Songsu-do Naval Base
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Songsu-do Naval Base is a large, multi-function Menghean military facility located on Songsu Island (Pine Tree Island) in Gyŏngsan municipality, southwestern Menghe. It contains the headquarters of the Menghean Navy, the country's largest shipyard, a military airfield, a cadet training school, a staff officers' academy, and supply docks for Menghean warships, as well as a wide array of residential and recreational facilities for military personnel, dockyard workers, and their families. The entire facility covers an area of 32.9 square kilometers and has a population of over 100,000 residents, ranging from top Navy commanders to on-base shop-owners.
History
Dynastic times
Historically, Yongsong Point, the peninsula forming the north side of Gyŏngsan Bay, was a critical defensive position for preventing invasion and repelling pirates. Some historical documents point to the existence of docks and barracks on Songsu island as early as the Kang dynasty, though the coastal landfill operations on the north shore have likely paved over any relevant archaeological sites.
The first definitive defensive facility was built during the Yi dynasty. This was a wood-and-stone castle on the southwest end of Okhae island to the south, meant to protect the area against pirate incursions. During the 14th century, the Okhae-do castle was expanded through the construction of a coastal battery fitted with early cannons. The Yi dynasty's war fleet mainly docked in Gyŏngsan proper, where supplies were easier to acquire, but excavations of Okhae-do have uncovered evidence of docks along the north shore, likely for supplying the cannon battery at the southwest point.
During the Myŏn dynasty which followed, the Yongsong Point batteries underwent several rounds of refurbishment and expansion, to better deter patrols by Casaterran gunboats. Naval funds dried up during the 18th century, however, and by the early 19th century the forts were in a state of serious disrepair. The Okhae-do southwest battery was comprehensively rebuilt in the 1830s, as a response to Menghe's disastrous defeat in the Uzeri Rebellion, but the domestic cannons were still outranged by the newest Casaterran models.
The Yi-dynasty castle on the southwest point of Okhae-do island survived to the end of the 19th century, and was turned into a historical site in 1905. In 1945, it was completely leveled by allied airstrikes targeting the shore batteries beside it. A replica castle was built next to the original foundation in the late 1990s, based on surviving historical photographs and using historical construction techniques.
Early modern era
During the Three States Period, Gyŏngsan Bay became a key staging point for the Sinyi faction. The Yongsong Point batteries were again rebuilt, and this time they were fitted with modern breech-loading artillery guns firing explosive shells. With guns on both sides of the harbor's entrance, these defenses could hit any fleet entering or leaving the harbor.
Initially the Sinyi fleet docked in Gyŏngsan proper, like its imperial predecessors. Due to concerns over sabotage and spying, however, Sinyi leaders established a new naval base on Songsu-do island in 1888, expanding the docks which were used to supply the Songsu-do coastal battery. These docks were built on the north side, in an area currently covered by landfill.
The expansion of the Songsu-do base accelerated dramatically after 1909, when the Gyŏngsan Songsu-do shipyard was established to aid in the construction of large vessels. The island site was selected to maintain a level of secrecy, and to keep the shipyard easily defensible against attack. New hull construction slips were added in the 1920s, dug out as floodable drydocks. A rail link to the mainland was completed in 1923; before then, supplies for shipbuilding arrived by sea.
Pan-Septentrion War
Following the 1927 coup which brought Kwon Chong-hoon and the militarist faction to power, the Songsu-do facility underwent further expansion, developing into a major base of operations for the Imperial Menghean Navy. A new yard for building light combatants was added, and two large cruiser-size drydocks were dug out. The Navy Headquarters was relocated to Songsu-do in 1932, marking the crowning achievement of the base's expansion. To defend the increasingly important facility, the coastal batteries defending the entrance to the harbor were again modernized, with high-caliber naval guns and anti-aircraft defenses.
As the Pan-Septentrion War broke out and progressed, work on the facility undertook a new urgency. A small airstrip was built on the north end, and construction and repair yards for light vessels and submarines were built at a rapid pace. It was during this time that the base's designers began blasting away parts of the central mountain and carting the rocks to the shore as landfill, expanding the amount of flat space available.
