Naval Air Station Corpus Christi and the Wings of a War

In March nineteen forty-one, nine months before Pearl Harbor, a brand-new naval installation opened on the south side of Corpus Christi Bay. The seventy-fifth Congress had authorized it three years earlier, citing what the Navy called a grave situation: the United States had almost no capacity to train carrier pilots at scale. Naval Air Station Corpus Christi was commissioned on March twelfth, nineteen forty-one, and flew its first training mission on May fifth.

Within months of Pearl Harbor, the training rate nearly doubled. By nineteen forty-four, the station had become the largest naval aviation training facility in the world. It covered twenty thousand acres. It had nearly a thousand hangars, shops, barracks, warehouses, and support buildings. At its peak, it trained more than three hundred student pilots a month. By the end of the war, more than thirty-five thousand naval aviators had earned their wings at Corpus Christi.

The trainees came from more than a dozen countries, including Canada, England, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. Women serving in the WAVES, the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, worked at the station as link trainer instructors, air traffic controllers, pressure chamber technicians, and gunnery instructors. Among the Americans who trained here before the war ended was a young Navy pilot from Connecticut named George Herbert Walker Bush, who would later become the forty-first President of the United States. John Glenn, future astronaut and Senator from Ohio, also trained at facilities connected to the Corpus Christi complex.

The station is still active today. When you see the Navy aircraft overhead in this part of South Texas, some things have not changed since nineteen forty-one.