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Google Maps: British Military Base in Indian Ocean?

google.ca — One of the more unlikely places you'd guess seeing a military base...

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  • gwjc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+30That's a pretty cool island.. must be beautiful; I wonder what the hell the big circle is for: http://www.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=reunion&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=-7.279539,72.367952&spn=0.005044,0.010815
    maybe it's where the extra terrestrials land ;)
    • Dradis, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10Maybe munitions testing/ ranges. There are similar patterns in the Nevada dessert that are used for these purposes.
    • gcnaddict, on 10/12/2007, -6/+21uhh, how is it unlikely to see a british military base in the indian ocean? Last I checked, India was practically owned by the British Empire until sometime in the early 20th century (maybe even up until WWII, but Im not that good with history)

      also, I agree with Dradis in thinking that the big circle might be a testing site for certain random munitions developed or salvaged :P

      edit: oooh look, image corruption courtesy of... either aliens or the british gov't. That or the british just successfully tested an EMP :P
      http://www.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=reunion&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=-7.262649,72.357223&spn=0.009717,0.018218
    • freebirdpat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12That big circle is the sand trap for the 18th hole. Or at least it was last time I was there....


      /kidding, obviously its an alien *GURGLE*
      //a red flash hits your eyes and you remember nothing
    • cyanidenfs, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6@gcnaddict: India was under the British rule till 1947. That's till 2 years after WWII got over.
    • bardo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1probably a VORTAC, used for airplane navigation to the island.. but no, looks like that would be here: http://www.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=reunion&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=-7.317168,72.413034&spn=0.003363,0.005971
    • kije, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16The big circle is the remnants of an old HF direction finding antenna. Like this one: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=52.042580,-0.388298&spn=0.052674,0.080887&t=k
    • npiv, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16That would make a sweet BF2 map
    • angularvelocity, on 10/12/2007, -21/+2why do britishers need a military base in the indian ocean ? british and us govenrment scare the hell out of me.

      i guess we need more nuclear subs/aircraft carriers ... or am i just being paranoid ? :D

      @gcnaddict: yup, they did practically 0wned us. not only us, a _lot_ of other countries too.

      btw..i am still confused who was responsible for india's freedom? great a.hitler or mofo gandhi ? :D

      btw, the island seems to be a nice place to relax .. eh? but the whole island seems to be covered by a runway ... :(
    • eclectro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5kije is right - zoom in on his link to see the hf direction finding pad. He shouldn't have been modded down. It was/is an NSA listening post.
    • hypercube33, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Oddly looks like a baseball field gone wrong!
    • delong, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19"why do britishers need a military base in the indian ocean ? british and us govenrment scare the hell out of me"

      The Indian Ocean basin - vital to east-west global maritime traffic. Not important at all. Why would anyone bother with that?

      While you haplessly sit on your butt eating cheetos at your computer, being scurred of those scary soldiers, airmen, and seamen, they are keeping the sealanes clear for you, so you can enjoy your cheap energy and goods. I won't expect you to understand in the least.
    • gnalakalaciath5, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6it already sort of looks like a bf2 map; wake island
    • bostonbull, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0looks likethere is a missle launch area with many fueling storage tanks situated far from the launch site to prevent explosions
    • bobbknight, on 10/12/2007, -0/+22Ahh the beautiful foot print of freedom as some call it.
      Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territories (BIOT)
      It started out as a Copra plantation, Google Copra.
      During the Vietnam war the US needed a new place to put B 52's.
      You see the Vietnamese with lots of help from the USSR had echo chambers directed at Guam. They could hear the B 52's coming. So in the mid 60's we asked the Brits if we could use DG as a B 52 base, so we rent it from them. Now we have a military communications station, a space trash optical tracking station (the bits that break off space craft, and that can cause damage to things in space), and a pre-positioned squadron of supply ships for the US Marines and other military items. Most go boom.
      Diego Garcia is a wildlife marine refuge, though people stationed there are allowed to fish. It has some of the best fishing I have ever enjoyed.
      It has a British Magistrate and about 200 or so Brit military. Many Brit Marines, very fun to rib with. Google ridged inflatable boat.
      The normal tour of duty for US Military is 1 year, unaccompanied, no wife and kids. Contract workers come mostly from the Philippines and run most of the support services on the atoll. That big circle is an HF communications antenna, used for backup support for the area around the atoll. Over all not a bad place to visit, or be stationed at. though it is out of the way.
      No bonus pay for being stationed there, when I was there, though that may have changed.
    • node3, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8The big circle is a prototype of one of the earliest attempts at fitting 1,000 songs in your pocket. While they were successful at fitting 1,000 songs onto a format that utilized technology of the day, they were never able to overcome several limitations, including the need for a large label in the center for identifying the tracks, and the tendencies for ocean breezes to send the arm/stylus across the media unpredictably (you can see in the picture that it has, in fact, landed on the human-readable meta-data portion where it does not belong).