Initially, the Songsu-do base was relatively sheltered from bombing, due to the long distances separating it from Allied airbases. After Glasic forces took control of the islands to the south of Dayashina, this situation changed. Frequent bombing raids targeted both Songsu island and the city of Gyŏngsan itself. The military facilities on Songsu-do were almost completely leveled, with the main brick and stone buildings gutted and the outlying wooden barracks and warehouses reduced to ash. The Menghean Navy temporarily relocated its headquarters to Donggyŏng, along with most of its seaworthy warships.
Early postwar era
Following Menghe's surrender, the Allied Occupation Authority made temporary repairs to Songsu-do base in order to make the docks usable again, and in 1951 the road-rail bridge linking the island to the mainland was rebuilt. But there were no efforts to fully rebuild the facility. The shipyard area was used for storage, and the dockyard workers lived mainly in shantytowns cobbled together from leftover metal and wood.
The largely derelict state of the facility contributed to one of the watershed events of the Menghean War of Liberation. As Communist forces advanced from the north, the Republic of Menghe Navy's East Sea Fleet withdrew from Donggyŏng to Gyŏngsan Bay, bringing the naval base well over its regular capacity. In October of 1963, the sailors of the East Sea Fleet mutinied, protesting long-withheld pay, rotten food, and the poor state of the war. Joined by many of their officers, the sailors overwhelmed the Tyrannian advisors still on the island, imprisoned the loyalists in a storage building, and opened fire on RoMA defensive lines from the island's gun batteries. With their retreat by sea cut off, the local RoMA forces quickly surrendered, allowing Communist guerillas to move in from the mountains and regain control of the city. This development left the Communists in control of a sizeable naval force, including two Unmunsan-class super-heavy cruisers, and removed the core lynchpin of the Allied presence in the southwest.
In the second half of the 1960s, the government of the DPRM made a concerted effort to rebuild the island into a major naval facility. The shipyard was restored to operation, and the naval headquarters buildings were rebuilt and expanded. Once the original facilities were back to their wartime extent, the Communist government embarked on a major expansion of the base's footprint, leveling a hilly peninsula to the northwest in order to expand the small wartime defensive airfield into a major base for jet bombers and cargo planes. On the side of one excavated cliff face, they dug the entrances to two large underground hangar complexes, and began work on bomb shelters elsewhere on the island. To improve security, the base operators added planned housing complexes for shipyard workers, naval personnel, and other base personnel, running the island as a closed city under military leadership.
Today
Modernization of the Songsu-do base continued after the Decembrist Revolution. Because relations with Dayashina were improving, defensive and strike capabilities around the base received less of an emphasis, and the underground hangar complex was never completed. Permanent surface-to-air missile emplacements for older missile types were dismantled, and replaced by parking areas for elements of the Changgung air defense system.
Logistics and support infrastructure, however, saw major improvements. A new four-lane road bridge to the mainland was added, eliminating the old bottleneck formed by the 1920s-vintage road-rail over-under bridge. The shipyard facility underwent major expansion and modernization, with the installation of large gantry cranes and prefabrication yards around the existing drydock slips. Additional large hangar structures were added inland to support the fabrication of more advanced ship components. A new set of planned communities were added to the north shore, also partly on landfill ground, for the added airfield and shipyard workers, and the Marine Infantry were given an expanded headquarters and staff education complex on the south coast.
While the Menghean Ministry of National Defense is headquartered in Donggyŏng, Menghe's capital, the Menghean Army and Menghean Navy both have their own dedicated headquarters buildings in outlying cities. The State of Sinyi established a new naval headquarters in Anchŏn in 1885, near that city's new modern shipyard, while the Namyang Government established its own Admiralty building in Dongchŏn in 1873. Following Menghe's unification in 1901, the combined naval leadership was moved to the Dongchŏn facility, which was expanded and modernized. Kwon Chong-hoon moved the Navy Headquarters to Gyŏngsan's Songsu-do island in 1932, on the basis that the new site was better protected against foreign naval attacks. The relocation coincided with a thorough purge of the Navy's top leadership, which replaced the old cohort of conservatives with nationalists and personal allies of the Kwon faction.
The Navy Headquarters at Songsu-do underwent multiple rounds of reconstruction in the decades that followed. What was originally the 1921 shipyard management building was converted into the main Navy Headquarters building, and new buildings were added to the small campus in the mid-to-late 1930s. The complex was damaged, but not leveled, during the Pan-Septentrion War, and it was converted back to a shipyard management building in 1947. During the 1970s, Sim Jin-hwan ordered the construction of a new naval headquarters at the Songsu-do site, as part of the northwest expansion of the site.
