KVIG Informative

Nellis Air Force Base, where Air Force pilots from around the world now train for Red Flag, began as a $10 real estate deal the City of Las Vegas closed in the dead of winter 1941.

The Army Air Corps surveyed a small civilian airfield northwest of Las Vegas in late 1940 for conversion into a gunnery school, according to an official history published by Nellis Air Force Base’s own public affairs office. That airfield had opened in 1929, built by aviator W.A. "Pop" Simon, and was purchased by Western Air Express in 1933, the base history states.

The City of Las Vegas completed a $10 purchase of the airfield in January 1941, according to the Air Force’s account, then leased most of the property back to the Army for what the Air Force calls Las Vegas Army Air Field, home of the Las Vegas Aerial Gunnery School. Construction on the new training base began in March 1941, and the first class of trainees began in January 1942.

Donate

Donate

The base trained Army aerial gunners through World War II, then went through a postwar drawdown. It reopened on Jan. 4, 1949, as Las Vegas Air Force Base, according to the same Air Force history.

On May 1, 1950, the installation was renamed Nellis Air Force Base in honor of 1st Lt. William H. Nellis, a Las Vegas High School graduate who had been raised in Searchlight and Las Vegas and worked for the railroad before entering pilot training. Nellis completed flight training in January 1944 and was assigned to the 513th Fighter Squadron of the 406th Fighter Group, flying P-47 Thunderbolts over Europe.

Nellis flew 69 combat missions and was shot down twice before he was killed on Dec. 27, 1944, while strafing enemy armor and motor transport near Bastogne, Belgium, on his 70th mission, according to the Air Force account. He was buried at the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium and was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Air Medal with oak leaf clusters. The Air Force unveiled a dedication plaque at the base at a ceremony on May 20, 1950.

Donate

Donate

Eight decades after the city handed its airfield to the Army for $10, Nellis is the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center, home to the Weapons School, the Thunderbirds and the Red Flag exercises the Air Force has run there since 1975, according to the base’s own fact sheet. The land deal the city once measured in pocket change now anchors one of the busiest stretches of military airspace in the country, and every crew that still works up a strike package over the Nevada Test and Training Range trains on ground that started as a $10 handshake.