Chandler Photo Album #2.

Per Arlen Trapp:

The mission and operations of Team/Detachment 329 are intriguing. The team was “attached” to the 6913^th RSM/SS.

Team 329 used a deployment site at Spieka for a while. Spieka is located a little further north, just 3 km northwest of Midlum (as the crow flies).

One of the commanders of Team 329, Maj Ervin F. Rees, who now lives near Houston, TX said that Team 329 operations were conducted in a small building at first. Maj Rees said that the Air Force then built a larger, more permanent facility at Hohes Moor, which is near Neuenwalde, about 10 km (8 miles) from the Staging Area, home of the 6913^th RSM. He said that one of the distinctive features of the Neuenwalde (Hohes Moor) site was the concrete road, which the AF constructed to go from the highway to the deployment site.

About four and a half years ago, I received an e-mail message from a German citizen, who described himself as a retired teacher who lives 100 km west of Bremen and interested in military history. He said he had seen the information about USAF units/detachments in the Bremen-Bremerhaven enclave, which we include in our personnel lists posted on the 6913^th RSM Web site.

He asked me to give him specific information (unit identification, mission, start and end dates at the location) for three deployment sites; as an attachment to the e-mail message, he included an annotated map of each location. He identified one of the sites as Stueh [Stuh, mit umlaut] (533919N-084337E), which is right on top of the Neuenwalde-Hohes Moor deployment site of Team 329. At the time, I didn’t know how much of the information might still be classified, so I did not give any information to this German “retired school teacher”.

Apparently, Team 329 continued operations in that area at least during the early 1970’s. I wonder whether Team 329 was attached to the NSG unit at Bremerhaven after the 6913^th RSM was deactivated? Here is a note posted in a guestbook at this URL:

http://usafgermany.com/rollcall/a-j.html:

Name:	Alan Burke
Email:	asb24NOSPAM@wmonline.com
HomePage:	http://
Comments:	Work site: Hohes Moor - 1970 - 1972. Family qtrs located in Bremerhaven
Current Duty Station/Home.	Arizona
Dates stationed at Hohes Moor.	1970-72
Shop/Branch/AFSC.	Detachment 329 - PERS
	August 3, 2004 22:31:07 (GMT Time)

I hope to learn more about Team 329 and its mission, as we find and talk with more of the people assigned to it. For now, I have learned from Maj Rees and two other members of Team 329 that they reported directly to AFTAC, the Air Force Technical Applications Center, located at that time in a red-brick building on Telegraph Road in Alexandria, Virginia (the AFTAC later moved to Patrick AFB, Florida, where it remains to this date).

The mission of AFTAC is to monitor and identify NUCLEAR events – detonations, accidents, weapons movement, rocket booster “signatures”, etc. This mission is performed by many field sites, teams/detachments located around the world. These remote sites feed information gathered from antenna fields, sensors, balloons, satellites, and HUMINT to AFTAC and its main overseas locations (Yokota AB, Japan and Wiesbaden, Germany) and its training installations (McClellan AFB, CA and Lowry AFB, CO).

-- Arlen Trapp