Fort Story’s prime seems past, swallowed by time and sea. Until gunfire crackles in the woods.

The heavy door creaks open. Rusty hinges groan.

Tucked into the base of a sand hill, cloaked by kudzu and weeds, the entrance to the bunker goes unseen by tourists on the other side of the mound, shuttled onto Fort Story to see the old lighthouses of Cape Henry.

Beyond the door, cobwebs drape a narrow passage. Cave crickets jump and scatter, startled at the sudden intrusion into their dark, dank world. Flashlights lead the way to a small room, empty except for a table.

It’s shaped like a half-moon — a plotting table where men wearing World War II uniforms once leaned in, the helm of operations for an underwater minefield guarding the Chesapeake Bay from enemy vessels.

Like much of the history of Fort Story, the bunker feels forgotten, ghostly with the images of what once was. Combat never came to Fort Story, making it easier for the past to fade away.

Fields that teemed with barracks, mess halls, chapels, a hospital and the bustle of thousands of boots are now bare grass, marked only by leftover street signs, eerily pointing the way to nothing.

Artillery emplacements — platforms for the anti-aircraft and long-range guns that bristled along the shore — have almost all tumbled into the surf, the casualties of erosion. Platforms that stood farther inland grow steadily fainter, concrete circles sinking, commemorative plaques crumbling away in the salty air.

A hush seems to blanket the 1,450-acre post. Except at night, when chopper blades whup overhead, and the dense woods peppering the base rattle with booms and crackle with gunfire.

That racket — loud enough to raise the eyebrows of campers at nearby First Landing State Park — is the sound of today’s kind of war and Fort Story’s latest life.

This windswept elbow, jutting into the sea, has always been strategic real estate.

Conflict has long blown across its dunes.

___

Under the fence

Underneath the storied lighthouse at Ft. Story is a WWII bunker once used as a command center for an underwater minefield that stretched from Cape Henry to the Eastern Shore. As seen Friday, November 1, 2019. (Stephen M. Katz)

Few people alive today know Fort Story better than Fielding Lewis Tyler.

He’s 86, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who grew up just outside the fort’s perimeter and still lives nearby.

“Not many people lived up here back then,” he says of the North End neighborhood of Virginia Beach, where he returned to spend his retirement years. “There wasn’t much for kids to do, and I was curious about what was on the other side of that fence.”

He and his pals found spots where they could slip under and explore. WWII was over and most of the troops were gone, but some of the artillery pieces remained.

“All these big guns and giant shells — all just lying there — I found it fascinating,” he says. “Got caught a time or two, though. They came and told my mother to keep little Fielding at home.”

At Virginia Military Institute, he majored in history, then went into the service. Vietnam was his war.

During his first one-year tour, he embedded with the South Vietnamese army in the Mekong Delta, calling in air strikes. He spent his second tour with a U.S. infantry unit. His third, as a briefing officer, was cut short when America pulled out and the North Vietnamese were closing in.

“I was giving a final press briefing," he says, “and we could hear the rockets.”

In his 30 years of service, Tyler found himself stationed around the world but never at Fort Story. When he finally moved home for good, the old fort intrigued him as much as ever.

Military history has long been Tyler’s interest. Memorabilia fills his study. Books about various wars cram his shelves. But Fort Story has always been special.

“Because it was close, I guess,” he says, “and because I could sneak under that fence.”

He joined a legion of local boards and history associations, some devoted to the bygone days of Fort Story and Cape Henry. He wrote a book about the place for the Images of America Series, filling it with vintage photographs, many from his own collection, some taken with his Kodak Brownie during those forays under the fence.

A flip through the book follows his blue eyes into the past.

As one of the gateposts defining the mouth of the bay — Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore is the other — the knob of sand and maritime forest has witnessed plenty, like the first landfall of the Jamestown colonists, who stepped foot on the cape in 1607. And their first skirmish, when native warriors promptly attacked.

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Fields that are now empty at Fort Story were packed with barracks and other buildings during WW2, when the fort played a key role in defending the Chesapeake Bay from enemy submarines. - Original Credit: Courtesy of JEBLCFS - Original Source: JEB Little Creek-Fort Story (Courtesy of JEBLCFS / HANDOUT)

Over the centuries, the cape has known wreckers, rescuers and pirates. Battles that changed the course of history have raged just offshore. The Battle of the Chesapeake during the Revolutionary War. The Battle of the Ironclads during the Civil War.

By the early 1900s, the cape had settled into a community — houses, hotels, railroad service, even a casino.

Fort Story came along during World War I, when the U.S. beefed up coastal defenses in case of attack. The federal government snapped up 340 acres of the cape, planted a couple of gun batteries in the dune line and named the post for Maj. Gen. John Story, a top Army artilleryman of the day.

It was largely an open installation, coexisting with its seaside neighbors who trekked right through it to reach their properties. When that war ended in 1918, the fort was placed on caretaker status until WWII renewed fears of invasion.

The entrance to the Chesapeake Bay was considered crucial to protect. Hostile vessels with access could reach all the way to the nation’s capital — not to mention the naval bases and shipyards that lay just inside.

But its mouth isn’t easy to secure: 15 miles wide, humming with military and commercial traffic that must be allowed to flow.

An early plan to build an artificial island in the middle for staging artillery was scrapped. Too difficult and costly.

Instead, old forts along the edges were muscled up. Manpower flooded into Fort Story, which quadrupled in size, gobbling up surrounding acreage that quickly sprouted a plywood city of support structures above ground, and a concrete warren of bunkers and tunnels below.