      On the other hand, it did have a white enclosure for the battery (seen to the left), and featured *two* pairs of white headphones (further to the left and above).

      Sadly, while the British PhonoPod contained many innovative features, they were never quite able to get it to fit into a standard-sized pocket.

      And now you know the true reason why Apple Corps sued Apple Computer.
  • greenergrad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+30Isn't that Diego Garcia, the US B-52 base leased from the UK?
  • BloodJunkie, on 10/12/2007, -2/+39Isn't that Diego Garcia? If so then it's used as a launch pad for the Iraq war. Also, there's a fascinating story behind how that came to be. The British basically deported the whole island nation of people to another nearby island where shortly afterwards they began literally dying of depression from missing their homeland.

    Check it out an article on it here: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27b/036.html

    And you can find a documentary about it on many torrent sites called "Stealing a Nation"
    • quasipalm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Also a good read:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia
    • eclectro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It's a cold war relic probably used for U-2s. But useful as a staging area for the persian gulf activities. I doubt if the islanders will ever be allowed back no matter what any court rules. Should be interesting to see how it plays out.

      The islanders would have a nice airport for tourists if they ever got their island back.
    • vermin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Cool, shuttle emergency landing.
  • fintheman, on 10/12/2007, -11/+4Wait, that is Diego!
  • dirtyfratboy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Is it just me, or is it impossible to reply to comments...? I can't find the little reply link anymore...

    Edit: NVM, they came back within a minute... weird.
  • teknosaurus, on 10/12/2007, -14/+6I was stationed there from Aug 02 - October 03...good times, good times. Punted every chicken there...
  • RichPowers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6http://www.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=reunion&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=-7.312385,72.415465&spn=0.003501,0.006781

    Wow, look at all those B-52s. I'd hate to be on the opposite end of that firepower. Beautiful aircraft though.
  • thezanman, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14Did anyone else see this and go "OMG Wake Island"???


    ...shutup.
  • YoctoYotta, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Reunion? I feel a compelling urge to play FFVII again.
  • Soniti, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Come- Now witness my reunion!!

    Sorry- couldn't help myself.

    ~Soniti
  • cliph, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Check out the South Pacific, several atoll bases there too:

    http://www.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=marshall+islands&ie=UTF8&ll=10.09867,167.211914&spn=23.333256,55.546875&t=h&om=1

    Good hi-res pics too.

    These islands are very beautiful parts of the earth. I went on a Google Maps journey around the South Pacific one day and found lots of beautiful islands, some with what look like military installations that have corresponding Wikipedia articles but I'm afraid I can't remember the names now.
    • automagically, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I followed your link, some cool islands! A bunch of the islands are circle shaped, with water in the middle! Well some of it looks under water, but some have buildings. Looks like they're growing a little something something too...

      I wonder what it's like to live so far out there. Forget Florida, I'm retiring to one of these places! Maybe it really is like that Leonardo DiCaprio movie.
  • UU7etc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia

    The airbase is US, you've probably heard of it on CNN.
  • WorfoSAUR, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Hmmm...Where's the BF2 Map?
  • theoallardyce, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Nice to see we've still got a couple of good old military island bases left. I would have thought Labour would have privatised them by now, or that they would have just run out of funding.
    • eclectro, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2We made it what it is. It's more our base than yours. Love Amerika.
    • theoallardyce, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2"We made it what it is. It's more our base than yours. Love Amerika."

