In 1942 the United States Army took over Lubbock's municipal airport and made it the world's largest training facility for combat glider pilots. The engineless aircraft they learned to fly were the troop carriers of D-Day, Sicily, and the Rhine crossing.
A Pirep featured story · KLBB Lubbock Preston Smith International, Lubbock, TX
The Lubbock Municipal Airfield opened in 1929 on a stretch of cotton ground four miles north of downtown. For more than a decade it was a regional airfield with a single building and a handful of pilots. In November 1937 it was formally established as South Plains Airport. Then the United States entered the Second World War.
In 1942 the Army Air Forces took over and renamed the field South Plains Army Airfield. It became the world's largest training facility for combat glider pilots — men who would fly engineless aircraft on a single one-way mission, into landing zones inside enemy lines.
The aircraft was the Waco CG-4A, a 48-foot wood-and-fabric glider with an 83-foot wingspan, carrying thirteen soldiers or a jeep or a 75-millimeter howitzer. It was towed behind a C-47 Skytrain on a 350-foot nylon rope. At the release point — typically several minutes after dark and several miles inside enemy territory — the glider pilot cut the tow line, glided silently to the ground (hence the nickname "silent wings"), and tried to land in a field he had memorized from photographs. He had no engine to go around. Most glider landings were one-time-use events for the aircraft and frequently for the pilot.
The glider pilots trained at Lubbock flew into combat in the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, the D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands in September 1944, the Rhine crossing in March 1945, and a half-dozen operations in Burma and the Philippines. Casualties among glider pilots were extreme. Thousands earned their wings at South Plains before the war ended.
South Plains Army Airfield closed on December 31, 1945. The City of Lubbock got the airport back in 1949 and renamed it for Texas Governor Preston Smith in 2004. The Silent Wings Museum on the field today preserves a restored Waco CG-4A — flown for one mission, by pilots who trained on the same square of West Texas dirt where the museum now stands.