Bluethenthal Field: Wilmington's Aerial Memorial

Wilmington International Airport opened in nineteen twenty-eight under a name most travelers today have never heard: Bluethenthal Field, named for Arthur Bluethenthal, a Wilmington native who became the first resident of North Carolina to die in aerial combat in World War One.

Bluethenthal was a remarkable figure. He was an All-American football player at Princeton, and then volunteered to fight for France, joining the French Foreign Legion, before the United States entered the war. He was killed in aerial combat over France in June of nineteen eighteen, five months before the armistice. Naming the new airport for him in nineteen twenty-eight was a local act of honor that also signaled what aviation would mean for coastal North Carolina.

The airport's military identity deepened dramatically in nineteen forty-one. After Pearl Harbor, the facility was transferred to the Army Air Corps and redesignated Wilmington Army Airfield. The federal government invested more than four million seven hundred thousand dollars to expand it, adding three seven-thousand-foot runways to accommodate heavy bombers and fighters. The airfield trained bomber and fighter crews and flew antisubmarine patrols over the Atlantic using P-forty-seven Thunderbolts, hunting German U-boats that had been devastating Allied shipping along the Carolina coast.

After the war ended, the Army deeded the expanded facility back to New Hanover County. The runways built for wartime training became the foundation of a commercial airport that grew steadily through the postwar decades. It was renamed New Hanover County Airport in the nineteen fifties, then New Hanover County International Airport in nineteen eighty-eight, and finally Wilmington International Airport in December of nineteen ninety-seven.

The Bluethenthal name is mostly forgotten now. But the airport's shape, its runways and acreage, was built by the war that followed the war that took him.