Mid-war, the town record goes quiet — which mostly means the town was busy. Thunderbird Field II, open barely a year, was running cadets through primary flight training at full wartime tempo, and the Stearman biplanes circling overhead had become simply part of the sky. In November it reached its peak, 615 cadets, nearly all of them U.S. Army aviation cadets (Southwest Airways trained its Chinese and British cadets at Glendale and Mesa), and by January 1944 it had 508 employees; it would graduate about 5,500 cadets before it closed in October 1944. For a farm town of a couple of thousand by most estimates, that meant payrolls, boarders, and dances nobody thought to write down.
The other wartime neighbor, Camp Papago Park on the town’s southwestern doorstep (almost half of it lay in what is now south Scottsdale), opened as a prisoner-of-war camp late that year — Italian prisoners first, German U-boat crews from January — and would supply the decade’s most famous night in December 1944. Between the airfield and the camp, the sleepy ranch crossroads of 1940 had become, in three years, a small working node in a global war. The whole story is in the 1940s chapter.