Liberal Army Air Field: One Quarter of All Liberator Commanders

The flat, windswept plains west of Liberal, Kansas were not where most Americans in nineteen forty-three expected the air war over Europe to be decided. But the logic was sound: unlimited visibility, open land for runways, and no obstacles for miles in any direction. In May nineteen forty-three the Army Air Forces opened Liberal Army Air Field, and for the next twenty-seven months the deep roar of four-engine bombers became the defining sound of this corner of Kansas.

The mission was urgent and specific. The Liberator, a heavy bomber with a distinctive high-mounted Davis wing and a twin-tail configuration, was being produced in greater numbers than any other American warplane. Factories in Fort Worth, San Diego, and Willow Run, Michigan were rolling out Liberators by the hundreds. The bottleneck was trained pilots, specifically pilots certified to command four-engine aircraft in combat. Liberal was built to break that bottleneck.

Three concrete runways, each seven thousand feet long, were laid across the prairie. Barracks, hangars, support buildings, and a full training infrastructure rose from what had been wheat fields. Newly commissioned officers who had completed advanced twin-engine training arrived and learned, on the early production Liberator and later the electrified turret variant, how to manage four engines, a crew of ten, a forty-four-thousand-pound maximum load, and the particular demands of formation flying at high altitude over enemy territory.

By the time Liberal Army Air Field closed in September nineteen forty-five, it had graduated four thousand four hundred sixty-eight four-engine airplane commanders. Historians of the air campaign calculated that Liberal trained approximately one quarter of all Liberator commanders who flew in the Second World War. In a conflict where the Liberator flew more sorties than any other American bomber, that number carries real weight.

The runways became the Liberal Mid-America Regional Airport. The Mid-America Air Museum nearby preserves the legacy, housing one of the largest collections of vintage aircraft in the country, most of them once the kind of machine these Kansas plains trained men to fly.