Nahant historian delves into secret Army radar site once located on Lynnway

LYNN – A secret site tucked off the Lynnway and all but obliterated by overgrown vegetation was once designated a last defense line against Nazi German and, later, potential Cold War invaders.Nahant historian Gerald Butler said the Army dubbed the Lynnway location “Site X” during the forlorn months of 1942, when Germany held sway over Europe and North Africa, and Imperial Japan dominated islands strung across the Pacific Ocean.”They called it that because they wanted no indication we had radar to such a degree that it was operational,” said Butler.Site X initially served as a training school preparing soldiers to operate radar machines resembling large scaffold-like structures mounted to a swiveling axle. Lynn native and Army Maj. Gilroy Linehan Jr. helped train a handpicked team of officers in radar technique and then sent them back to Army bases ranging up and down the Atlantic coast.The big radars, Butler said, were designed to detect German bombers inbound to Boston, New York and other cities.”In 1942, they were definitely worried about the Germans sending over an armada,” he said.History proved those fears to be unfounded but Butler said the secrecy cloaking Site X was also intended to hide American advances in radar technology from German spies who might be lurking around military installations in Nahant or the aircraft and naval engine plants at the River Works.An Army veteran from the 1960s who served with an intelligence unit, Butler has delved deep into the history of local coastal defense installations constructed in the last century, including the array of high-powered guns and reinforced bunkers that turned Nahant during World War II into “an Army camp.”To prepare Site X, Butler said soldiers set up equipment near the long-gone Lynn Open Air Theater and lived in 12-man squad tents surrounded by sandbag gun emplacement where guards manned .50-caliber machine guns. A turn down a dirt road running off the turnaround land on the Lynn-bound side of the General Edwards Bridge led to a sentry shack and the site itself.”It was so secret they didn’t even take too many pictures of it,” Butler said.He included copies of the few pictures that were taken in two roughly 20-page-long histories he has written on the Site X and its successor – Site B-10.Erected in 1951 and 1952 as the United States faced off with the Soviet Union and fought in Korea, B-10 was much larger than Site X but located on the same Lynnway land taken over by the Army in 1942.Butler said the Army mounted four big 90 millimeter antiaircraft guns on the site and stationed about 125 soldiers who lived and worked in eight wood buildings. The soldiers packed up B-10 and its guns once a year and drove down to Wellfleet where they practiced-fired the artillery.B-10, said Butler, was just one of nearly a dozen batteries surrounding Boston in the 1950s. The site closed in 1956 and other batteries were dismantled as the Army replaced the big guns with missiles.Butler hitchhiked in 1958 from Nahant to Lynn with a friend to rummage through the dismantled Lynnway site.”The only thing I found was a red ‘no smoking’ sign,” he said.Thor Jourgensen can be reached at [email protected].