Camp Taliaferro

Camp Taliaferro was a World War I flight training center run by the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the Fort Worth, Texas area. It was named after Walter R. Taliaferro, a U.S. Army aviator who had been killed in an accident.

The camp provided facilities for members of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and U.S. forces from October 1917 to November 1918. It included three airfields, at Saginaw (Hicks Field), Benbrook (Carruthers Field) and Everman (Barron Field). Activities were administered from a building adjacent to what is now the Will Rogers Memorial Center complex in Fort Worth's cultural area near University Drive & W Lancaster Avenue.

During winter 1917-18, RFC instructors trained about six thousand men there. In six months, 1,960 pilots were trained, completing 67,000 flying hours on the Curtiss JN4 Canuck (also known as the "Jenny"), a two-seater biplane weighing 2,100 lb (950 kg) with a maximum speed of 75 mph (120 km/h). 69 ground officers and 4,150 others received training in ground trades and skills.

Canadian cadets were at Benbrook and Everman Fields while the US cadets and the Canadian aerial gunnery school went to Hicks. The training was a major life experience, sufficiently so for veterans to keep memorabilia long afterwards. For example the wife of Harry Kuhlmann from San Jose, California, (22nd Aero Squadron 1917-9) died in 1974, still holding Camp Taliaferro Post Exchange Tickets. In Cornell's Alumni News, L. H. Germer announced as his permanent address: Squadron 139, Field No. 1, Camp Taliaferro, Hicks, Texas. At Christmas, special postcards were available from the camp for residents.

For those who survived the training, combat life expectancy was short. Only two US Air Service squadrons—the 17th and 148th Aero Squadrons—saw active service with the British, flying with them until November 1918, after which they were absorbed into the US Air Service. The obituary of one veteran may be typical:

ELLIOTT, Edward William. 1st Lieutenant. Son of Samuel A. and Myrtle Elliott; born September 9, 1895, Wapakoneta, OH. Living in Muncie, IN when he entered First Officers Training Camp, Ft. Harrison, IN, May 15, 1917. Commissioned 1st Lieutenant. Assigned to 27th Aero Squadron. Transferred to Toronto, Canada; then to Camp Taliaferro, TX. Overseas in march 1918. Killed in an air battle, Chateau-Thierry, France, July 2, 1918. Survived by widow, Reba Thorpe Elliott, Muncie, IN.

Others survived the war, but to continue in aviation was almost as perilous:

Edmund Pike Graves: born in Newburyport, Massachusetts on March 13, 1891. Middlesex School, Class of 1907; Harvard, Class of 1913. Enlisted as a cadet, Royal Flying Corps in Canada on July 9, 1917 to avoid a delay in getting into a U.S. flying program. Commissioned 2nd Lieutenant, R.F.C. on October 29, 1917. Assigned as instructor in aerial gunnery at Camp Taliaferro, Hicks Field, Fort Worth, Texas. One of the first pilots to do elaborate stunts in a Curtiss. Transferred to Officers' School of Special Flying at Armour Heights, North Toronto in early spring, 1918. Promoted to 1st Lieutenant in May, 1918. Posted overseas, arrived on November 5, 1918 - armistice signed prior to movement to France. Demobilized in July, 1919. Volunteered for Kosciuszko Squadron flying for the new state of Poland and flew Albatross aircraft in patrols over the front in the Lemberg (Lwow) area. Killed during the celebration of the liberation of Lemberg from the Ukrainians when his aircraft lost its right wing during a double roll at 150 feet. Buried in Lemberg, with honors, by the Government of Poland.

Thirty nine officers and cadets died in Texas. Eleven British, Canadians, and Americans remain there, re-interred in 1924 at a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery plot in Greenwood Memorial Park, Fort Worth. The plot is in Section 5 of the cemetery, at 32-45-47, 97-21-48. Also interred there are one of their comrades who died in 1975, and the daughter of a Canadian instructor who died as a baby in 1918. A stone monument serves as a focal point on Memorial Day in May of odd-numbered years, when friends of the cemetery support a moving Remembrance Service, at which people from the three nations remember the sacrifice of those buried there.