Malmstrom and the Minuteman Missile Fields

Construction began on June eighth, nineteen forty-two, on a flat stretch of Montana grassland east of Great Falls, and within months the first B-seventeen bombers were landing on the new runways. Great Falls Army Air Base was built to train bomber crews for the Eighth Air Force campaign over Germany: the northern plains offered clear skies, wide open land, and geography that worked.

After nineteen forty-three, the base took on a stranger mission that most of the country did not know about during the war and has largely forgotten since. It became the primary transfer point for aircraft being delivered to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Program. American pilots flew planes north from factories to Great Falls. Soviet pilots and crews picked them up here, flew them across Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska, then across the Bering Strait to Siberia. In a twenty-one-month period, approximately eight thousand aircraft passed through on that route. Soviet and American airmen worked side by side on these Montana runways during the years the two nations were allies.

The base was renamed Malmstrom Air Force Base on October first, nineteen fifty-five, honoring Colonel Einar Malmstrom, a World War Two veteran who died in a training accident near the base in nineteen fifty-four.

Six years after the renaming, Malmstrom became the first base in the United States selected to host Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. The first missile arrived by rail on July twenty-third, nineteen sixty-two, the same summer as the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which Malmstrom's weapons went to full strategic alert. By nineteen sixty-three, one hundred and fifty Minuteman missiles were operational across twenty-three thousand five hundred square miles of central Montana farmland, each in its own underground silo, each connected by cable to launch control centers buried beneath the plains. Today, one hundred and thirty-three Minuteman Three missiles remain active in those fields.