General Richard Ellsworth and the 1953 Crash
For its first decade the airfield on the prairie east of Rapid City carried plain, functional names tied to the war that built it and the town it served. The name it wears today came from a death, and from the kind of accident that the early Cold War produced with grim regularity.
Richard E. Ellsworth was a career Army Air Forces and Air Force officer who had risen to brigadier general by the early 1950s. He commanded the wing stationed at the Rapid City base during the years when the installation was being folded into the Strategic Air Command and its long-range bombing mission. By all accounts he was an active commander who flew with his crews rather than directing them from a desk, and that habit placed him aboard the aircraft on the night he was killed.
In the spring of 1953 Ellsworth was flying as a crew member on a B-36 returning from a long-range training mission, the kind of exercise meant to prove that bombers based on the northern plains could reach distant targets and come home. The flight came down in bad weather over high ground near Newfoundland. Everyone aboard died. For a base that had sent its men out on exactly these sorts of demanding flights, the loss of its own commanding general was a blow that reached well beyond the gate.
A base renamed
Within a short time the Air Force moved to rename the installation in his honor, and President Eisenhower came to the base for the ceremony that summer. The visit was an unusual one for a sitting president, and it underscored how seriously the country took its bomber bases in those years. The field that had been the Rapid City Air Force Base became Ellsworth Air Force Base, and the name stuck so completely that within a generation few residents could have told you who the man had been.
That is the quiet irony of place names. A general who died in his fifties on a routine mission lent his family name to an institution that has outlived nearly everyone who knew him, and that name now attaches to schools, roads, and the daily speech of a city that mostly does not pause over it.
The cost of the mission
The crash that killed Ellsworth was not an isolated tragedy. The B-36 was an enormous and complicated machine, flown on punishing schedules over long distances and in all weather, and the Strategic Air Command of the early 1950s accepted a level of risk that later decades would find startling. Crews trained constantly for a war that, fortunately, never came, and a number of them died in the training itself. The men lost in such accidents were memorialized locally and then, often, forgotten by the wider public, their deaths recorded as the background cost of deterrence.
Ellsworth’s name endures partly because it landed on a base, but the circumstances of his death are worth remembering on their own terms. He was killed doing the thing he asked his crews to do. In a period when the public imagined nuclear danger mostly in terms of enemy attack, the more immediate hazard for the airmen on the South Dakota prairie was the aircraft they flew and the weather they flew it through.
The base that carries his name went on to a long career, first with the great B-36 Peacemaker bombers and later with missiles and newer aircraft, and it became one of the largest employers in the region. Visitors today can trace much of that story at the South Dakota Air and Space Museum near the base entrance. The name above all of it belongs to a commander who did not survive to see what his base would become, and who is remembered now mostly through the syllables of a word that Rapid City says without thinking.