Beale Air Force Base (IATA: BAB – ICAO: KBAB) | military, United States Air Force

 air force base, military, United States Air Force

6252 B Street
Beale AFB, CA 95903
(530) 634-3000

www.beale.af.mil/

Home of the 9th Reconnaissance Wing, Beale is considered by many to be one of the show places of the United States Air Force.

A base steeped in history, it is in the forefront of the Air Force’s future in high technology. Beale is located in northern California about 10 miles east of the towns of Marysville and Yuba City and about 40 miles north of Sacramento, the state capital. Beale is a large base in terms of land and has five gates providing access on all sides of the base. Visitors enter the base through a main gate that local merchants, individuals and the Beale Military Liaison Committee donated $100,000 to construct.
The base, covering nearly 23,000 acres, is home for approximately 4,000 military personnel.

Unlike most Air Force bases, which since the birth of the Air Force in September 1947 have carried the name of famous aviators, Beale Air Force Base was named for Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a man who experimented with camels as replacements for Army mules and who was one of California's largest landholders.

Edward Fitzgerald "Ned" Beale was born Feb. 4, 1822, in the District of Columbia. His father George, a paymaster in the Navy, had won a Congressional Medal for Valor in the War of 1812. His mother Emily was the daughter of Commodore Thomas Truxtun. Ned was a student at Georgetown College when, at the solicitation of his widowed mother, President Andrew Jackson appointed him to the Naval School. Beale graduated in 1842.
Camp Beale opened in October 1942 as a training site for the 13th Armored and the 81st and 96th Infantry Divisions.

During World War II, Camp Beale’s 86,000 acres were home for more than 60,000 soldiers, a prisoner-of-war encampment and a 1000-bed hospital. In 1948, the camp transferred from the Army to the Air Force.

From 1959 until 1965, Beale was support base for three Titan I missile sites near Lincoln, Chico and the Sutter Buttes.