Ellsworth Air Force Base: The Showplace of the Air Force

In the spring of nineteen fifty-three, a military transport carrying Brigadier General Richard Ellsworth and twenty-two other airmen crashed in Newfoundland while returning from a training exercise in Europe. Ellsworth had been commanding the reconnaissance wing at the Army Air Base just east of Rapid City, South Dakota. Within months, the base was renamed in his honor.

The base had opened in nineteen forty-one as the Rapid City Army Air Base, training B-seventeen bomber crews during the Second World War. In the years that followed, it grew into something far more consequential. By the late nineteen fifties, it had earned a nickname: the Showplace of the Strategic Air Command. It was operating two legs of what the Air Force called its strategic triad at the same time, strategic bombers and nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, from the same installation.

The B-fifty-twos that flew from Ellsworth during the Cold War were kept on alert, with crews ready to launch within minutes. The forty-fourth Strategic Missile Wing, based here, controlled nearly one hundred fifty Minuteman Two missiles buried in silos across western South Dakota. For roughly thirty years, Ellsworth held enough nuclear firepower in those silos and on those runways to alter the course of human history.

In nineteen eighty-seven, the first B-one B Lancer arrived to replace the aging B-fifty-twos. The Lancer became the base's aircraft for nearly four decades, until the Air Force selected Ellsworth as the first operational home for the B-twenty-one Raider, the next generation of long-range strategic bomber.

The base today covers more than twelve thousand acres and supports roughly eight thousand military personnel, family members, and civilian employees. What began as a wartime training field became, and remains, one of the most significant military installations in the United States.