Grissom Air Reserve Base: From Navy Wings to a Lost Astronaut
Indiana
Ten miles south of Peru, Indiana, a military airfield has lived multiple lives under multiple names, each one reflecting the country's shifting priorities across eight decades of conflict and Cold War.
The installation opened on July first, nineteen forty-two as Bunker Hill Naval Air Station, a Navy flight training facility that rushed thousands of pilots through basic instruction before shipping them to combat in the Pacific and Atlantic theaters. The urgency of the war demanded constant throughput: planes, instructors, and trainees cycling through around the clock.
When the war ended the need for mass pilot training vanished overnight. The base was mothballed, its runways returned partly to farmland, the whole enterprise mothballed as if it had never existed. Then the Cold War changed the calculus again. In June of nineteen fifty-four the Air Force accepted transfer of the property from the Navy and reestablished it as Bunker Hill Air Force Base, this time as a Strategic Air Command installation. In the calculus of mutual assured destruction, mid-continent airbases carrying nuclear-armed bombers were as essential as any beachhead.
The base received its current name on May twelfth, nineteen sixty-eight, about fifteen months after a flash fire on a Florida launchpad killed three Apollo One astronauts during a preflight test. One of them was Gus Grissom, born in Mitchell, Indiana, a hundred and twenty miles to the south. Grissom had flown one hundred combat missions in Korea before becoming one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts. He piloted the second American spaceflight, flew Gemini Three, and was selected to command the first Apollo crew. He died in the fire alongside Ed White and Roger Chaffee on January twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-seven.
The renamed Grissom Air Force Base became Grissom Air Reserve Base following base realignment in nineteen ninety-four. Its museum, open to the public, holds a collection of Cold War aircraft on the ramp where Grissom's fellow Hoosier pilots once prepared for missions that would have ended civilization if they had ever been launched.
