Turnberry first became a military airfield in the First World War, when the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force took it over. It housed No. 1 School of Aerial Fighting; Loch Doon, to the east, became a School of Aerial Gunnery. The two were eventually merged into No. 1 School of Aerial Fighting and Gunnery, which on 29 May 1918 was renamed No. 1 Fighting School (North-West Area). The courses lasted three weeks each. The Turnberry Hotel - the grand James Miller-designed building opened in 1906 with the railway - was used during the war as a hospital for the wounded. The school was disbanded on 25 January 1919. The wounded eventually went home. The hotel reopened to paying guests; the greens were rebuilt and the courses renamed Ailsa and Arran.

Between the wars, the survivors took care of the dead. A memorial honouring lost airmen of Turnberry was raised on the hill overlooking the 12th green of the Ailsa course - the cliff at the seaward end of the property, where the wind comes off the Firth of Clyde and the view stretches across to Arran. People played around it. Caddies pointed it out. It is still there. The men remembered on it had come to Scotland to learn to fight, and had died before they could. The geography of the course held space for them; the golfers absorbed the memorial into the rhythm of their game.

The cycle repeated when the Second World War broke out. The hotel was commissioned again as a hospital, this time for the Royal Navy. The golf courses were requisitioned for air training and effectively paved over. In November 1942 the Torpedo Training Unit RAF moved in from RAF Abbotsinch in Glasgow; in January 1943 it became No. 1 Torpedo Training Unit RAF, a name it kept until May 1944. RAF Coastal Command based Consolidated Liberators at Turnberry for the long anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic. Crews learned to fly the Bristol Beaufighter and the Bristol Beaufort here. Barnes Wallis's "Highball" bouncing bomb - the naval cousin of the more famous Upkeep used on the Mohne and Eder dams - was tested off the Turnberry coast by 618 Squadron. The training was as dangerous as the operational flying it prepared men for. Two hundred patients died at the hospital during the war.

After 1945 the units left. No. 10 Gliding School RAF lingered until January 1948, and the Coastal Command Flying Instructors School passed through. But the runways were eventually broken up, the courses re-laid - Mackenzie Ross redesigned them in 1949-51 - and Turnberry went back to being a golf resort. A disused landing strip is still visible on the property, the only obvious sign of what happened here. The hotel restored itself to a place where guests played in fair weather; the cliff above the 12th green still carries the memorial to the airmen, and the sea-wind still moves the long grass around it. The names are kept by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and remembered, in different ways, by everyone who knows what the course used to be.