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Contact Info
Home Town Livonia, MI
Last Address Elizabethton, TN
Date of Passing Jan 31, 2003
Location of Interment Washington County Memory Gardens - Johnson City, Tennessee
Wall/Plot Coordinates Hillside Mausoleum
Official Badges
Unofficial Badges
1944-1944, AAF 611, Las Vegas Army Air Corps Gunnery School
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In October 1940, Maj. David Schlatter, of the U.S. Army Air Corps, surveyed several areas in Utah, Arizona and Nevada looking for a site to locate the "first" American flexible aerial gunnery school. Major Schlatter was particularly interested in the Nevada site since about 90 percent of the area north, northwest and northeast of Las Vegas was desert wasteland. On Jan. 25, 1941, Las Vegas Mayor John L. Russell signed over the property to the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps for the development of the flexible gunnery school. The mission of the new school, the Las Vegas Army Air Corps Gunnery School (located on the new Las Vegas Army Air Field), was defined as "training of aerial gunners to the degree of proficiency that will qualify them for combat duty."
Other Memories The Army chose Las Vegas as the site for a flexible gunnery school. In 1941, the Army concluded a lease with the City of Las Vegas to use McCarran Field. The facility, which opened in 1942, provided training to pilots and instruction on handling machine guns mounted on the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator and, later, the B-29 Super Fortress.
Students received five weeks of intensive training and classes were quickly rotated. The training started on the ground using mounted shotguns with fixed arcs of fire, and then shotguns mounted on the backs of trucks, which were driven through a course. Then the students went up in the bombers, shooting at targets pulled by other aircraft. Twenty-five thousand students eventually trained at the base.
The base was shut down in 1945, but the U.S. Air Force reopened it in 1949, and renamed it Nellis Air Force Base in 1950. It remains a training base, known as the "Home of the Fighter Pilot" and the Air Force Thunderbirds.