Camp Taliaferro

Camp Taliaferro was a World War I flight training centre run by the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the Fort Worth, Texas area. It was named after Walter R. Taliaferro, a U.S. Army aviator who had been killed in an accident.

The camp provided facilities for members of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and U.S. forces from October 1917 to November 1918. It included three airfields, at Saginaw (Hicks Field), Benbrook (Carruthers Field) and Everman (Barron Field). Activities were administered from a building adjacent to what is now the Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium complex in Fort Worth's downtown cutural area near University Drive & W Lancaster Avenue.

During winter 1917-18, RFC instructors trained about six thousand men there. During six months, 1,960 pilots were trained, completing 67,000 flying hours on the Curtiss JN4 Canuck (also known as the "Jenny"), a two-seater biplane weighing 2,100lb (950 Kg) with a maximum speed of 75 mph (120 km/h). 69 ground officers and 4,150 others received training in ground trades and skills.

It was hazardous; 39 officers and cadets died in Texas. Eleven British, Canadians, and Americans remain there, re-interred in 1924 at a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Greeenwood Memorial Park, 3100 White Settlement Road, Fort Worth. Also interred there is one of their comrades who died in 1975, and the daughter of a Canadian instructor who died as a baby in 1918.

A stone monument serves as a focal point on Memorial Day in May of odd-numbered years, when friends of the cemetery support a moving Remembrance Service, at which people from the three nations remember the sacrifice of those buried there.

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