The Rapid City Army Air Base in World War II
When the United States entered the Second World War, the open country east of Rapid City turned out to be unexpectedly valuable. Flat, dry, and far from any coast or border, the high prairie offered exactly what the Army Air Forces needed for training: room to fly, clear weather much of the year, and land that could be acquired without much trouble. In 1942 the military broke ground on an airfield there, and the decision reshaped the city for the rest of the century.
The installation took the name Rapid City Army Air Base. It was one of many such fields thrown up across the interior of the country during the war, where the weather and the empty distances made for good flying schools. Construction came quickly, in the way wartime construction did, and within a short time the prairie east of town held runways, hangars, barracks, and all the apparatus of a working air base.
Training the bomber crews
The base existed to train men to fly and fight in heavy bombers. Crews learned their trade there before shipping out, working through the gunnery, navigation, and formation flying that combat would demand. The aircraft most associated with the field in those years was the B-17 Flying Fortress, the four-engine bomber that carried much of the American air campaign over Europe. Young airmen cycled through the base, learning the dangerous, exacting work of crewing a bomber, and then moved on toward the war.
For the men stationed there, western South Dakota was a hard, cold, windswept posting, a long way from anywhere. For the aircraft, the same emptiness that made life dull made the flying safe to practice. Training accidents were a grim constant at fields like this across the country, and the base saw its share, but the scale of training meant thousands of airmen passed through on their way to the fronts.
What it meant for the town
The effect on Rapid City was sudden and large. A town that had grown up as a supply center for the Black Hills and a hub for the surrounding ranch country, the story told in the account of its founding in 1876, abruptly acquired thousands of servicemen, a federal payroll, and a steady stream of construction. Soldiers filled the downtown on their off hours. Businesses reoriented toward the new customers. Housing tightened, and the rhythms of the city bent around the base.
This was the moment Rapid City became a military town, and it never entirely stopped being one. The wartime field planted roots that outlasted the war. Where many hastily built training bases were abandoned once peace came, this one was kept on, drawn into the Cold War mission that would define the next chapters of the region’s military history.
From wartime field to permanent base
After the war the installation did not close. It was retained and, in time, renamed for General Richard Ellsworth, the commander killed in a 1953 bomber crash, becoming Ellsworth Air Force Base. Under that name it joined the Strategic Air Command and carried the enormous early Cold War bombers, then the missile mission, that made it a permanent fixture on the prairie. The wartime training field had become one of the largest institutions in South Dakota.
The original base belongs to a particular American moment, the rush of 1942 when the country threw up airfields wherever the flying was good and the land was cheap. Most of those fields are gone now, returned to grass or scattered with concrete foundations. The one east of Rapid City endured, and the city grew around it. For a community that began as the gateway to the Hills, the arrival of military aviation during the war added a second identity that has lasted into the present day.