March 6, 1946

February 1946. World War II is over and wartime production jobs were ending. During the war, Carl and Georgie worked a number of jobs in several places, finishing the war in Pocatello, Idaho. They elected to return to Iowa, where they both had family, but opted to make a grand tour of the west on the way. Georgie wrote a journal of the trip. The story starts here.

Left Las Vegas the next morning and drove to Boulder City. It is a very pretty, clean looking town as all the buildings are new – the entire town was built when Boulder Dam was being constructed.  Were amused by a restaurant sign “the best food by a dam site.”

Scrapbook page with a booklet about the dam and some of Carl’s pictures.

Drove to the dam and spent some time looking around. While on the road crossing the dam, looked down and saw several large trout swimming in Lake Mead.

Google (ND) [Directions from Las Vegas, NV to Williams, AZ] Retrieved February 13, 2021.

Drove down to Kingman and saw acres and acres of airplanes which were being brought back to the United States and parked at the Army Air Base there. Later read an article in Life Magazine about these planes which were sold to salvage companies. Drive through Hackberry, Peach Springs, Seligman, Ash Fork to Williams where we spent the night at a tourist camps on the edge of town and Fran stayed in a hotel.

Walt’s Comments

I didn’t find any restaurants in Boulder City with the “best food by a dam site” slogan, but it’s hardly surprising. The oldest place I could find had “been serving for nearly 30 years”. I did, however find “the best motel by a dam site”, “the best little lab by a dam site” and “the best car show by a dam site”. The town calls itself “the best town by a dam site” too, so the spirit, at least, is alive and well.

Kingman Army Air Field

When the war ended the US military found that it had a lot of excess planes. The US build about 294,000 aircraft, and while many had been given to our allies, and many more had been lost in accidents and combat, they still had an awful lot of planes on their hands.

Of course, they still needed some of them. But the military was drastically reducing manpower, and the peacetime forces simply wouldn’t have the people to fly all the planes. Also, in 1946 the nature of aerial warfare was changing fast. With the advent of nuclear weapons, the day of the thousand plane raid was over. Now, to destroy a city you only needed one plane. Finally, the jet engine was promising that the usefulness of piston-engined military aircraft was about to be over.

Most of the planes wouldn’t have much commercial value, either. Fighters only carried one person, were expensive to operate and tended to be difficult to fly. Bombers were even more expensive to operate, and couldn’t really carry cargo unless you were planning to drop it on the recipients. Cargo planes were the exception, and a lot of those were sold. Some of the fighters and bombers did get sold or given to other countries, but the majority were scrapped.

It’s rather sad to consider how much history got thrown into a smelting furnace, and what even one of those planes would be worth today.

Digging Deeper

This website has lots of information about airplane boneyards.

The War History Online site has a bunch of pictures of WW2 boneyards.