Tinker Air Force Base, Named for a Man Who Never Came Home
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
The largest single-site employer in the state of Oklahoma is a military base outside Oklahoma City, and it owes its name to a man from Pawhuska who climbed from a remote Oklahoma childhood to the highest rank the Army Air Forces could offer, and then disappeared over the Pacific.
Clarence Leonard Tinker was Osage. He was born in Pawhuska, in what was then Indian Territory, in eighteen eighty-seven, when the Osage Nation still controlled its mineral-rich lands in northeastern Oklahoma. He earned his wings in nineteen twenty-one and rose through the ranks to become the first American of Native American descent to reach the rank of major general in the United States Army. He was also, by all accounts, an aviator who still wanted to fly missions himself.
On June seventh, nineteen forty-two, six months after Pearl Harbor, Tinker personally led a flight of long-range B-twenty-four Liberator bombers on a strike against retreating Japanese forces near Midway Island. His aircraft never returned. He became the first American general officer killed in action in the Second World War.
Oklahoma City businessmen had been lobbying hard for a military maintenance depot since nineteen forty, knowing the economic stakes. On April eighth, nineteen forty-one, the War Department awarded the contract. The depot was activated on March first, nineteen forty-two. When Tinker was lost two months later, officials named the base in his memory.
The choice proved apt. At the height of the war, Tinker's industrial plant repaired B-seventeen and B-twenty-four bombers and fitted B-twenty-nine Superfortresses for Pacific combat. Thirteen thousand five hundred workers ran the depot; another twenty-three thousand worked for Douglas Aircraft on the adjoining facility, producing roughly half of all C-forty-seven Skytrain transports used in the war.
Today, the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex at Tinker is the largest aircraft maintenance depot in the Department of Defense, with more than twenty-six thousand military and civilian workers. The base Tinker never saw still carries the name of the general who led from the front.
