Dagley Field
Lubbock, Lubbock County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Aircraft vastly changed the face of war and Dagley Field played a part in that transformation. As tensions mounted in the late 1930s, the United States created the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP), administered by the Civil Aeronautics Administration. This program offered college students classroom instruction and flight time. The classes eliminated those who lacked potential and ensured that only qualified candidates trained to be army or navy pilots. Texas Technological College in Lubbock trained about 6,500 CPTP and Pre-Flight students in the 309th College Training Detachment (Aircrew) from September 1939 to June 1944. Half of these students flew at Dagley Field. The airport was located on 34th Street and extended one-half mile west from Quaker Avenue to Utica Avenue and then south to 42nd Street. It consisted of four dirt runways and one 140-foot long hangar, which served as an office, workshop and doping room. Maenard F. "Dag" Dagley moved his flying service onto this quarter-section of land after the U.S. Army Air Forces moved into the Lubbock Municipal Airport in June 1942. In March 1943, Dagley himself was called into wartime service, and Clent Breedlove of Breedlove Aerial Service assumed responsibility for the students. Training ended on June 30, 1944, and the airfield name changed to Lubbock Aero Field, offering private lessons and charter flights. Due to a welding accident, the hangar burned on April 29, 1945. After the war ended and the demand for trained pilots decreased, the field closed. In late 1946, long-time property owner Samuel D. Baggett subdivided the land into commercial and residential lots, naming the new addition College Heights. Later, Stubbs Elementary School opened and served the children of Lubbock until 2001. (2017)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On the eve of World War II, the United States realized it would need pilots by the thousands and launched the Civilian Pilot Training Program to turn college students into aviators. At Texas Technological College in Lubbock, roughly 6,500 cadets moved through the program, and half of them took to the air from this dirt-runway field run by local flyer 'Dag' Dagley. When the war's demand for pilots faded, the field closed and its quarter-section became the College Heights neighborhood.
Why it matters
Small training fields like this one quietly built the vast pool of American airmen who won the war in the skies, showing how total war reached into ordinary college towns.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the last years of the 1930s, the United States watched the world tilt toward another war and did the arithmetic of the air. Aircraft had already begun to change how nations fought, and everyone could see that the next conflict would demand pilots by the thousands — far more than the peacetime military had ever needed to train. Out of that worry came the Civilian Pilot Training Program, a partnership between the government and the country's colleges to teach ordinary students the classroom fundamentals of flight and put them, one by one, into the cockpit.
Lubbock sits high on the flat, wind-swept Llano Estacado of West Texas, a young cotton-and-college town where the horizon runs to the edge of the sky. It was, in its way, close to perfect for the work: level ground, long sightlines, and open air for miles. Texas Technological College anchored the town, and when the training program came, the campus became one of its engines, moving thousands of young men through instruction on the ground and in the air.
This was the era when total war reached quietly into places that had never seen a battlefield. A dirt airfield at the western edge of a Texas college town became part of a national machine, spinning up the aircrews the country would soon need over Europe and the Pacific.
People & events
The field carried the name of Maenard F. Dagley — "Dag" to everyone — a local flying man who moved his flying service onto this quarter-section of prairie in the summer of 1942, after the Army Air Forces took over the municipal airport across town. What he built was plain and purposeful: four dirt runways and a single long hangar that did triple duty as office, workshop, and the "doping room" where the fabric skins of trainer aircraft were treated and tautened. From here, roughly half of the thousands of cadets who passed through the college's training detachment took their turns at the controls.
Then the war reached for Dagley himself. In the spring of 1943 he was called into service, and the responsibility for the students passed to Clent Breedlove of Breedlove Aerial Service — one flyer handing the school to another so the training would not miss a beat. The classes ran on until the last day of June in 1944, by which time the great need for new pilots had begun to ease.