The new Navy Headquarters campus covers an area of 600 by 425 meters, and sits immediately to the northwest of the old Navy Headquarters (current shipyard management) on leveled and reclaimed land. It is built in the monumental Socialist Classicist style typical of the Sim Jin-hwan and early Choe Sŭng-min eras, with grey stone walls and a Hemithean hip-and-gable roof covered in dark blue tiles. New buildings were added to the campus in the 1990s and 2000s, built in a similar socialist neo-traditional style. The main facility contains the Menghean Navy's top administrative offices, as well as design institutes and doctrinal study centers.
Immediately outside the Navy Headquarters campus, from the northwest to the northeast, are state-built housing units for the Navy's top officers and staff and their families. Admiral-grade officers are assigned larger houses, while middle-ranking headquarters staff live in low-rise apartment buildings.
Gyŏngsan Songsu-do shipyard
The Gyŏngsan Songsu-do shipyard is the largest operational military shipyard in Menghe, having surpassed the Kimhae Naval Yard when the latter was partially converted to civilian work. It was established in 1909 to provide a new site for the construction of capital ships, and steadily expanded over the following decades during the buildup to the Pan-Septentrion War. Under the Democratic People's Republic of Menghe, it emerged as Menghe's primary location for the building of large surface combatants, including the Songgang-class cruisers and Haebang-class carriers.
Today, warship construction at the Songsu-do yard takes place in the same excavated drydock slips which existed during the Pan-Septentrion War, but the supporting facilities have been greatly improved. Above each slip is a massive rail-mounted gantry crane, the widest types 140 meters across, straddling the drydock and an open staging and assembly area beside or forward of it. Smaller rail-mounted and gantry cranes move parts and hull sections around staging grounds within the large cranes' reach. This upgrade to the facility, brought to its current extent during the 1990s, allows for the assembly of warships from prefabricated components built in nearby warehouses, speeding up construction times and reducing costs.
In its current state, the Songsu-do shipyard contains thirteen drydock slips:
- Two 244m by 34m drydocks for large surface combatants (former cruisers, current destroyers)
- Two 310m by 40m drydocks for capital ships (former battleships, current landing platform docks)
- Two 145m by 27m drydocks for medium surface combatants (former destroyers, current frigates)
- Four 110m by 20m drydocks for small surface combatants (former torpedo ships, current corvettes)
- Three launching slips (unknown size) inside a large covered structure, used for the construction of diesel-electric submarines
All of the surface ship slips open into an enclosed 32-hectare harbor with a two-gate entrance, allowing for controlled adjustment of water levels within the enclosure and maximum reduction of rough seas and currents. Warships launched from the dryocks undergo fitting-out in this area, which can also be used for repairs of battle-damaged vessels and refits and modernizations of outdated ones. Here, too, rail-mounted tower cranes assist in the installation of heavy equipment on the hull. Submarines are launched into their own, smaller enclosure, by means of a floating drydock platform at the end of rails leading out of the covered structure.
Inland of the drydock slips, the Songsu-do shipyard is equipped with a large number of expansive warehouses for the storage of supplies and the fabrication of parts. In combination with the gantry cranes over the drydocks, these allow for the construction of prefabricated modules within a protected environment while work on the hull itself is still ongoing.
The Songsu-do Naval Command College is the Menghean Navy's main staff college. It was founded in 1933, during the expansion of facilities on the island, and rebuilt in the 1960s. Unlike the Anchŏn Naval Officers' Academy, which is Menghe's main commissioning school for new officers, the Songsu-do Naval Academy is a postgraduate institution which re-trains officers in command, administration, and other specialist staff duties to prepare them for their upcoming postings. It is also the center of Menghe's doctrinal naval development. The campus covers an area of 25 hectares, including exercise grounds and overflow buildings added during the 2000s and 2010s.
Songsu-do airbase
A small dirt airstrip was built at the north end of the island in 1944, as a response to the threat of Allied bombing and nearby carrier patrols. Due to the limited level space available, it was too short to accommodate heavier transport aircraft, and was mainly intended to support short-range interceptors and regular fighter aircraft.
The current airbase facility was built in the 1970s, as part of a wider building spree around the island. Work teams leveled the northwestern peninsula extending out of the island, pushing rocks and earth from the ridge into the sea to form a wide, flat landfill area. A 2.5-kilometer landing strip began operation in 1977, but further expansion of the level area continued well into the 1990s, and included the movement of the main landing strip close to a full kilometer further along its course to keep the southeast end clear of the slope.
