It began as a hopeful local petition. In December 1941, just after Pearl Harbor, citizens of Laurinburg and Maxton learned the federal government wanted to put a training airfield somewhere in the area. Local governments wrote to Washington begging for it. The deal that emerged in May 1942 was unusual: four local townships would buy 583 acres and lease the land to the War Department for the duration; afterward the property would revert to civilian use as a public airport. Construction was authorized April 20, 1942. Within six months — a pace impossible to imagine today — three 6,500-foot runways were laid out in a triangle, twenty miles of paved roads ran through the support station, water wells were sunk, a railroad spur built, and barracks, hangars, dining halls, a hospital, and chapel rose from longleaf pine country at a cost of more than ten million dollars. The base was designed for ten thousand men.

Gliders are not romantic in 1944. They are expendable. The Waco CG-4A could fly a single mission and was often left in the field afterward, too damaged or too far from a runway to recover. The pilots were expendable in a related sense — they had no second chance, no go-around, no engine to power out of a bad approach. The course at Laurinburg-Maxton was eight weeks. Pilots learned to fly behind the C-47 tow plane, to release at altitude, to descend in dead silence to a field they had seen only on aerial photographs, and to land hard enough to stop before hitting whatever lay at the field's edge. They also trained to fight: M1 carbine, bazooka, sub-machine guns, mortars, hand grenades, tank-hunting, jungle reconnaissance, the study of Japanese small-unit tactics. By the end of the course they were dual-purpose: aircrew until touchdown, infantry from touchdown onward.

One technique trained here became famous. A glider on the ground — perhaps loaded with wounded soldiers — could be retrieved by a C-47 flying low overhead. The C-47 trailed a grappling hook on a long line; the line caught a loop strung between two upright poles in front of the glider; in an instant of violent acceleration the glider was airborne again. They practiced it at the airfield. They also practiced water ditchings — landings in Lee's Mill Pond, a millpond near the base where pilots learned to put a glider down in water and get the wounded out before the airframe sank. The first glider pilot training class began on June 2, 1944 — four days before the Normandy invasion. By war's end, more than forty Army and Air Force units had cycled through, including elements of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Generals Eisenhower and Marshall both came to watch.

By April 1945, the base population was around ten thousand. By the end of September — five weeks after Japan's surrender — it had fallen to 914. By October 30, 1945, the base was closed. The hangars stayed. The runways stayed. The pursuit-driving track that North Carolina Highway Patrol cadets used from the 1960s through the early 1990s ran on the old taxiways. Lee's Mill Pond is still there. The base chapel stands today as Skyway Baptist Church. The base hospital became Scotland Memorial Hospital before moving to a newer facility six miles southeast. The airfield is now Laurinburg-Maxton Airport (ICAO: KMEB) — still used occasionally by Fort Bragg airborne units doing exactly what their predecessors did here eighty years ago, training to drop into places they cannot otherwise reach.

There is a tension in the postwar memory of the base that the official history acknowledges only briefly. The county is Lumbee country. The relationship between Lumbee people and the North Carolina Highway Patrol — the agency that used the airfield for pursuit-driving practice for thirty years — was poisoned by events including the 1958 Battle of Hayes Pond (when armed Lumbees broke up a Ku Klux Klan rally near Maxton) and a series of incidents in the 1960s and 1970s. Patrol cars parked at the airfield were repeatedly vandalized over the decades. The official base history mentions this in a single sentence and moves on. The full story belongs to the Lumbee histories of Robeson and Scotland counties, told in other places by other voices. What Laurinburg-Maxton remains is many things at once: the largest glider school in the world, a chapel that became a Baptist church, a runway where C-47s once practiced snatch pick-ups, and a place where local memory runs deeper than any single official narrative.