Barksdale Field and the Long-Range Bomber in the Swamp
Near Shreveport, Louisiana
In nineteen twenty-eight, the Army Air Corps began searching for a location for a new training base in the South. Shreveport made a calculated bet. Citizens approved a bond issue of one and a half million dollars, used the proceeds to purchase land in adjacent Bossier Parish, and donated the entire parcel to the federal government.
The base opened on February second, nineteen thirty-three, named for Lieutenant Eugene Hoy Barksdale, a World War One aviator and test pilot who had died testing aircraft near Dayton, Ohio in nineteen twenty-six. Barksdale Field spent World War Two training replacement bomber and fighter crews. By the Cold War it had become one of the primary strategic air command installations in the country, housing reconnaissance and bombardment wings through the nineteen fifties and sixties.
In January of nineteen ninety-one, during Operation Desert Storm, B-fifty-two bombers launched from Barksdale on a mission that lasted thirty-five hours round trip, the longest combat sortie in aviation history at that point. The aircraft flew from Louisiana to targets in Iraq and back without landing. On September eleventh, two thousand one, President George W.
Bush's aircraft briefly sheltered at Barksdale after the attacks in New York and Washington, before continuing to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The base today serves as headquarters for Air Force Global Strike Command and maintains roughly forty-four B-fifty-two Stratofortress bombers. It occupies more than twenty-two thousand acres and hosts more than fifteen thousand active-duty personnel.
