There is a slab of concrete out in a Texas pasture wide enough to land a bomber on, and the cattle do not think a thing about it. ✈️
By the end of World War II, Texas had 65 Army airfields. The weather was clear most of the year, the land was flat and cheap, and the sky was empty, so the Army Air Forces trained enormous numbers of pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners right here. Towns that had never seen anything like it suddenly had thousands of young men in uniform, a rail spur, a water system, and a runway laid down where a cotton field had been.
Then it ended, nearly overnight. Some of those fields became the airport your city still flies out of. Some stayed military and are active bases today. And some were simply walked away from. Pyote out in Ward County, which crews nicknamed the Rattlesnake Bomber Base, spent the postwar years holding hundreds of surplus bombers until the whole lot was cut up for scrap and the place was left to the brush. Pampa up in the Panhandle ...