news-record.com

The Army Corps of Engineers wanted to know if what’s now Piedmont Triad International Airport had a weapons range during World War II.

The corps placed a full-page ad in the News & Record several months ago seeking information about such a range, where unexploded shells might lurk.

The best answer: The airport, known as Lindley Field during the war, lacked a range.

Bill Beerman of Greensboro used to hang around the airport out of a love of anything that flew before he became a World War II fighter pilot, and he doesn’t recall a firing range. Men stationed there who returned for a reunion in the 1980s didn’t mention one.

They recalled bugs, heat, cold, dust, mud and living in the woods beside the single runway that had been there since early 1927, when civilians started the air strip on land once owned by Lindley Nurseries.

“If there was a roof over one’s head, it was a certainly a canvas tent,” said William John Decker, a UNCG graduate student who in 1990 wrote his thesis on wartime Lindley Field.

Decker’s paper makes no mention of a range. Still, his research provides valuable insight into what was there after the Army made Lindley Field a base in 1942. It booted out commercial and private aircraft until the war ended. Soldiers from Fort Bragg served as guards.

The field was unrelated to the giant Army Air Corps training base, best known as the Overseas Replacement Depot, off Summit Avenue near downtown. With more than 900 tar-paper buildings and many drill fields, the facility had some 90,000 soldiers serving there from 1943-46.

Lindley Field at its peak had about 1,500 soldiers. They serviced and repaired military aircraft, including air hospitals. They taught a civilian flying program in which Bill Beerman was a student.

The men became so caked with dust, mud, oil and grease the Army trucked them several times a week to the downtown YMCA for showers.

When the first group of soldiers left — on a train that stopped on tracks across from Lindley’s entrance on what’s now West Market Street Extension — another unit arrived. The group worked the rest of the war on fighter planes, including the famous P-51.

Living and working conditions improved (including the use of dorms at High Point College.)

Decker writes that the base eventually had an ambulance, truck, weapons and 18 temporary buildings that included a post exchange, medical station, mess hall and recreation day room.

A 1944 Army report says Lindley Field soldiers serviced 13,200 planes and repaired 8,830.

If the men needed weapons practice, they likely went to the range built for — but 10 miles from — the big downtown base. The site remains a range of a different sort, for practicing golf, part of the city’s Bryan Park.

Bryan Park people say the Corps of Engineers have looked, but reported nothing dangerous. Golf maintenance people have dug up harmless empty bullet casings.

At Lindley Field, even with improvements, soldiers cursed working on planes on unpaved land. Rain turned the field into a sea of mud that caused extreme wear and tear on planes and equipment, Decker writes, adding the dust was just as bad.

Decker says the war ended two weeks after the work space was finally paved — an example, he says, of “military organization,” an oxymoron.

Decker says the base deserves more historical recognition.

“As the pain of the war has faded,’' Decker writes, “so have the traces of a small airport that fought the war from far behind the front lines.”

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net