Selfridge: America's Oldest Continuously Active Air Base

The airfield you are passing has been in continuous military service longer than any other in the United States, and its history touches nearly every chapter of American aviation.

In nineteen sixteen, Packard Motor Car Company president Henry Joy acquired land along Lake St. Clair because Packard was developing aircraft engines for the war in Europe and needed room to test them. When the United States entered World War One in nineteen seventeen, the Army took over the site and renamed it Selfridge Field, in honor of Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, the first military officer ever killed in an aircraft accident, when a Wright Flyer crashed at Fort Myer, Virginia, in nineteen oh eight.

The base became the Army Air Service's first aerial gunnery school in nineteen eighteen, training the machine-gunners who would ride in observation planes over the trenches. In the years between the wars, Selfridge hosted some of the most celebrated aviators in the country; it was effectively the Air Corps' showcase base for the industrial Midwest.

But the chapter that changed the base's meaning came in January nineteen forty-four. With the famous Red Tails of the three hundred thirty-second Fighter Group about to deploy overseas, the Army activated the four hundred seventy-seventh Medium Bombardment Group at Selfridge, the first all-Black bombardment group in American history. African American crews trained here while fighting a war on two fronts: one against the Axis abroad, another against segregation inside the United States Army. The experience fed directly into President Truman's executive order integrating the armed forces in nineteen forty-eight.

Today, Selfridge is home to the One Twenty-seventh Wing of the Michigan Air National Guard. The Selfridge Military Air Museum on the base preserves more than seventy aircraft, from a World War One SPAD to Cold War jets, telling the full arc of a century of American airpower.