Sumter City and County, South Carolina, in World War II

Sumter County's Shaw Field opened in August 1941, almost four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, as a U.S. Army Air Corps Basic Flying School, teaching cadets the basics of flying before they moved on to advanced training. In October 1942 it switched to Advanced Flight Training, and by the end of the war more than 8,600 American and Allied pilots had graduated there. From March 1945 through early 1946 the field also served as a prisoner of war camp, holding German POWs who worked on farms in the area.

Several Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) served at Shaw Field. With male pilots in short supply and pressure to train as many new ones as possible, they helped train male cadets, taught male instructor pilots, and flew as test and ferry pilots for the airfield.

On the home front

The people of Sumter and the wider county threw themselves into the war effort:

• companies such as Carolina Industries, Inc. manufactured items for the military;
• service groups like the Kiwanis sponsored paper drives and collected scrap metal;
• high school students trained in home nursing and joined the Victory Corps, a federal school club program to help students take part in the war effort and prepare for possible military service;
• citizens volunteered for civil defence, and the City National Bank Building, the tallest in the city, served as an observation tower in the air raid warning system.

Schools at War Program poster, 1942, by Irving Nurick. Credit: U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The jeep drive

In 1943, schools across the country joined a U.S. Treasury Department Schools at War promotion, setting goals for raising money through war bonds and stamps to help the government buy jeeps. South Carolina's goal was 63 jeeps. Students at Edmunds High School in Sumter invested enough to buy twenty-one of them — one-third of the whole state's goal met by a single school.

Remembering

Sumter City and County honour their wartime history with a monument to the Tuskegee Airmen, four of whom had ties to Sumter; Veterans Park; the Temple Sinai Jewish History Center; the Sumter Military Museum; and markers around Memorial Lake Park on Shaw Air Force Base.

Sources

Based on "Sumter City and County, South Carolina," part of the American World War II Heritage City series, published by the National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The article's photographs — a 1943 yearbook picture from Edmunds High School and a 1944 view of trainer aircraft at Shaw Field credited to Martin C. Eichelman — are not reproduced.