A Russian Airbase in the Mojave

Flight Journal, Apr 2004 by Harrison, Will

THE WIND BLOWS TUMBLEWEEDS ACROSS THE expanse of cracked tarmac. The sun gleams off the crazed, peeling white paint on a pair of quarter-mile-long open-bay service hangars, and the unpainted, 60-year-old redwood interior beams in the hangars glow a deep, copper red. If you listen carefully, you'll hear the rumble of dozens of Wright R-2600 radiais echoing in the hangars, or is it just a distant six-locomotive Santa Fe freight train?

This is Daggett Airfield today. It was a bustling community during WW II when Douglas Aircraft Co. used it as an auxiliary airfield and open-air plant for the final modifications and assembly of the DB-7/A-20 series of Douglas twin-engine light bombers. About 120 miles northeast of the Douglas Aircraft plants at El Segundo and Santa Monica, Daggett provided a secure area in the Mojave Desert near the Marine Corps Supply Depot at Barstow. Safe from any threat of Japanese bombing attacks, Daggett also served as a secluded airfield for Russian pilots to train from before flying the new aircraft to Nome, Siberia and the Eastern Front.

It began as an airmail stop on the Amarillo (Texas) to Los Angeles route with only a single runway and a small hangar. But after Douglas moved to the field, Daggett grew into a large complex, complete with two huge open-bay service and maintenance hangars that were each a quarter-mile long, three enclosed hangars, a mess hall, barracks and a swimming pool that Donald Douglas built with concrete transferred from other defense projects. The two, long, open-bay hangars were constructed of redwood that had been brought down from Northern California by train. They were sited with their closed sides toward the west and featured louvered clerestory roofs and multiple unglazed windows on the closed side to provide air circulation. It is difficult to imagine what it must have been like to work on radial-engine aircraft in the middle of the 120-degree Mojave summer!

DB-7s were flown to the airfield from El Segundo. As early as 1939, the planes were being built for the French Armee de l'Aire and were then disassembled and shipped to Casablanca for final assembly. But it wasn't until 1942 that Daggett came into its own. With the advent of the Lend-Lease Act, the agile, fast and heavily armed DB-7 (and its USAAC alter ego, the A-20 Havoc) came into heavy demand by the Russians. Of the more than 7,000 DB-7 and A-20 variants that Douglas built, almost 3,000 were transferred to the Russians. The majority of these made their way north to Daggett and then across Alaska and Siberia to the Front.

The Russian pilots arrived in Daggett mostly by train; in those days, the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads offered frequent passenger service to Barstow. The pilots were housed at Daggett; they learned to fly the aircraft there and then flew the planes back to Russia. The battle history of these aircraft is essentially unknown. As Rene Francillon says in his book "McDonnell Douglas Aircraft since 1920," "Even though the Soviet Air Force received more aircraft of the ... series than any other Service ... little is known about the operational career of these aircraft."

Even before the War was over, Douglas began to remove itself from Daggett; the production of DB-7s and A-20s had come to an end, and the threat of Japanese bombings had dissipated. The Marine Corps took over the field and its facilities from the Army and operated Daggett as an annex to the Supply Depot at Barstow for a number of years. Later still, Lockheed took over the field and used it as a helicopter test and evaluation facility. Eventually, the County of San Bernardino became the proprietor, and it remains so.

There is still a small Fixed Base Operation at Daggett. On a windy day in December 2003, the only aircraft on the tarmac was a Twin Otter that had broken a nosewheel when landing and was waiting for repairs. At the far corner of the facility, there was a small detachment of Army helicopters from Fort Irwin, and a handful of Cessnas and Pipers were parked in the massive, open-bay hangars. But the barracks are no longer; their concrete slabs arc slowly being covered by sand from the desert. The swimming pool is fenced off and unused, and paint is peeling from the wooden structures. Rabbit brush and tumbleweed grow in the railroad tracks that were used to transport supplies from Los Angeles. But on quiet, moonlit nights, it's easy to imagine that you hear the faint rumble of Wright or Pratt & Whitney radiais or catch a whiff of the unmistakable pungency of "paper vodka."

by Will Harrison, MD, with Donald W. Douglas Jr.