French Wikipedia says the French naval air station of Lartigue, near the village of Tafaraoui whose name it first carried, operated from 1940 to 1964. It was named after Rear Admiral Jean Lartigue, killed in a German bombing raid on Rochefort. The field was first assigned to the air force and then passed to the navy, which based Dewoitine D.520 fighters and Martin 167 bombers there; the Martins gave way to LeO 45s in 1941.

After the Allied landings the field was occupied by the US Army Air Forces, and an Allied Coastal Command centre was set up there. French naval aviation returned after the war; French Wikipedia records that its 22F flotilla eventually left Lartigue for Nîmes, but the date is missing from the article. The base outlived Algerian independence in 1962 by two years. French Wikipedia says the former Lartigue base was recovered by the People’s National Army in 1964.

Operation Torch, the Allied landing in French North Africa, gave the 2nd Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry, the most ambitious task of its first day: to fly from England, across Spain, and seize the airfields at Tafaraoui and La Sénia outside Oran. It was the US Army’s first combat parachute operation of the war, and the distance — about 1,500 miles, according to the regiment’s history — was at the edge of what the C-47 could do.

It went badly. The Operation Torch article says poor weather over Spain and the extreme range scattered the formation, and 30 of the 37 transports landed in the dry salt lake west of the objective. One pilot became disoriented and landed at Gibraltar, two came down in French Morocco and three in Spanish Morocco, where another dropped its paratroopers by mistake; 67 Americans were interned by Franco’s forces until February 1943. The 509th’s own article counts 39 C-47s, says only ten actually dropped their troops and that 28, nearly out of fuel, landed on the Sebkha d’Oran. The two Wikipedia articles do not agree on the numbers, and neither is an official count.

The paratroopers marched overland to their objective. Tafaraoui and La Sénia were taken, but the Operation Torch article concludes that the airborne role in the landings was minimal. The same morning, aircraft from three British carriers attacked the two airfields and destroyed seventy aircraft that the article describes as armed and ready to take off.

Once taken, Tafaraoui became, in English Wikipedia’s words, a major Twelfth Air Force base of operations in the North African campaign. Drawing on the US Air Force Historical Research Agency, it lists the arrivals: the 1st Fighter Group with P-38 Lightnings from 11 to 20 November 1942, the 14th Fighter Group on 14 November, the 62nd Troop Carrier Group with C-47s from 14 to 16 November, the 68th Observation Group with A-20s on 16 November and the 319th Bombardment Group with B-26 Marauders on 17 November. The 31st Fighter Group flew Spitfires from the field, and B-17s and B-25s passed through, among them the B-17 of General Jimmy Doolittle.

Several of these stays were short — the 1st Fighter Group’s lasted nine days, the 62nd Troop Carrier Group’s two — as the Allied air forces moved east towards Tunisia. French Wikipedia says the Americans also set up an Allied Coastal Command centre on the field; after the war it was again the French navy’s Lartigue.

Algeria needed its own flying school. Its first pilots had trained abroad during the war of independence, and the early air force relied on Egyptian and Soviet instruction. English Wikipedia says the air base of Tafraoui, in the 2nd Military Region, was built in 1966 as an air officers’ school (EOA) and that the airport was established that year as an air base and training ground; French Wikipedia says the army recovered the base in 1964. The two dates may describe the handover and the opening of the school; the sources do not say.

In 1977, French Wikipedia says, the base took the status of École supérieure de l’Air, training pilots, engineers and technicians. The Library of Congress country study of 1993 described a pilot training school eventually established at Tafraoui near Oran, and the Air Force Academy and a technical training school at the same complex. The Algerian government publishes no fleet or unit list for the school, and none is reproduced here.