USAF OCS Class 62-A
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History of OCS

 


For a brief time in the fall of 1946, the Air Training Command sought to relocate OCS elsewhere, but apparently it could not arrange the move. The command signaled its resignation to keeping OCS at Lackland Air Base (so named on I I July 1947) by allowing a revision of the course in early 1947, resulting in its extension from four to six months in length. As part of a major reorganization of the recently constituted United States Air Force, the ATC organized the 3700th Officer Candidate Training Group (OCTG), effective 26 August 1948. The group took up the officer candidate training mission and continued to utilize the USAF Officer Candidate School named activity to describe its mission.

After this transition year, the officer candidate-training program continued to graduate newly commissioned reserve officers at a rate of 300-600 per year for the next 16 years. (The Korean War saw a temporary increase in OCS production: 970 graduates in 1951; 1,494 in 1952; 2,085 in 1953.) The curriculum remained substantially the same, focusing on the development and evaluation of six qualities: job knowledge, cooperation, leadership, reliability and personal responsibility, judgment, and career potential. Some notable content and procedural changes did occur. The West Point-type class system, with its attendant hazing, was subordinated in 1947 to a student organization into flights, squadrons, and groups as a means for inculcating military discipline and command.

Class 1949-A, which began training in January, was notable because it included both black and women candidates, thus putting the Officer Candidate School in the forefront of Air Force racial and sexual integration. Only late in 1949 did the service inactivate all exclusively black units. Beginning with 6 black males, 332 white males, and 19 Women in the Air Force (WAFs), the class lost 103 students, including three women who resigned when they decided to marry. The WAF participated fully in all training and activity, with two exceptions. They had four separate hours of sanitation and first aid instruction, and the live firing portion of small arms training was voluntary for them.

LACKLAND's EXPANSION IN THE 1950s

The Cold War era, firmly installed by the 1948-1949 Berlin Blockade and resulting allied airlift and by the 1950-1953 Korean War, greatly affected Lackland Air Force Base (the installation being so named on 3 February 1948). Its huge square-foot capacity in hundreds of temporary barracks and classrooms constructed during World War II and its extensive acreage in ranges, parade fields, drill pads, and open spaces made Lackland a likely candidate when the Air Force needed a site for new or transferred training missions. In addition to the base's main mission as the Air Force's principal basic military training facility, Lackland gained several initial officer indoctrination missions in the early 1950s to add to its officer candidate training.

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