Old pics for Don- Castle Air Museum
"Nose gunner to pilot.....bandits at 12o'clock high!"


Castle Air Force Base located in Atwater, California was named in honour of Brigadier General Frederick W. Castle.

More than simply lines from a movie, these words started adrenaline surging through the veins of men whose courage and skill were tested daily in the skies over the Pacific, Europe, Africa, Korea and later, Vietnam.

To those who survived it, there is nothing glamorous about war. But, there is something awesome...a mystique...about the aircraft flown by the brave pilots and crews of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam Conflict.

These aircraft...planes like the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator, the B-29 Super Fortress, the B-26 Marauder and the B-25 Mitchell Bomber as well as the Mustang, Thunderbolt and Lightning are as much a part of America's heritage as Independence Hall, and the Battlefield at Gettysburg. In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt announced that the U. S. would build 50,000 planes a year to help defeat the Axis powers. It was a number that, by his own admission, he had picked out of thin air. Production in 1939 was 2,195 aircraft. In the event, 300, 000 military aircraft were produced in the years 1940 through 1945, 95,272 in 1944 alone. When World War II ended, most of them were withdrawn from service and scrapped almost as rapidly as they had been built.

It was to preserve for posterity the few remaining examples of these aircraft that the United States Air Force's Heritage Program was begun. Through the Heritage Program, communities and organizations are offered limited assistance in establishing air museums in which vintage military aircraft may be preserved.