Boise Airport: From WPA Runway to B-17 Training Field
Near Boise, Idaho
The airport you are passing carries a history that stretches from the Depression-era Works Progress Administration through the heaviest aerial campaigns of the Second World War.
Boise began acquiring land for a municipal airport in nineteen thirty-six, the depths of the Depression, when federal public works money was available for exactly this kind of infrastructure. The city moved fast. By nineteen thirty-eight the project had produced the longest runway in the United States, eight thousand eight hundred feet of paved surface, built as a Works Progress Administration project under city sponsorship. In an era when most civilian airports were still grass strips with short paved areas, Boise had built something that could handle aircraft that did not yet exist.
That runway capacity attracted the attention of the War Department almost immediately after Pearl Harbor. The Army Air Forces leased the field in nineteen forty-one and began using it to train the crews who would fly the country's heavy bombers over Europe and the Pacific. On July twenty-third, nineteen forty-one, the field was officially named Gowen Field, in honor of First Lieutenant Paul R. Gowen, a Boise-area pilot who had died in a plane crash.
During the war years, crews trained at Gowen Field on B-seventeen Flying Fortress and B-twenty-four Liberator bombers, the aircraft that would fly the great bombing campaigns over Nazi Germany. More than six thousand men were stationed here at the peak of operations. The airfield that a city had built with Depression-era labor became one of the key training installations for the air war.
After the war the Air National Guard took over the military portion of the field, which it still occupies today on the south side of the airport. The civilian terminal grew alongside it through the postwar decades, with the original steel hangar from Varney Airlines, one of the predecessor carriers to United Airlines, eventually converted into the passenger terminal and used until a new facility opened in two thousand four.
The airport that began as a public works project in the worst years of the Depression is now one of the fastest-growing airports in the mountain west.
