Del Valle Army Air Base (Bergstrom Air Force Base)

The base was activated on September 19, 1942, on 3,000 acres leased from the city of Austin, a tract the Chisholm Trail had once crossed. It took the name Bergstrom Air Force Base in December 1948. After July 1966 it was under the control of the Tactical Air Command and housed the headquarters of the Twelfth Air Force, which ran all of that command's reconnaissance, fighter and airlift operations west of the Mississippi River. In fiscal 1989 the base was estimated to be worth $343 million to the economy within fifty miles and $533 million to Central Texas.

What the plaque says

Del Valle Army Air Base (Bergstrom Air Force Base) (Bergstrom Air Force Base) Following the U.S. entry into World War II, the Army Air Corps established a base here in the Del Valle community on land once a part of the Santiago del Valle Mexican land grant. The City of Austin purchased 3,000 acres to lease to the federal government for use as an air base. Construction began in May 1942 after the removal of homes, churches and businesses, and the first units of the 316th Troop Carrier Group arrived in late September. The base was a replacement center for the First Troop Carrier Command, training pilots to transport combat troops and supplies. In March 1943, the base was renamed Bergstrom Army Air Field to honor Captain John August Earl Bergstrom, Austin's first casualty of war; he was killed at Clark Field in the Phillipines on December 8, 1941. The base name was shortened to Bergstrom Field in November 1943. Crews from Bergstrom saw duty in the invasions of Normandy, southern France, Holland and Germany. After the war, the air field became Bergstrom Air Force Base, assigned to the Continental Air Command, and planes from here participated in the Berlin Airlift, 1948-49. Over the next 50 years, Bergstrom served as part of both the Strategic Air Command and the Tactical Air Command, sending bombers and reconnaisance aircraft into combat theaters from Korea to Iraq. In 1968, the 12th Air Force moved its headquarters here to a newly completed circular building, nicknamed the "Roundagon." Bergstrom Air Force Base closed in 1992 in compliance with the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, and the city converted it to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in 1999. Texas in World War II, V+60 (2005)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McKinney Falls State Park — 4.1 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Texas State Cemetery — 5.3 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 5.4 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 5.6 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.

More markers nearby

• The Original Townsite of Montopolis — 3.7 mi
• Santiago Del Valle Grant — 4.2 mi
• Parque Zaragoza — 4.4 mi
• Zavala Elementary School — 4.6 mi