      Thanks guys, although I have to point out we were the ones who masterfully evicted the old inhabitants - you cant beat a good ethnic cleansing when you need an island!
  • iMactel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The real question is this: Who do you have to piss off to get stationed there? I'm sure its beautiful, for the first couple of days or even weeks, but can you imagine spending months on island that is completely covered with a runway?
    • jefree, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Might have great surfing. That would do it for me.
    • goob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My aunt and uncle were stationed there together for a few years back in the early 90s and absolutely loved it. Back then it was highly secretive though, someone was always listening in on any calls we made to them and if they started to describe too much of the island or anything, the call would be cut off. Also, every letter we'd get from them was already opened and resealed with yellow tape saying it'd been inspected. But they still loved it and have some great stories from their time there.
  • djNullSpace, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3They must have modelled the Wake Island map in BF2 after this island.
  • speel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I wonder if they have some good fishing over there.. looks like a nice vacation spot to. Maybe its Bill Gates little island paradise.
  • umberloid, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Google Earth's new beta version has a great new feature, "Google Earth Community", a layer you can enable and see places of interest marked by others, along with a popup text window with info. Good thing to have when you find that unknown island. :)
  • plokey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I heard 007 is stationed there until his next movie.
  • Obsidian743, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I think an entire island that's a lagoon is pretty ***** cool.
  • craigiedan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The Island is Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. There are several US military commands stationed there as well as a small unit of British Military Police. I was stationed there in 2000 in the US Navy. The island is used mostly for support for ships and planes operating in the Indian Ocean. Most of the wildlife consists of chickens and donkeys that were brought in from earlier settlers....
  • serithchylde, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've known people that have been stationed out there. You have to volunteer for it. Theres all sorts of bonus pay for being stationed there. However from what I have been told there isn't much to do there but drink. The recreation hall was pretty well setup from what I remember hearing. Most people that volunteer for that duty station are single without family. I beleive it's only a two year duty station too.
  • kordless, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0This looks like an old landing strip/base from WWII:
    http://www.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=marshall+islands&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=9.320711,166.846613&spn=0.004801,0.008497
  • tekmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There are a number of ships in the harbor area, but most of them have passed the obvious dock near the airstrip. Is there some other secret dock I'm missing?
  • fishindiesea, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1coming from india, im pretty sure that the island in question was a former british base in WWII, but now is used as a training site for airforce pilots in emergency maneuvers. heard this in a military history show in india.
  • whiterajah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1BIOT (British Indian Ocean Territory) is strictly off limits to casual visitors, as you can imagine. The British writer Simon Winchester included it in his list of places to see for when doing the research for his 'Outposts: Journeys to the surviving relics of the British Empire'. He has a great write-up of the entire saga of the British lease of the place to the US, and an account of how he sailed up to to the place himself in a small yacht and faked a water shortage to get allowed on shore for a look around. Interesting reading!
  • hextor25, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Holy Moley. So much disinformation. It's Deigo Garica a fairly well known British Protectorate in the Indian Ocean - look at the google mini map it says as much. Us Brits have a base there and the US uses it for mid east operations. It's not like DG is even a secret.
    • veritech, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Kinda old news to me. It's been a staging base for all the gulf war bombing operations since 1991. You didn't think they did all the flights from guam and the continental us?

      B-1's, B-52's, Tanker aircraft, E-3's. If it can't fit on a carrrier, doesn't cost a billion quid (ala B-2) this is where it does the dirty on the iraq and the rest of the middle east.

      I believe you americans got in part for our war debt after WWII, along with quite a few other things, but it's only on lease, like Hong Kong was.
  • iCallShotgun, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Cool, how'd you find that?
  • Electric_Sheep, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=reunion&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=-7.313508,72.416548&spn=0.002389,0.005407

    Are these B52's? They could be British Herculies transport planes however.

