History
Wurtsmith got its start in 1923 as Loud-Reames Aviation Field, a soft-surface landing site for Army Air Corps aircraft from Selfridge Field. It was renamed Camp Skeel in 1924, for World War I pilot Captain Burt E. Skeel, and was used as an aerial gunnery range and for winter maneuvers 1924 through 1944 by the 1st Pursuit Group at Selfridge Army Air Base near Detroit. During those winter maneuvers the army pilots and mechanics battled snow squalls and bitter cold temperatures to get the engines of the planes started. Oil was heated in drums over open fires of pitchpine and then poured into the engines. Crews then worked fast to get the engines running before the oil congealed. No self-starters were available on those early planes so engines were cranked by hand by swinging the propellers. Aviation gasoline to refuel the planes was hauled across the ice-covered lake on a six-foot hand sled which held two barrels. After 1927 the field was also used for aerial gunnery practice.
Read more about this topic: Wurtsmith Air Force Base
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)