No bugles will blow, no trumpets will sound: a narrative history of Smoky Hill/Schilling Air Force Base, Salina, Kansas, 1942 to 1967.

Abstract

No Bugles Will Blow is a narrative history of Smoky Hill/Schilling Air Force Base, Salina, Kansas starting prior to its construction in early 1942 to its last days as an Air Force installation in 1967. Smoky Hill AFB started its life in April, 1942 when Capt. Paul M. Long arrived to begin the process of acquiring and plotting land. It closed on April 3, 1967 when Lt. Col. Homer H. Houghton pulled down the flag of the officially deactivated Schilling AFB. There are nine chapters in this paper, chapters one and nine are the introduction and conclusion, respectively, with chapters two through eight as the body of the paper. The latter chapters cover the two major eras of the base: 1942 to 1949 and 1951 to 1967, as well as the first deactivated period of late 1949 to mid-1951. In the first era, Smoky Hill was first a World War II training base for the B-17 and B-29 bomber aircraft and closed out the era as a B-29 bomber base in the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in 1949. Smoky Hill's second era started on August 1, 1951 when the base was reactivated as a SAC medium bomber base of two Wings and an Air Division equipped with the new B-47 stratojet bomber. The Air Force left Salina for good in April, 1967 after disposition of most of the Air Force property at Schilling. Attention focuses primarily on the air base as a small city as well as its relationship with the city of Salina two miles northeast of the base. Person nel sketches of the major Commanders are provided when available. However, the primary objective of this paper is to provide a view of the trials and tribulations of an air base during the 1940s, 1950s, and part of the 1960s. Smoky Hill played a role in three major wars in which the United States was involved; World War II, Korea, and Viet Nam. Activated during the dark days immediately following Japan's attack on Hawaii, the base was reactivated during the Korean Conflict, and finally deactivated while the United States was escalating its involvement in Viet Nam. The base was indirectly involved in all three conflicts, although the housekeeping units were never involved in the actual combat. The runways of this base from its first activation to its final deactivation were among the longest military runways in the United States. Four of its original runways were 10,000 feet long and designed to handle the largest aircraft in the world which was then the B-29 bomber. By 1962, two of the runways had been extended to 13,330 feet with 1,000 feet overruns at each end to accomodate the B-52 bomber, which was supposed to be assigned to the base, but never arrived. The final closing took everyone by surprise, including, seems, SAC which had assigned an overage of personnel to the base. Appendices provide a listing of the units assigned to the base from 1942 to 1967, Commanders of the major units assigned to the base, capsule views of the base streets when the city of Salina assumed control of the base, and capsule stories of the 40th and 310th Bomb Wings.