The B-36 Peacemaker Era at Ellsworth
Anyone who lived near the air base east of Rapid City in the early 1950s would have heard them before they saw them. The B-36 made a sound unlike anything else in the sky, a deep droning hum from six piston engines mounted backward on the wing, later joined by four jet engines slung in pods. The aircraft was so large that the men who serviced it sometimes worked inside the wing, walking through passages built into the structure to reach the engines in flight.
The B-36 came to the Rapid City base as the installation passed from its wartime role into the Strategic Air Command. The plane was designed during World War II for a mission that the war’s end made unnecessary, the bombing of Europe from bases in North America in case Britain fell. By the time it actually entered service the threat had changed, and the giant bomber found its purpose as the first aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons across intercontinental distances. For a few years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was the long arm of American deterrence.
A bomber for the new strategy
Stationing such aircraft on the northern plains made a particular kind of sense. From western South Dakota the polar routes to the Soviet Union were shorter than from bases farther south, and the open country around the base offered room for long runways and the dispersal that nuclear-age planning demanded. The base, renamed Ellsworth in 1953 after the loss of a commanding general in one of these very aircraft, became home to a wing of the big bombers and to the thousands of personnel who kept them flying.
The B-36 was a transitional machine, and its limitations were plain even in its prime. It was slow, and as jet fighters improved on both sides it grew clear that a propeller-driven bomber, however high it could fly, would not survive long over defended territory. Its value lay less in any expectation of use than in its existence. A fleet of intercontinental bombers, kept ready and flown hard in training, was meant to make the prospect of attacking the United States look unprofitable.
Living with the giant
For Rapid City the B-36 years were the beginning of a long partnership with the Air Force that would reshape the city. The base brought payrolls, construction, and a steady flow of military families into a community that had been built on ranching, mining, and tourism. The bombers were part of daily life, their training flights a familiar interruption of the prairie quiet, their crews and mechanics filling the town’s restaurants and rented rooms.
The era did not last long. By the mid-1950s the all-jet B-47 was arriving in the Strategic Air Command, and the even larger B-52 followed close behind. The B-36 was retired from service before the decade was out, and the type vanished from the sky almost as quickly as it had appeared. Most of the aircraft were scrapped, their aluminum melted down, and only a handful survive in museums today.
What the B-36 left behind in western South Dakota was less the airplane than the arrangement it had brought. The base it flew from did not close when the bombers went. It took on new aircraft and, before long, the buried Minuteman missiles that would carry the deterrent mission into the missile age. The B-36 had been the first chapter of that long story, the strange and enormous machine that made the open country east of Rapid City a piece of the nation’s front line. A visitor to the South Dakota Air and Space Museum near the base can stand beneath one of the survivors and get some sense of the scale that words do not quite convey.