Majors Field, Greenville

The airport southeast of Greenville carries the name of a young man from Hunt County who became the first person from this area to die in the Second World War. Lieutenant Truett Majors did not live to see what was built in his honor. The base named for him became one of the busiest military flight training centers in the American South.

Majors Army Airfield opened on June twenty-sixth, nineteen forty-two. The site was selected from nearly one hundred fifty locations surveyed by Civil Aeronautics Administration engineers, and the advocacy of Sam Rayburn, the powerful East Texas congressman who served as Speaker of the House for much of the war period, helped land it near Greenville. At its peak, the base housed approximately five thousand pilots, ground crew, and civilian workers.

What made Majors distinctive was the range of trainees who passed through. American cadet pilots trained here on PT-Nineteens, PT-Seventeen Stearmans, and P-Forty Warhawks. Women Airforce Service Pilots, the WASPs, used the field for flight training at a time when women were not permitted to fly in combat but were needed to ferry aircraft, test repaired planes, and tow aerial targets. Their presence at fields like Majors represented one of the war's quiet revolutions in what the country was willing to ask of women.

Perhaps the most unusual unit to train at Greenville was Escuadrón Doscientos Uno, the Two Hundred First Squadron of the Mexican Air Force. Mexico joined the Allied war effort in nineteen forty-two after German submarines sank two Mexican tankers in the Gulf of Mexico. The Two Hundred First trained at Majors and eventually deployed to the Philippines in nineteen forty-five, where it flew combat missions under General Douglas MacArthur.

The base deactivated in July of nineteen forty-five. The city of Greenville took ownership, and the runways that trained a generation of pilots became the municipal airport they remain today.