The airfield was built in 1923 by Italy's Regia Aeronautica and originally known as Mellaha Air Base. For a decade, it served quietly as a military airfield. Then, in 1933, the roads around the base and the neighboring Mellaha Lake were repurposed for something unexpected: the Tripoli Grand Prix motor race, which drew international drivers to a circuit on the Libyan coast. When World War II arrived, the glamour vanished. The German Luftwaffe took over Mellaha during the North African Campaign, basing the 2nd Staffel of Aufklarungsgruppe (H) 14 there with a squadron of twelve Henschel Hs 126 reconnaissance aircraft, three Fieseler Fi 156 Storch liaison planes, and a Junkers Ju 52 transport. It was a listening post and reconnaissance hub, peering across the desert while Allied forces closed in.

The British Eighth Army captured the airfield in January 1943, and the U.S. Army Air Forces moved in the same month. The 376th Bombardment Group of the 12th Air Force used Mellaha to launch B-24 Liberators against targets in Italy and southern Germany. The base also served as a stopover on the North African Cairo-to-Dakar transport route. In April 1945, USAAF Air Training Command took control, and on May 17 the field was renamed Wheelus Army Air Field in honor of Lieutenant Richard Wheelus, a USAAF pilot who had died earlier that year in a plane crash in Iran. The naming honored one man's sacrifice, but the base was about to become something far larger than anyone in 1945 could have imagined.

After a brief closure in 1947, Wheelus reopened in June 1948 under the USAF Military Air Transportation Service. Its host unit, the 1603rd Air Transport Wing, flew C-47 Skytrains and C-54s to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Cyprus. When King Idris I was crowned in 1951, U.S. Air Forces in Europe-based fighter-bomber units began using Wheelus and the nearby El Uotia Gunnery Range for weapons training. A 1954 agreement between the United States and Libya formalized the arrangement through December 1971. The base became a self-contained American community, complete with the 7th Air Rescue Group, the 580th Air Resupply and Communications Wing running special operations across the Mediterranean and Middle East, and later the 58th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron flying HH-3E Jolly Green Giant helicopters and HC-130 refueling tankers. For the 4,600 Americans living there at any given time, it was suburbia with a Mediterranean view.

Gaddafi's 1969 revolution changed everything. The new regime demanded the Americans leave, and in 1970 the last U.S. personnel departed. The base was renamed Okba Ben Nafi Airfield after the seventh-century Arab conqueror Uqba ibn Nafi, a pointed historical reference. Soviet military advisors moved in, and the facility became the headquarters of the Libyan Air Force. In April 1986, the United States returned, though not in the way anyone at the old beach club would have recognized: American warplanes bombed the base during Operation El Dorado Canyon, a retaliatory strike against Gaddafi's regime. The airfield that had once housed American families was now an American target.

After the bombing, the base was renamed once more, this time as Mitiga International Airport, and gradually transitioned to civilian use. Passengers now walk through terminals where fighter pilots once briefed, and commercial jets taxi on runways that launched B-24 Liberators and Jolly Green Giants. The Grand Prix circuit is gone. The beach club is gone. The high school, the bowling alley, the shopping mall, all absorbed into a different country's infrastructure. What remains is a piece of North African coastline that has served every major air power of the twentieth century, a place where the history of aviation intersects with the history of empire, and where the control tower has changed hands more often than most airports change their schedules.