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Stateside Air Field collection

p51

One Too Many
Messages
1,119
Location
Well behind the front lines!
I grew up not far from the former runways of this 3rd AF fighter training base. They closed the field in the early 60s when they moved the airport outside of town. It was a large AAF field until 1945. I have stacks of photos and volumes of books and notes for the book about the field I never wrote:
DaleMabryField025.jpg

DaleMabryField022.jpg

DaleMabryField021.jpg

Items from around the town from the WW2 era:
DaleMabryField017.jpg

DaleMabryField015.jpg

DaleMabryField010.jpg

The "rock" in the photo is actually a small piece of the runway surface I dug up several years ago:
DaleMabryField008.jpg

DaleMabryField006.jpg

DaleMabryField004.jpg
 

p51

One Too Many
Messages
1,119
Location
Well behind the front lines!
More
The civilian log book is from the WW2 era (they had limited civilian traffic there through the war), signed by one of the town's aviation pioneers:
DaleMabryField001.jpg

And the crown jewel of the collection to the right. Not even the Florida State Archives has a copy of this! The photo album to the left has several photos from the field inside:
DaleMabryField018.jpg


Beats me who added this info on Wikipedia, but there's a decent write-up here (except that it suggests a long-incorrect assumption that the 99th FS flew there. They didn't. They only went through a survival school set up at Silver Lake (the pilots would have been trucked right by the plot of land that the house I grew up would have been built about 15 years later!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Mabry_Field
See the photo of Ivan Munroe? That's the guy who signed my logbook in 1941!
 

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