Scottsbluff Army Air Field

Before the bombers there was a smaller field. Scottsbluff's municipal airport opened in 1934 with a hangar, airline connections, air mail and a weather bureau station, and after Pearl Harbor the city offered it to the Army. On September 5, 1942, Scottsbluff was chosen as one of seven satellite bases in Nebraska, work began two days later at a cost of about $5.5 million, and the old airport closed to make way. The base shut on December 31, 1945. The county now runs it as William B. Heilig Field, after a wartime Army flight instructor.

What the plaque says

Scottsbluff Army Air Field During World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces operated a satellite air field at this site. In the fall of 1942 twenty-eight farms were vacated so construction could begin. Some 600,000 cubic yards of concrete for three runways was poured in forty-five days. There were approximately 108 buildings on the grounds including barracks, mess halls, officers' quarters, warehouses, a han- gar, a camouflage instruction building, and a bombsight storage building. The first troops arrived in early December 1942. Initially air and ground crews of B-17 and B-24 bombers of the Second Air Force based in Casper, Wyoming, received final training here. In 1944 the Scottsbluff field became a satellite of the Alliance Army Air Field and the First Troop Carrier Command, training C-47 and glider crews. Aircraft and radio maintenance person- nel also trained here. In 1947 the City of Scottsbluff bought the air field for use as a municipal airport. Most build- ings were sold and removed. Since 1970 the prop- erty has been operated by Scotts Bluff County. North Platte Valley Historical Association Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scotts Bluff National Monument — 6.5 mi
  A bluff named for a fur clerk whose death nobody witnessed, the narrow pass the wagons used beside it, William Henry Jackson's watercolors, and a 1937 road through three tunnels to the top.
• Wildcat Hills State Recreation Area — 12 mi
  A pine-covered escarpment south of Gering where bighorn sheep were released and mountain lions came back on their own, with Depression-era stone shelters and a nature center.
• Chimney Rock National Historic Site — 18 mi
  The spire the trains watched for along the North Platte, measured again and again by the people passing it, and shorter now than when the first of them wrote it down.

More markers nearby

• Rebecca Winters — 2.2 mi
• Fort Mitchell, 1864-1867 — 6.9 mi
• Chimney Rock — 17 mi
• The Great Smoke / The Horse Creek Treaty — 23 mi