Dalhart Army Air Base: Gliders, Flying Fortresses, and the Texas Panhandle

In nineteen forty-two, with American forces still reeling from Pearl Harbor and the Japanese advances across the Pacific, the Army Air Forces needed training space fast. The Texas Panhandle had two things in abundance: flat land and clear air. Dallam and Hartley counties issued bonds to purchase more than three thousand acres southwest of Dalhart, and construction crews poured runways across what had recently been grazing range.

Dalhart Army Air Base opened in the spring of nineteen forty-two with an unusual initial mission: glider training. Silent, engineless troop-carrying gliders were a new tool of modern warfare, used to deliver soldiers and equipment behind enemy lines without the noise of an approaching aircraft. The Waco CG-Four A, called the Hadrian, was the standard American glider, a high-winged fabric-and-metal craft that could carry thirteen fully armed soldiers plus two pilots. At Dalhart, C-Forty-Seven tow planes from the Fourteenth Troop Carrier Squadron yanked Hadrians into the Texas sky while cadets learned to navigate, judge altitude, and land without power on unfamiliar ground.

The base's mission evolved as the war changed. Glider training gave way to bomber training, and Dalhart eventually hosted B-Seventeen and B-Twenty-Nine aircrews alongside fighter pilots conducting exercises in conjunction with the heavy bomber units. The base operated three separate airfield complexes to manage the training load, a network spread across the Panhandle landscape.

By early nineteen forty-six the base was closed and the land returned to the city of Dalhart, which converted some of the surviving structures into the municipal airport that operates today. The history of American airpower training in the Second World War is usually told through the great combat theaters of Europe and the Pacific, but it was built in places like this: remote, flat, clear, and far from everything, which was exactly the point.