They Serve Here: Thirty-Three Maxwell Men

摘要

The 30 essays that follow first appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser during September 1997. They contributed to the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the United States Air Force. Montgomery, Alabama, has been associated with the airplane almost since its conception. For two months in the spring of 1910. Orville and Wilbur Wright operated the world's first civilian flying school on the Kohn cotton plantation, the site that is today's Maxwell Air Force Base. Military aviation began in 1917 with the establishment of primary flying training at Taylor Field in the Pike Road community just east of Montgomery. Early the next year, the Army reopened the old 'Wright Field' as an aircraft engine and repair depot. In 1929, because of the efforts of Mayor William Gunter, Montgomery was one of the first cities in the country to have a planned municipal airport-commercial passenger service began three years later. Today the site of the old municipal airport is Maxwell's Gunter Annex. During the late 1920s and 1930s, Maxwell Field became a permanent facility with major construction of military facilities and housing units. From 1931 when it relocated from Langley Field, Virginia, until it was closed in 1942, the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) developed air power doctrine and educated many, if not most of the airmen who led the Army Air Forces during World War II. Air University was established in 1946, fulfilling the vision of its first commandant, Gen Muir S, Fairchild. Air University has become the heart and the mind of the Air Force Thousands have served at Maxwell since World War I-men and women, service members and civilians, Americans and foreigners, aviation cadets and flying instructors, students and faculty, and support personnel and flyers. The 33 airmen featured here are not representative of all who have served at Maxwell. Rather, they are a few of those who have achieved a place in aviation or military history.