Naval Air Station Corpus Christi

The station went up fast. President Roosevelt signed a $25 million appropriation on June 13, 1940, and construction began June 30. At the peak, on January 14, 1941, 9,348 people were at work, with a weekly payroll of $305,125. Crews laid a 20-mile railroad in 35 days, a 980-foot rail-and-highway bridge and a 400-foot trestle across Oso Bay. The Secretary of the Navy dedicated the base on March 12, 1941. By 1945 the Navy had built 997 hangars and other buildings, at a cost above $100 million. The Blue Angels were based here from 1949 to 1955.

What the plaque says

Naval Air Station Corpus Christi After the fall of France to Germany in June 1940, there was an increasing possibility of United States involvement in World War II, and an urgent need for naval aviators and naval air stations to train them. Coastal south Texas was considered an ideal location for its flat terrain, suitable weather for year-round flying, ready availability of fuel and seaplane training access. Subsequently, construction began and Naval Air Station Corpus Christi (NAS-CC) was commissioned on March 12, 1941. The first cadets began arriving in March 1941 and received their wings on November 1, only weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Before World War II ended, NAS-CC exceeded all other airfields, graduating 35,000 aviators, and became known as "the University of the Air." Notable WWII pilots who received their wings at NAS-CC included later President George H. W. Bush, and later astronaut and Senator John Glenn. In addition to Americans, trainees came from Canada, England, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. Scores of W.A.V.E.S. (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) served at NAS-CC and its auxiliary fields as link trainer instructors, pressure chamber technicians, air traffic controllers and gunnery instructors. In addition to the main station, auxiliary airfields were added at Rodd Field (primary flight training), Cabaniss and Cuddihy (intermediate flight training), Kingsville (advanced flight training, fighters and dive bombers), Waldron (torpedo bombers) and Chase Field in Beeville (specializing in instrument flying). Twenty-five additional outlying practice landing fields ("p-fields") dotted the surrounding countryside. In 1945, NAS-CC established a camp for German prisoners of war. NAS-CC served as a vital military training facility and as a catalyst of postwar economic activity in the area. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mustang Island State Park — 6.9 mi
  More than five miles of Gulf beach on a barrier island named for wild horses, with beach camping on the sand and a twenty-mile paddling trail on the bay side.
• Mirador de la Flor — 11 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 12 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 12 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• German POW Camp at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi — steps away
• Flour Bluff — steps away
• Sunshine Cemetery — 4.1 mi
• Ward Island — 4.2 mi