History
Ground was broken on August 2, 1941 for the Rome Air Depot, to be completed in 1942. After a series of names and realignments, the base was finally named "Griffiss Air Force Base" in 1948. The base was named in honor of Lt. Col. Townsend Griffiss (1900–1942), a Buffalo native and 1922 West Point graduate who, in 1942, became the first U.S. airman to be killed in the line of duty in the European Theatre of World War II when the Consolidated B-24 Liberator in which he was flying was shot down by friendly fire over the English Channel.
Read more about this topic: Griffiss Air Force Base
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)