In 1942, the Army Air Forces needed training space, and the desert around Yuma offered it in abundance. Yuma Auxiliary Army Airfield No. 4 — later called Rolle Field — was one of seven satellite airfields serving the main Yuma Army Air Field, which is now Marine Corps Air Station Yuma. The United States Army Air Forces used Rolle to train bomber crews, including crews flying B-26 Marauders, through the end of World War II.

When peace came, the military's need contracted. The airfield was declared surplus in 1945 and handed to the Department of the Interior in 1947, officially concluded with its wartime mission.

For the next three decades, Rolle Field found its purpose in the agricultural fields that cover this corner of Yuma County. The Imperial and Yuma Valleys are among the most intensively farmed landscapes in North America — lettuce, cotton, citrus, alfalfa — and all of it requires pest management. Through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Rolle's single runway served primarily as a base for the low-flying biplanes and ag-planes that swept the fields with chemicals at dawn.

In 1972, the runway was improved, and the airfield entered a long period of quiet utility. The work was unglamorous but essential to the farming economy that defines this borderland.

In 2011, after years of deferred investment, a comprehensive renovation transformed the airfield. Workers reconstructed the runway, built a new taxiway and aircraft parking apron, added runway end run-outs, and installed new infrastructure including a hangar, septic system, water well, electrical generator, perimeter fence, and access gates. A new parking lot and sidewalk completed the picture.

The Yuma County Airport Authority, which had renewed the airfield's lease in 2009 for 25 years, hoped the improvements would attract not just general aviation but companies specializing in unmanned aerial systems — a growing industry that the vast, restricted airspace around Yuma supports particularly well. The Navy and Marine Corps test drones in this desert routinely; civilian UAS operators find it appealing for similar reasons.

Today Rolle Airfield handles about 3,100 aircraft operations a year — roughly 8.5 per day, according to 2016 data — nearly all of them general aviation. The military accounts for only 3 percent of traffic. With no based aircraft at the time of that count, the field serves primarily as a transient and training destination.

Ownership by the Department of the Interior is a legacy of the wartime land transfer and gives Rolle an unusual legal status among Arizona airports. The airfield sits in a flat landscape between Interstate 8 and the Mexico border, the Sonoran Desert extending to the south and the irrigated green quilt of Yuma County farmland spreading to the north and east. It is a modest place — a single asphalt runway, a fence line, a few structures — that has outlasted the war that created it by eight decades.