Lodwick's Pilots and the World War Two Sky
Near Lakeland, Florida
Before the Tigers played where Joker Marchant Stadium now stands, that land trained some of the most important pilots of the Second World War. The Lodwick School of Aeronautics opened on September fourteenth, nineteen forty, by contract with the United States Army Air Corps. It was the first primary flight training school to open in the Eastern Flying Training Command, and it would be one of the last to close.
Albert Lodwick, the school's founder, had spent nine years with the Curtiss-Wright Corporation and served as president of the Stinson Aircraft Company before coming to Lakeland. He had the relationships, the instructors, and the equipment to build a serious military training operation. The school started with forty cadets. At peak enrollment it was processing three hundred students at a time, with nearly five hundred civilian employees running the operation.
The student pilots trained on PT-seventeen Stearman biplanes, the open-cockpit trainer that taught a generation of American airmen the basics of flight. The school processed Americans in one stream and foreign allies in another. The first class of British Royal Air Force cadets arrived in nineteen forty-one, one year before Pearl Harbor formalized the alliance. By the time the school closed on August seventh, nineteen forty-five, it had graduated more than six thousand American pilots and twelve hundred British pilots. Men who learned to fly here went on to fly every theater of the war.
The city honored Albert Lodwick by renaming the airport for him in nineteen forty-eight. The Lodwick School Historical Marker is installed near the stadium site today. The pilots who trained here are mostly gone now, but the fact that the longest spring training partnership in baseball history sits on the same land is the kind of historical layering this city never seems to run short of.
