, Provincial Court Judge James Igloliorte, found them not guilty on the basis that they honestly believed they were not trespassing on their own land. It was the first time a Canadian judge had decided a case of this kind that way. A higher court later held that federal jurisdiction meant the convictions should stand.

The federal environmental assessment panel struck in 1986 finally reported in 1995. It found insufficient scientific evidence to justify banning the flights, and recommended mitigation instead. In the end low-level training at Goose Bay was ended not by the panel or by the courts but by the collapse of the requirement. That does not make the campaign a footnote: it put Innu land rights on the national agenda, produced the Igloliorte ruling, and is why any talk of reviving low-level flying in Labrador now begins with consultation.

The modern wing is tiny in proportion to its infrastructure: about 75 military personnel and 90 civilian employees, with roughly 250 Serco Canada staff under contract doing air traffic control, cleaning, plumbing, carpentry and snow removal, and a Military Family Resource Centre that opened a new building in January 2019. The wing is responsible for an area of about 295,000 square kilometres, which is roughly the size of the United Kingdom.

Its flying unit is 444 Domestic Response Squadron, which began as a base rescue flight of three CH-135 Twin Hueys, was re-badged as 444 Squadron in 1993 and re-equipped with three CH-146 Griffons in 1996. Its job is to cover flying operations and exercises and to respond to local emergencies. Above that sits the reason the runway is maintained: Goose Bay is a NORAD forward operating location, a place fighters can be pushed to at short notice, with fuel, shelter and 11,046 feet of asphalt.

The field has form as a diversion. Goose Bay was the first Canadian airport to take transatlantic traffic on 11 September 2001, it absorbed two Military Airlift Command flights an hour during the Desert Shield build-up of August 1990 against a normal two or three a month, and it refuelled the Space Shuttle Enterprise on its 747 carrier in 1983. That is what an eleven-thousand-foot runway in the middle of nowhere is worth.

The unglamorous work is underground. Decades of fuel handling left soil and groundwater contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals and polychlorinated biphenyls; in 2014 more than a million litres of undissolved petroleum were estimated to be in the ground. Remediation began in 2009, is due to finish in 2028, and by 2022 had cost 142.9 million dollars, recovering over 700,000 litres of hydrocarbons, treating more than five million litres of groundwater and turning one former dump into an engineered wetland. On 19 April 2024 the base lost Hangar 8 and the old control tower in a structural fire with explosions inside — another piece of the wartime station gone.