Seventy-Five Years Ago: Beating Plowshares into Planes, Part 2

As the nation girded itself for total war at the beginning of the 1940s, ten stark white concrete triangular forms appeared among the irregular patchwork of farm fields and woods in the Tidewater region and along the Mid-Atlantic coast. The last of them, all Naval Air Auxiliary Stations under the administrative management of Hampton Roads Naval Air Center, was located at the small town of Oceana, which was the second-to-last stop on the Norfolk-Southern railway line that ended at Virginia Beach.

Although it was the last Naval Air Auxiliary Station (NAAS) in the Hampton Roads area to open during World War II, NAAS Oceana (Seen here in 1944) expanded by leaps and bounds after its commissioning on August 17, 1943.  The total area of runways and support areas that existed just the year before are shaded blue on the photograph below. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

Despite a reputation founded upon fighters, the first aircraft to call NAAS Oceana home were patrol aircraft, namely Consolidated PB4Y-1 Liberators and PB4Y-2 Privateers, dedicated to protecting the sea lanes from the continuing depredations of German U-boats, which were down by this time in 1943, but were not out. 

 
NAAS Oceana continued to expand after the war.  It was designated a naval air station on April 1, 1952, and achieved the designation of master jet base in 1957. By the the early-1990s, it had grown to over 16 times its original size. Base realignment and closure activities since then have brought even more commands and functions to the sprawling 5,916-acre facility.  

Of course, not all of the airfields created in the area during the war thrived nearly as well, or at all, yet some of them serve diverse, interesting, and even mysterious functions today.  Here are a few of them.

NAAF Pungo, just south of NAAF Oceana, as it appeared on May 23, 1945. It was originally established in March 1941 on 441 acres northeast of the town of Pungo in Princess Anne County (now the City of Virginia Beach), and after training at least 24 Wildcat and Avenger squadrons during World War II was sold to Atlantic Flight Services. Although that business failed, according to Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields, some of the land around the runways reverted to farmland, a large berm there became the nucleus of the Virginia Beach Rifle and Pistol Club, and during the 1960s, the Coast Guard established a radio transmitter site on the property.  (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

NAAF Elizabeth City had been officially commissioned into naval service on March 6, 1943, but by the time this picture was taken on May 22, 1945, the Coast Guard presence loomed large, as can be seen on the roof of the large hangar at the center of the photograph.  Today, Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City is the service's largest. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

NAAS Franklin was commissioned on March 8, 1943, approximately two months after the Navy leased Franklin Municipal Airport from the city.  It proved to be a much better facility for the Hampton Roads Naval Air Center to base its Acceptance and Delivery Unit than its earlier location at muddy NAAS Monogram, northwest of Franklin on the banks of the Nansemond River. After making a number of improvements, such as adding barracks to house hundreds of temporarily-attached squadron personnel and adding a 4,200-foot runway, the facility was returned to the city and exists today as Franklin Municipal-John Beverly Rose airport.  (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

NAAS Chincoteague, seen here in September 1943, was commissioned into naval service a little over six months before. It now part of the National Air and Space Administration's Wallops Flight Facility, yet the Navy still conducts Field Carrier Landing Practice (FCLP) there.  (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

NAAS Fentress, commissioned on April 15, 1943, is the only one among the nine other fields created during World War II to ease the pressure on NAS Norfolk to help train personnel for deployment that has has retained much of its original mission as a Naval  Auxiliary Landing Field (NALF). The original runways were woefully insufficient for the task after jet aircraft began to enter naval service en masse during the 1950s, so a runway measuring over 8,000 feet was added. (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

A U.S. Geological Survey image of NALF Fentress taken in April 1990.  (Wikimedia Commons)

Navy and local officials break ground for NAS Harvey Point, North Carolina, in 1958, resurrecting the former PBM Mariner seaplane base, which had been deactivated 12 years earlier, as the new home of the experimental Martin P6M Seamaster.  The Seamaster program was cancelled in 1959, yet the Navy converted the facility for other purposes, and it now exists as the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity. Although it has successfully kept itself out of the news for many years, the former seaplane station at Harvey Point has played an important role in recent years for, among other things, training special operations forces, most notably when it was reported that Naval Special Warfare Development Group Sailors practiced there on a full-scale mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound in Pakistan before the successful mission was carried out in 2011, ending the biggest manhunt in United States History.