Naval Air Station Jacksonville and the Military City
Near Jacksonville, Florida
In the fall of nineteen forty, with Europe already at war and American involvement growing more likely by the month, the United States Navy began construction on a major air station on the west bank of the St. Johns River, about eight miles south of the Jacksonville city center. Naval Air Station Jacksonville was commissioned in October of nineteen forty, and within two years it was training hundreds of naval aviators a month, processing them through an accelerated program designed to produce combat-ready pilots faster than any previous American military institution had attempted.
The base transformed Jacksonville in ways that went far beyond the wartime economy. Tens of thousands of servicemen passed through the city during the war years, many of them seeing Jacksonville for the first time and making mental notes about a place that had warm winters, naval infrastructure, and a certain unhurried quality that the northern industrial cities they came from did not offer. A significant number came back after the war as civilians, bringing families and ambitions and a willingness to settle in a city that had treated them reasonably well as servicemen.
The military presence around Jacksonville today includes Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Naval Station Mayport on the barrier island east of the city, and a substantial community of veterans and active-duty personnel that shapes local politics, economics, and culture in ways that are not always visible on the surface. The Jacksonville metro area is home to one of the largest concentrations of active-duty military and veteran populations in the southeastern United States. The base that was built in a hurry in nineteen forty is still very much in operation, still training aviators, still sending aircraft out over the Atlantic, still defining a large part of what kind of city Jacksonville is.