    If they are b52s, then the U.S.A is renting the airstrip for either stop overs or for flying sorties.
  • mjlott, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've been to Diego Garcia once, for about two weeks. I had to go home on emergency leave from the Persian Gulf, and passed through Diego Garcia on the way back to my ship. It's not much to speak of. Very small and not much to do except workout and drink. They had a nice mess hall and restaurant, and the barbershop is free, so there are some small perks I guess They did have an outdoor theater also and a 24 hour basketball gym, so that was pretty cool. As for the surfing, you won't be doing that there if you have any sense, since the waters all around the island are crawling with sharks.
  • tacom8, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Its Atlantis you fools!!! i knew it existed!
  • Valnar300, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Is it just me or do they have baseball fields? Top right, on big part of island
  • MyDigitalSin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What a strange place for a base... but strategically, perfect!
  • blutkind, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0I was looking at the picture very carefully, that's an american BASE, as all those planes are B52's american STRATOFORTRESS nuclear/sub-nuclear LARGE ordinance bombing aircraft, pretty cool picture though :)
  • arnigunnar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Man ... one can get lost strolling the world in Google Maps
  • fmonnard, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Google will always be amazing... Such a precise map of an island lost in the ocean and not even a decent resolution for Switzerland (You know the country where Google a lab....). ;-)
  • nothingthewolf, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1something tells me that was taken before the 2005 tsunami...

    that island must be under water now.
    • asvasv, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4From wikipedia:

      The island and base were unaffected by the tsunami caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. Service personnel on the island reported only a minor increase in wave activity. The island was protected by its favourable ocean topography. East of the atoll lies the 400-mile-long Chagos Trench, an underwater canyon plunging more than 16000 feet. The depth of the trench and its grade to the shore makes it difficult for tsunami to build before passing the atoll. In addition, undersea coral reefs may have dissipated much of the waves' impact.
    • hrbanana, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Wasn't DG quoted in Top Gun? "..I'll have you flying Hercs out of DG.." or something similar.
  • scott1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Doesn't the british control some islands(not including that one) in the Indian Ocean? So I'am not to suprised to see there being a milltary base in that area.
  • Testify.Alex, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2Looks kinda like wake island map in BF2
  • batmant, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Does anyone else see barracks or housing or any kind?
  • 3leggedHorse, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2theres b52's on that island, since when the british own those things.
  • magicRob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I've got a nice mug from Diego Garcia :) My brother picked it up for me on his way to (or maybe from) the Persian Gulf. Either way he's spent many hours there between the Gulf and Australia :) It happens to be the main launch point for US B52's and a refueling point for warships on that side of the planet (he was on an Australian one).

    Have we all forgotten that the UK is one of the Allies? And that the US sails Aircraft Carriers (amongst other things) from San Diego to the Gulf via the Indian ocean...
  • h2d2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@gcnaddict:

    India the country and Indian ocean are not related besides the name. Dozens of countries (just like India) have shores lining it... including the Antarctic territories.

    May be need to do some geographic research before asking why Great Britain needs a military base in the Indian ocean...
  • ericxoxp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's also the home of a couple of B2's. If you look at the tarmac where the cloud shadows are you can see 4 B2 shelters. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/systems/xldahs-pics.htm
  • MourningZoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I cound 18 planes. This island looks awesome, it's beautiful
  • yeahbuddy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Man, there is no such thing as secrecy now that Google Maps and other easily accessable satellite maps are widely available. Makes for creative intel these days...
  • adammil2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I was there for a year and 3 months during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Before and during the arrival of the B52s and about 2000 Air Force that ruined the peace and jammed up the PeaceKeeper inn and Brit Club.
    Here's a neat site to tell you all about it:
    http://www.zianet.com/tedmorris/dg/links.html
  • wwvvwwwvvv, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0why are there iron crosses on the helipad? my first thought was, "oh it probably used to be nazi base," but that makes no sense b/c there were no helis in WWII and the germans wouldnt have holdings in the middle of hte indian ocean.

    does the UK make a habit of painting iron crosses on their helipads?
  • FrugalFreak, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1http://www.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=reunion&ie=UTF8&ll=-7.339653,72.423935&spn=0.254701,0.365295&t=h&om=1

    City UNDER WATER? or maybe DOCTORED?
  • FrugalFreak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1zoom all the way in under dark black areas, looks like Block compond type buildings. those clouds are WAY too fake. and notice ripples of water inside middle versus outside.
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