by Robert Waldvogel

Created on: September 14, 2009   Last Updated: September 16, 2009

I

Driving into Millville Airport, currently a general aviation facility in Southern New Jersey, is like entering a World War II time portal: several cinder block buildings and barracks, characteristic of the war, stand eerily silent and vacated, as if the area had once provided the stage for some vast performance, but its players had long since departed. The runways still routinely field take offs and landings, but mostly of single-engined Cessnas and Pipers. Yet, the location had been an integral part of World War II and therefore remains historically significant.

Sparked, like numerous war-necessitated air fields, by the prospectively destructive capability of the advancing airplane design, as evidenced by German and Japanese combat missions in Europe and Asia, it had been one of 900 defense airports ordered by the US government to be strategically located round the country in order to be immediately convertible from civilian to military application and to train counterforces in the event of war. Unlike the others, however, Millville Army Air Field had been the first one and therefore had been dedicated as America's first defense airport by local, state, and federal officials when it had opened on August 2, 1941 amid a 10,000-strong ceremony.

Still in a spartanly constructive state, it had only featured a few runways from which civilian aircraft operations had been conducted, but the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii had rapidly ignited its transition to military status, the 56th Fighter Squadron of the 33rd Fighter Group temporarily relocating from Philadelphia Municipal Airport for a three-week period to commence Curtiss P-40 Warhawk training, at a still nascent facility only able to accommodate its crews in tents.

One of World War II's most effective fighter-bombers, the aircraft, based upon the P-36, had been intended as a modernized successor which had initially appeared with a 12-cylinder, V, inline, liquid-cooled Allison V-1720 piston engine, but high-altitude operations had quickly dictated the need for the gear-driven, supercharger-equipped V-1710 version. Although the Army Air Corps had hitherto used its fighters for coastal defense and ground attack missions, it had nevertheless evaluated the aircraft because of its superior performance, the prototype, a converted P-36A airframe redesignated XP-40, first flying on October 14, 1938 with the modified powerplant.

The low-wing monoplane, powered by the single, 1,160-shp

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