CFB Edmonton Airfield, October 28, 1969 from an Aerial Photo. With the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Japanese on 7 December 1941, an urgent need arose to increase the defences of the North American West Coast. The United States and Canada quickly negotiated an agreement permitting the U.S. to use Edmonton’s Blatchford Field as a jumping-off point in the protection of Alaska. Busy Blatchford Field, (now City Centre Airport), eventually ran out of room and was not able to expand. It could no longer handle the requirements of the U.S. military’s heavy fuel tankers, and so in 1943, the Americans rushed to build a second airfield at Namao, 11 km north of Edmonton. The airfield was run by the Americans until the end of the war in 1945, when it was turned over to the Canadian Government but the United States continued to use RCAF Station Namao as a refuelling point on their way to Alaska. During the cold war of the 1950’s, Namao was used for the United States’ Strategic Air Command (SAC). The airfield was lengthened and strengthened between 1954 and 1960, to compensate for the increasing weight of tankers used to refuel nuclear bombers patrolling the arctic. The airfield also served as home base for search and rescue flights patrolling the Rockies and the Arctic. United Nations’ Food Aid flights departed from Namao, delivering aid to Ethiopia, Somalia and Bosnia. The base was also designated a NASA emergency space shuttle landing site.