TALES OF VEGAS PAST

Thursday, May 15, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Tales of Vegas Past: Horned toads for victory!

By Gregory Crosby

A clay pigeon explodes in the crisp winter sky, shattering into a dozen pieces as a shotgun shell strikes it. A curtain of dust hangs in the air as the young soldier who hit it is jolted along an unpaved road, the truck bed he sits on covered in fine, desert dust as well. The truck rolls across the horizon, the trainee aims his shotgun, another pigeon is released. Aiming and firing, aiming and firing, all the time moving, a long line of trucks and men trying to improve their ratio. It was, perhaps, almost impossible to imagine that this makeshift, rolling skeet shoot would soon translate into firing at German fighters from the belly of a B-17 Flying Fortress, where the survival of themselves and their crew would depend on their aim.

But that was the case in January and February of 1942 on the grounds of what had been the Western Air Express strip, eight miles northeast of Las Vegas. That strip was now the Las Vegas Army Air Field, commandeered by the military for use as an aerial gunnery school. Purchased for that purpose in 1941, a full-fledged base quickly kicked into gear after Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the Second World War. No-frills, utilitarian buildings sprang up, basic structures that would house hundreds of officers and enlisted men, charged with the task of teaching recruits how to fire air-to-air weapons: the .30-caliber flexible gun, the .50-caliber fixed and flexible gun, the 20mm and 37mm cannon guns.

But the sudden urgency of the school, whose initial construction had been hampered by delays and lethargy over the previous year, meant that this instruction more often than not was by the seat of the Army Air Corps' pants. The training course became a realm of trial and error as brass experimented in the field with what could be accomplished with the materials at hand; hence those trucks. Inexperience, inadequate equipment and lack of preparation were slowly ironed out as the nation's war footing grew, and the school began to turn out graduates, first from the ground-to-air gunnery facilities at the main field, then from the air-to-air firing established at the smaller Indian Springs Gunnery Training Camp, where students blasted away at tow target aircraft such as B-10s, B-17Es, B-24s and B-26s. By the end of 1942, 9,117 graduates were ready to be thrown into the maelstrom over Europe.

By today's computerized, high-tech standards, the weapon systems these men were trained to use were nearly as crude as those shotgun-wielding boys on trucks: heavy machine guns in turrets firing masses of hot lead into the sky. "My first airplane ride was in the back of the open cockpit of a T-6," recalled Chief Master Sgt. Stanley R. Janesik. "This T-6 was called a Texas Trainer. The mount was .30-caliber that was hand-held on swivel mount in the rear of the cockpit. We fired at a sleeve that was towed by another T-6." Like kids swinging a mounted gun in an arcade game, the soldiers honed their skills, hoping no doubt to somehow look and feel as fierce as their mascot, the desert horned toad, a lizard who graced the cover of the base's newspaper The Horned Toad like a two-fisted machine gun-slinging dragon, ready to take on the whole Axis. Whether the propaganda film shot at the base, "The Rear Gunner," starring the very unlikely pairing of Lt. Burgess Meredith and Lt. Ronald Reagan, gave them an extra morale boost is hard to say. Certainly they knew the life span of a ball turret gunner decreased over the number of missions his B-17 flew.

Outside the base, the presence of so many soldiers led to the final closing of Las Vegas' notorious Block 16 red light district, but the city's gambling halls and saloons survived just fine, boosted by servicemen's money (when the MPs weren't chasing them down for being AWOL). City officials were naturally thrilled to have the economic advantages conferred by a nearby Army base. When the war ended in 1945, the school's personnel was halved, the base having reached a peak population of 15,000 trainees at the war's height. It seemed certain that the entire facility, Indian Springs included, would be boarded up and left to rot in the desert sun, but local business leaders fought hard to turn the facility into a permanent air base.

After the creation of the Air Force as a separate military branch in 1947, those efforts succeeded, and the name of one of those Las Vegans who hadn't come back from Europe, P-47 pilot Lt. William Harrell Nellis, was affixed to the base in 1950, long after the victory that he and those skeet shooters transformed into gunners had made possible.Las Vegas Army Air Field mascot.