Current print subscribers can create a free account by clicking here
Otherwise, follow the link below to join.
To Our Valued Readers –
Visitors to our website will be limited to five stories per month unless they opt to subscribe. The five stories do not include our exclusive content written by our journalists.
For $6.99, less than 20 cents a day, digital subscribers will receive unlimited access to YourValley.net, including exclusive content from our newsroom and access to our Daily Independent e-edition.
Our commitment to balanced, fair reporting and local coverage provides insight and perspective not found anywhere else.
Your financial commitment will help to preserve the kind of honest journalism produced by our reporters and editors. We trust you agree that independent journalism is an essential component of our democracy. Please click here to subscribe.
Need to set up your free e-Newspaper all-access account? click here.
Non-subscribers
Click here to see your options for becoming a subscriber.
Register to comment
Click here create a free account for posting comments.
Note that free accounts do not include access to premium content on this site.
I am anchor
New book highlights Luke Air Force Base in images
Author scours base’s photographic archives
Posted
The book “Images of America: Luke Air Force Base,” by author Rick Griset, will be released from Arcadia Publishing Monday, March 2.
Luke Air Force Base, created in less than a year from desert scrub and farmland, stands some 20 miles west of Phoenix. Construction began March 31, 1941, months before the U.S. entered World War II, according to an Arcadia Publishing news release. That summer the Army Air Corps named Luke Field after World War I hero and triple ace Frank Luke Jr.
Some pilots from Luke Field’s first class flew from air fields in Hawaii during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
From the beginning, Luke Field trained fighter pilots, as it does today, Arcadia notes. Over the years the Luke Air Force Base was home to 14 primary fighter aircraft, graduated over 60,000 students, and accounted for millions of training flight hours.
Of the pilots who trained at Luke Field, a number became aces, including the all-time U.S. leading ace, Maj. Richard I Bong. For decades Luke Air Force Base has been home to more fighter aircraft than any other base in the United States, earning the moniker “Fighter Country.”
Mr. Griset selected the best images from Luke Air Force Base’s extensive historical photographic archives and called on the base’s records and most knowledgeable people to narrate this visual flight through the history of Luke Air Force Base.
