The year opened with a manhunt and closed with a migration. On January 28, U-boat commander Jürgen Wattenberg — the last of the twenty-five Papago escapees still loose — ventured into Phoenix for food, was recognized, and surrendered, ending the Great Papago Escape after five weeks without a single act of violence. The desert, it turned out, had been the real guard all along.
Then the war ended, and the Valley discovered that its most valuable wartime product had not been pilots but impressions. Thousands of servicemen had trained under Arizona sunshine — at Thunderbird Field II over Scottsdale’s own fields, at Luke and Williams nearby — and a striking number decided, somewhere over the alfalfa, that they were finished with snow. They came back with wives, children, and GI Bill financing, and the migration that would quintuple the town over the coming decade began quietly, one family at a time.
Scottsdale in 1945 was in no way ready for them: still unincorporated, no fire department, no newspaper, no formally organized chamber of commerce. The rest of the decade would be spent improvising those institutions — craft center, private fire brigade, paper of record — just fast enough to stay ahead of the growth. The 1950s chapter shows what the migration did when it hit full stride.