Author Description

On the 2nd of December, 1940, Tucson officials received a Western Union telegram from the War Department notifying them that a decision had been made to establish a military airfield at the city's municipal airport. This marked the culmination of an intense eleven-year effort on the part of many of the Old Pueblo's most prominent citizens to get an air base established at Tucson. Throughout the subsequent years, the fledgling installation grew in spurts; prompted first by the outbreak of World War II and then by the buildup of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in the era of the Cold War. The missions supported by the base have gone full circle over the years. Its first mission was strategic bombardment and reconnaissance. That ended with the attack on Pearl Harbor, after which the field was tasked with the training of combat crews for the big B-17, B-24, and B-29 bombers used during the war. With the creation of the Strategic Air Command in 1946, Davis-Monthan Field took on an new strategic role involving B-29s, B-50s, and later the all-jet B-47 bombers. The importance of the base was bolstered during the 1960s with the addition of the nation's first Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile wing and a high-technology reconnaissance unit. The strategic bombardment mission, however, was lost during that period. Within the same decade, the Tactical Air Command first appeared at the base as a tenant unit charged with the training of combat crews for the F-4C jet fighter-bomber. The prominence of the Tactical Air Command at Davis-Monthan AFB became much more pronounced in the early 1970s with the arrival of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing and its inventory of A-7Ds and later A-10s. With the final wind down of the Southeast Asian conflict, the base lost its reconnaissance mission and only the Titan II wing remained to represent the Strategic Air Command. After 30 years of SAC stewardship, the base was turned over to the Tactical Air Command on 30 September 1976. CHAPTER