Construction work during the 1970s and particularly the 1980s also included the excavation of two large tunnels into the cliff face left behind by the terraforming work. These tunnels were wide enough to allow Songrim SR-6 tactical bombers to taxi in and out, and were located on the northwest-facing side of the mountain, complicating any aerial or ballistic missile strike from Dayashina. The underground basing area was still under construction in 1987, when Menghe underwent its Decembrist Revolution and work on the tunnels ceased. As a sign of goodwill to Dayashina, Menghe never resumed work on the Songsu-do underground hangar facility, and in 2001 a government spokesperson declared that the underground hangars had been closed off. Safety concerns may have also played a part. The current extent of the complex remains unknown.
The aboveground, operational portion of the airbase has two runways, one 3400 meters long and 90 meters wide, the other 3300 meters long and 6 meters wide. These runways are capable of supporting most civil passenger jets, as well as fully loaded maritime strike bombers and tactical bombers. The base houses the 26th Maritime Bomber Squadron, an independent maritime patrol unit, the 33rd Naval Heavy Multirole Squadron, and the 93rd Naval Aviation Lead-In Fighter Training Regiment, with additional facilities for temporarily posted units. Small VIP jets and helicopters are often seen on site to transport important naval personnel on- and off-base.
Residential facilities
Throughout the early 20th century, most base workers lived in single-story housing spread through existing coastal villages, while administrative staff lived in Gyŏngsan and commuted by ferry. Houses for top-ranking officers at the Naval Headquarters were added from 1935 onward. Following allied bombing at the war's end, base personnel lived in temporary barracks halls, contributing to poor morale. In the 1970s, the DPRM added on-site individual apartments for 5,000 commissioned officers and their families, and rebuilt the separate base houses for Headquarters pesonnel. Personnel on warships based at Songsu-do were assigned to collective barracks, though commissioned officers could apply for housing in Gyŏngsan or the towns on the mainland, and nearly all civilian workers commuted from the mainland as well.
As part of the comprehensive infrastructure improvements to the base in the 1990s and 2000s, the Socialist government dramatically expanded the number of on-base housing units, hoping to improve morale and lighten bridge traffic. There was a general shift from communal barracks to apartment-style structures with individual rooms, initially for permanent base personnel only, and later for shipyard workers and personnel on warships based at Songsu-do. This building boom continued into the 2010s, as excess output in the local construction industry drove down costs and incentivized the government to prop up state-owned companies with military contracts. Since 2016 there has been little new expansion, as the remaining land is too hilly and the remaining fillable coastline too deep.
All military personnel permanently assigned to the base, including officers and staff at the Navy Headquarters, ground crew and air traffic control personnel at the airbase, and instructors at the military academies, are given vouchers for on-base housing, which is owned by the Songsu-do Housing Bureau. The available units differ according to rank; the Chief Commander and Vice Chief Commander have spacious traditional-style manors rebuilt according to 1935 designs, while most other permanent personnel live with their immediate family members in apartments averaging 100 square meters. Students at the Cho Sŭng-chŏl Naval Academy and Songsu-do Naval Command College live in on-campus dorms.
A similar rank-based housing allocation system exists for the crews of warships with Songsu-do as their home base. Commissioned officers and upper enlisted personnel are guaranteed individual apartments, permanently assigned to them for the duration of their service, and have the option of renting a larger on-site apartment to live with immediate family members. Lower enlisted personnel are assigned to smaller single-resident or dual-resident apartments, which are rotated on a hot racking basis: when a ship goes to sea for an extended period, the vacant rooms of its lower enlisted crew are handed over to lower enlisted crew from other ships coming in to dock. If the number of docked ships surpasses normal peak levels and there are insufficient apartments available, the surplus enlisted crew members may be assigned to other apartments or kept aboard their ships.
Semi-skilled shipyard, airfield, and dockyard workers may rent from the remaining public housing units, though they receive no guaranteed-housing vouchers and must pay rent at prices set by the Housing Bureau. Many of the worker-designated buildings offer only single-resident rooms, with the expectation that internal migrant laborers would leave their families behind when moving to the island. Some of the newer housing units, added in the 2010s, have incorporated more family-size flats, to improve worker retention and raise morale.
