Warbird Information Exchange

Kingman to celebrate 70th anniversary of base where soldiers trained for WWII

On Saturday, the volunteers behind the Kingman Army Airfield Museum will host a two-hour open house to commemorate the base/museum’s anniversary.

The Kingman Airport and the surrounding industrial park was a base dedicated to training servicemen to operate .50-caliber machine guns on B-17s during World War II. Museum Curator Rob Chilcoat said 36,000 people graduated from the school before the end of the war in 1945. Those 36,000 people learned to hit moving targets with .50-caliber machine guns, but that’s not where their training started.

Students started with BB guns, graduated to shooting skeet with shotguns, went on to shooting moving targets from moving vehicles with .30-calibur M-1s before they even touched the .50-calibers, said Kingman Army Airfield Museum President Bob Loose. It was a six-week course, with two weeks of classroom work dispersed throughout, two weeks of on-the-ground training and two weeks of in-the-air training, Chilcoat said.

http://www.warhistoryonline.com/feature ... -wwii.html

To celebrate, will they have a cake shaped like a B-17 and cut it into little pieces?

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All right, Mister Dorfmann, start pullin'!
Pilot: "Flap switch works hard in down position."
Mechanic: "Flap switch checked OK. Pilot needs more P.T." - Flight report, TB-17G 42-102875 (Hobbs AAF)

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Martin
Wide open & turning left.