Fort Story was already the only post in the U.S. armed with M1920 16-inch howitzers — four of them, with 30-foot-long barrels, powerful enough to lob one-ton shells nearly 14 miles.

More heavy guns were brought in, with additional batteries burrowing into the other side at Cape Charles and Fisherman’s Island. Fort Monroe and Fort Wool were the fallback, the inner line of harbor defense. More firepower was amassed at the local forts than anywhere else in the country.

Fire control towers were erected along the shorelines — dozens of high platforms for the spotters who helped gun crews adjust aim. A network of searchlights cast arcs over dark water.

Stout nets were stretched under the surface between the capes, with guarded openings for friendly ships. Hundreds of mines were laid beneath the waves — the largest mining operation on the East Coast.

The threat was real. German submarines, known as U-boats, were hunting nearby. During the first half of 1942, dozens of ships were downed off the mid-Atlantic coast.

In June of that year, a U-boat came calling on Hampton Roads. Creeping in at night, so close that the crew could see residents through lighted windows ashore, the U-boat dropped mines of its own just outside the bay entrance. Over the next few days, five ships collided with those enemy mines and were sunk or damaged — blasts that stunned locals from the Boardwalk to Buckroe.

Overall, however, the blockade of the bay itself was effective. In 1945, when the war ended, the nets were hauled out and mines were removed or detonated in place. Guns were carted away — most of them anyway. And little Fielding Tyler began crawling under that fence.

“What a great place to play army,” he says with a chuckle.

By then, troop numbers had dwindled, largely leaving the post to a few Army transportation groups. The Cold War brought some Nike missile batteries in the 1950s to counter the Soviet bomber threat. But mostly, time washed over Fort Story as it dozed.

Spiders and mold took over the bunkers. On the surface, weather worked on the wooden buildings until almost all had to be razed.

For years, Tyler led tours for WWII reunion groups until those folks “were all gone, too.”

At the peak of its commotion all those decades ago, Tyler figures, a few thousand people were stationed at Fort Story.

There’s almost that many stationed there now.

So why does the place feel like a ghost town?

Because, Tyler says, since the Navy SEALs came, “that’s what they want.”

Today

SEALs moved into this time capsule when the Navy took over Fort Story from the Army and merged it with Little Creek Amphibious Base in 2009, creating a joint expeditionary base.

SEALs aren’t the only ones at Fort Story — it’s also a hub for bomb disposal experts, among others — but the stage is ideal for the Navy’s premier commando force. Vacant land for out-of-the-way practice ranges. Broad, lonely beaches for honing water-born tactics. Dark woods to train for night operations, and tuck replicas of the far-away villages they’ll need to know how to navigate under dangerous conditions.

Training, in fact, has become Fort Story’s thing. More than 10,000 personnel from every branch of service come through each year to be coached in nearly 50 different disciplines, carried out on more than 120 ranges.

Yet, somehow, the place still seems empty. Isolated. Muffled by the sea on one side and the forests of First Landing State Park on the other.

Bruce Widener, the park’s manager, said it’s not unusual for campers to be concerned about noises heard in the adjoining woods. “We try to educate them ahead of time — we tell them we’ve got some unusual neighbors,” Widener says.

Not everyone gets the word. Campers turn up in the mornings, wide-eyed over the gunshots, explosions and low-flying helicopters of the night before.

“Once we explain what it is and tell them it’s safe, they’re usually OK with it,” Widener said. “And a lot of them are like me. I love the military and I find it all really interesting."

Only a few have packed up and left.

“And I get that," Widener said. “I mean, sometimes they don’t even get started over there until after midnight. A helo buzzing at tree-top level when you’re tent-camping? That can be more than enough all by itself.”

At today’s Fort Story, a little Fielding wouldn’t roam far inside the fence.

Like other military installations, it’s now firmly closed to the public. Visitors can come to the cape’s lighthouses and a memorial to the first colonists, but they’re taken on base by a shuttle and not allowed to wander.

Even if they were, so much of the fort’s past has been erased.

“Fifty-five thousand visitors come to see the lighthouses every year and they don’t see anything else because it’s not there anymore,” says Spencer Layne, a public affairs officer for Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story.

Layne served 23 years in the service, most of it as a Navy photographer trotting the globe. For the past nine years, he’s been in his civilian job at the base, where he’s come to treasure Fort Story’s history and its remnants.

“The bunkers, the gun mounts — you can walk around and visualize so many things that happened here,” he says. "I guess it just brings out the little boy in me.”

It brings out perspective, too. There are hopes of opening at least one bunker to visitors — a place where people can stand face-to-face with the peeling paint of perils that defined a generation before them, and remember that 9/11 wasn’t the first time an enemy came to America’s shores.

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Fielding Tyler is another gem Layne has found at Fort Story.

“He’s been a wonderful resource for me,” Layne says. “I mean, he wrote the book — literally.”

But Tyler’s shock of silver hair hasn’t been seen at Fort Story in quite a while. Time is taking its toll on him, too, and Layne finds himself increasingly thrust into the role of memory keeper.

He does what he can to collect and preserve old records and photos.

"But there’s no way I can ever fill someone like Fielding’s shoes,” Layne says. “No one could.”

Joanne Kimberlin, 757-446-2338, joanne.kimberlin@pilotonline.com

Sources for this story include: Fort Story and Cape Henry (Images of America – Fielding Lewis Tyler); The Chesapeake Bay at War (Terrance McGovern); Hampton Roads, The World War II Years (Images of America – Patrick Evans-Hylton); Virginian-Pilot research