With the German invasion of Poland and increased Japanese militarism in the Pacific in 1939, the US Army Air Corps finally decided to rapidly expand its pilot training capabilities. By the Fall of France the following year, America was graduating over 2,000 military pilots a year, but even this increase was still not enough for the Air Corps. They then contracted with 45 civilian flying schools by mid-1941 to provide primary training. The Raymond-Richardson Aviation School in Douglas, Georgia was one of these who were to help produce a growing wave of combat ready airmen.
Formerly called the College Airfield, the airstrip was owned and operated by the nearby two-year junior college, which opened back in 1927. Besides a single grass strip, the airfield consisted of just one small hanger barely large enough to hold a single plane. This structure stood just off of the highway north of the later airbase and roughly across the road from the modern Jameson and Hampton Inns. In 1939, Wesley Raymond and others contracted with the college to provide a flying school for the students and when the Army wished to expand its own pilot program again in early 1941, Douglas applied to be one of the new civilian operated Primary Flight Schools. Construction on the actual airbase buildings (new hangers, barracks, offices, classrooms, mess hall, and canteen) began during that summer. The first PT-17 Trainers arrived at the new 63rd Flight Training Detachment (FTD) not long after and the first class of 60 cadets graduated just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
With America's entry into the war, the Douglas Airbase was expanded with the construction of more barracks and the addition of more aircraft and cadets as well. WWII Air Corp cadets went through three levels of flight training - Primary, Basic, and Advanced. Each of these ascending levels of training lasted for three months, although as the war went on a few weeks were trimmed from this. By the time this base closed in December of 1944, along with most of the other civilian schools, over 5,000 men had gone through primary and ground school at the facility.
The pilots who earned their wings here went on to fly and fight in every major theater of the globe spanning war - in the skies of America and North Africa, at palm tree level over the islands of the Pacific, over the humid Indian Ocean, the lonely stretches of the North and South Atlantic, and hopping the deadly hedgerows of France. The 63rd FTD men flew bombing runs over Germany, transported important war cargo over the Himalayan "hump", shot down Messerschmitt fighters over Italy, soared through blazing anti-aircraft fire as a matter of daily survival, and carried morale building V-mail all over the planet. The men that came though this single base, just one of the first of what would eventually be 65 such schools across the country, flew well and fought hard. During the war, many former cadets won awards and honors and some gave all for the continued freedom of our nation.