Eglin Afb, FL news and local guide

World War II made Eglin enormous. On June 27, 1940, the U.S. Forest Service ceded the Choctawhatchee National Forest, some 384,000 acres by the base's count, to the War Department for an aircraft armament proving ground. Eglin became a center for fighter gunnery training and for testing aircraft, weapons and tactics, and in March 1942 Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle used it as one of the sites where his B-25 crews prepared for their raid on Tokyo. In 1944 its personnel worked out tactics for destroying German V-1 launch sites. At the wartime peak the base employed more than 15,000 officers, enlisted personnel and civilians. After the war Eglin pioneered guided-missile work and, on January 13, 1947, flew a drone from Eglin to Washington, D.C., in a simulated bombing mission. It became Eglin Air Force Base on June 24, 1948, and has remained the Air Force's main center for testing non-nuclear weapons. The base also trained the Son Tay Raiders in 1970, housed more than 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees at a "Tent City" in 1975, and processed more than 10,000 Cuban refugees in 1980. Sources Eglin Air Force Base: Eglin Air Force Base History (fact sheet) Wikipedia: Eglin Air Force Base