Reese Air Force Base

The War Department announced the base on June 26, 1941, on 2,000 acres the city offered, and Lt. Col. Thomas L. Gilbert took command that November. Cadets of Class 42-E flew T-6 Texans, AT-17 Bobcats and AT-9 Jeeps. After reactivation in 1949 the main trainer was the TB-25 Mitchell, flown until jet training began in January 1959; the last one stands at the old main gate. Students took about 748 hours of classes and 176 of flying in a year, and by 1986 nearly 400 men and women graduated annually.

What the plaque says

Reese Air Force Base Ten years of concentrated efforts by city officials led to the establishment of a U. S. Army Air Corps Advanced Flying School at Lubbock in the summer of 1941. Built ten miles west of the city, where barracks, runways and other military facilities replaced cotton fields and grassland, the base officially opened in January 1942. Renamed Lubbock Army Flying School the next month as the first class of cadets arrived, the base provided training to more than 7,000 World War II pilots by the time of its deactivation in 1945. During the post-war years reserve units used the facilities here, and barracks were converted into housing for returning veterans and their families. By 1949 the base was reactivated and renamed in honor of First Lt. Augustus F. Reese, Jr., a Shallowater, Texas, native killed in action during World War II. Designated a permanent installation by 1950, Reese Air Force Base was transferred to Air Training Command in 1958. Thousands of pilots were trained here in the following decades, but by the 1990s the base was slated for permanent closure, leaving a 56-year legacy of excellence. More than 25,000 men and women earned their wings at Reese, including more than 600 international students from 40 allied countries. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 8.1 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 8.2 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Buddy Holly Center — 11 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• American Windmill Museum — 12 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.

More markers nearby

• Carlisle Cemetery — 3.1 mi
• Cora Vance and Vance Hatchery — 6.7 mi
• Coronado High School — 6.7 mi
• Dagley Field — 6.9 mi