What came after reads like the ordinary aftermath of an extraordinary time. The field took a new name and turned to private lessons and charter flights. In the spring of 1945 the hangar caught fire during a welding accident and burned. With the war ending and the demand for trained airmen falling away, the field closed for good, and its runways gave way to a peacetime future.
Its place in the American story
It is tempting to imagine the American air war being won in famous factories and over famous battlefields. But the pilots who flew those missions had to be found and taught somewhere first, and much of that work happened at small, unglamorous fields exactly like this one — scattered across college towns from coast to coast, each turning a handful of students into aviators.
The genius of the training program was that it treated pilots as a resource to be grown deliberately, in quantity, before the shooting fully started. The classroom weeded out those who lacked the aptitude and made sure that only capable candidates went forward to become Army or Navy flyers. Multiply one dirt field's graduates by the hundreds of such fields, and you have the vast pool of American airmen that the war would consume and depend upon.
There is a second, quieter significance in how the story ends. When the emergency passed, the field simply folded back into the town it had served, its land turned to homes and, later, a neighborhood school. That, too, is part of the American story — a country that mobilized ordinary ground for war and then let it return, just as ordinarily, to peace.
If you visit
Stand here today and the first thing to understand is that you have to imagine most of it. The runways are gone, the hangar is a memory, and the open quarter-section has long since become city — the land was subdivided into a residential and commercial addition after the war. What you are really visiting is a footprint beneath a neighborhood.
Use the marker's own geography to picture the field: a broad rectangle running west from one avenue to another and then south, four bare dirt strips crossing open grassland, and a single long hangar standing alone against the West Texas wind. Once you fix that shape in your mind, an ordinary block of streets becomes the ghost of an airfield.
It makes a fine, thoughtful stop on a Lubbock outing — a few minutes to consider how a flat patch of prairie helped win a war and then quietly disappeared into the everyday life of the town. Look up. The wide, uncluttered sky that made this a good place to learn to fly is the one thing here that hasn't changed at all.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Maenard F. "Dag" Dagley
- · Clent Breedlove
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Breedlove Airport
Lubbock, TX
When Lubbock lacked an airport in the 1920s, civic boosters raised money for a municipal field, opened in 1930 and managed by local flyer Clent Breedlove. In 1941 Breedlove opened his own 219-acre airport east of the Tahoka Highway, complete with four runways, hangars, a café and a control tower. During World War II the field trained thousands of cadet pilots through the Civilian Pilot Training Program and Texas Tech's pre-flight detachment, feeding the nation's desperate wartime need for aviators.
Reese Air Force Base
Lubbock, TX
After a decade of lobbying by Lubbock officials, an Army Air Corps advanced flying school opened west of the city in January 1942, replacing cotton fields with barracks and runways. As the Lubbock Army Flying School it trained more than 7,000 pilots before deactivating in 1945, then reactivated in 1949 and was renamed for First Lt. Augustus F. Reese, Jr., a Shallowater native killed in action during World War II. Over a 56-year run, Reese Air Force Base sent more than 25,000 men and women — including hundreds from 40 allied nations — into the sky before its closure in the 1990s.
Original Lubbock Municipal Airport
Lubbock, TX
Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo Atlantic flight set off a nationwide aviation fever, and Lubbock answered by buying land north of town and completing a stylish art deco brick hangar in 1930. A WPA grant paved concrete runways in 1938, and as the nation edged toward World War II the city handed the field to the Army, where the South Plains Army Airfield trained glider pilots for the USAAF from 1942 to 1945. The city reclaimed the airport after the war and opened a new terminal in 1950.
South Plains Army Air Field
Lubbock, TX
During World War II, the Army leased and expanded Lubbock's municipal airport into the South Plains Army Air Field, a leading center for training combat glider pilots. Here men learned to fly the engineless Waco CG-4A, the workhorse glider that carried troops silently behind enemy lines. Remarkably, the field trained nearly 80% of America's combat glider pilots, who went on to fly in the D-Day landings, Operation Market Garden, and the crossing of the Rhine. Its story is now told at the Silent Wings Museum on this site.