To better serve workers' and servicemembers' needs, the island contains public education facilities for residents' children. In addition to small day care and preschool facilities, the island has three general-purpose schools combining primary school and middle school students (Grades 1 through 8). There are no on-site civilian high schools; high school admission is governed by the UMSAT exam, which sorts students between different tiers of school depending on their scores. Children over the age of 14 would, depending on their scores, enroll in boarding schools off the island. An exception exists for those students who test into the Cho Sŭng-chŏl Naval Academy, a Navy-run Gundae Hakgyo on the island, though this academy is run as a boarding school and also enrolls students from elsewhere in the country.
A large hospital in the center-north performs routine check-up and immunization work for base residents, both civilian and military. It can also serve as a treatment site for seriously injured naval personnel during peacetime accidents or times of conflict, with a large number of extra beds beyond what regular peacetime needs would require. Occasionally, following earthquakes and typhoons, Songsu-do Central Hospital has served as an overflow treatment point for injured civilians in the surrounding area. Three helipads on its roof facilitate the evacuation of wounded personnel from ships at sea, or their rescue from the ocean.
The steady increase in the island's permanent residential population has fueled the growth of a private service economy catering to staff and their families. A central commercial district just north of the shipyard was established in the 1960s, originally consisting of state-run specialty shops but now home to a variety of small family businesses and chain stores. Other private retail outlets opened around the island as its population grew. Business-owners and their employees are treated the same as semi-skilled shipyard workers with regard to housing, in that they may rent publicly owned units on the island but they do not receive priority vouchers.
Transportation
Songsu-do island has only two land links to the mainland. The first is an over-under road-rail truss bridge with a single pair of tracks running above and room for two lanes of traffic below. The road section makes landfall at opposite ends of a 143-meter span, while the overhead rail section continues on steel supports for a total of 440 meters. From there, the railway proceeds through a 1.1-kilometer tunnel crossing the island's main ridge, exiting directly into a branching rail yard in the middle of the shipyard. During the leadup to the Pan-Septentrion War, this railway was the main artery bringing supplies into the shipyard, and also the preferred route of travel for passengers.
The original over-under bridge was built in 1922, only to be destroyed by bombing in 1945; a replacement bridge of similar design was built in 1952. Because the width of the road section was designed with 1920s cargo lorries in mind, larger articulated lorries carrying semi-trailers had to be flagged through one at a time in opposite directions, imposing a bottleneck on base operations. This problem was solved in 1992 with the construction of a 334-meter four-lane road bridge alongside it, with wider lanes and room for constant traffic flow. This four-lane road then proceeded directly through a tunnel nearly parallel to the original rail one, eliminating similar bottleneck issues that required lorries to drive along narrow mountain and village roads.
Sea travel between the base and the surrounding ports is also possible. Civilian ferries dock at the north harbor, with regularly scheduled service to Gyŏngsan's city center and to other coastal urban agglomerations in Gyŏngsan Bay. Smaller military ferries offer both regular and on-demand service for smaller groups of personnel. The airfield also provides a direct link for military and civilian air transport, whether by plane or by helicopter.
Regularly scheduled shuttle buses provide transportation around the island itself, including transportation to the villages on the east side. These shuttle buses are free of charge for both military personnel and civilians, and are operated by the City Bureau of Transportation. As with ferries, there are also small military taxis for on-demand service, though these are mainly reserved for high-ranking officers. In addition to these on-island services, two inter-city bus lines link the island to the surrounding villages, and one express bus line provides direct service to Gyŏngsan.
Security
All legal points of entry to the Songsu-do Naval Base are guarded by security kiosks, where base staff check the identity documents of all individuals who enter and leave the base. This information is entered into an on-site database containing a precise list of all individuals on the base grounds at any given time. Active Navy personnel, civilians employed in base transportation, and civilians who have successfully applied for residence or employment on the base are given a special ID card stating their status, for easy entry and exit; all other visitors require proof of invitation, and must pass through additional security screening. Guard outposts are stationed around the island to guard against infiltration by sea.
In an effort to further safeguard the facility against sabotage and spying, the base authorities set up a base-wide network of surveillance cameras which use facial recognition and artificial intelligence to record the precise movement of each person on the base grounds. Faces which do not match base personnel and registered visitors trigger an alert to on-base security personnel. A trial system restricted to the shipyard area began operation in 2018, and the full base-wide system went online in 2019.