Naval Air Station Vero Beach in World War II — Vero Beach, Florida

Naval Air Station Vero Beach was a World War II flight training base that the U.S. Navy built on top of the small city airport west of downtown Vero Beach. The state historical marker at the airport records that the station was commissioned on 24 November 1942 to provide Navy and Marine flight training base for over 2700 men, 300 WAVES and women Marines. For a city that the O'Malley family history describes as having about 3,000 residents a few years later, that was a second town planted on its northwest edge.

The station lasted less than five years. Its pilots trained first on dive bombers and finally as night fighter crews, and its runways, hangars and barracks outlived the war. The airfield went back to the City of Vero Beach and became today's Vero Beach Regional Airport, and in 1948 the empty Navy barracks next to it became Dodgertown, the spring training camp of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Much of the later history of the city's airport, its baseball complex and its aircraft industry grew out of the ground the Navy cleared in 1942.

Before the war the field was modest. The Museum of Florida History describes it as originally a small municipal airport with refueling and maintenance use by Eastern Airlines, and says this field became NAS Vero Beach in November 1942. The City of Vero Beach historic preservation history places the wartime station north-west of the original town and notes that the Navy performed many training exercises off the coast.

The takeover was fast and large. The O'Malley family's history of Dodgertown says the nearly 2500-acre base and adjacent streets were developed quickly in 1942 after the Vero Beach Municipal Airport was condemned for federal takeover. The state marker gives the same scale from the airport's side: the previously city-owned airport expanded from 100 acres to 2500 acres, with self-supporting facilities for a population equal to the size of Vero Beach itself. The O'Malley history also describes the two-story wooden barracks the Navy left beside the old Vero runways, buildings that would matter a great deal after 1946.

The mission at Vero Beach changed several times. According to the marker, the purpose of the NAS was constantly revised from originally training dive-bomber pilots to daytime pilots and ultimately to nighttime fighter pilots. The marker counts almost 200 men who received training on the Brewster SB2A Buccaneer and 1400 men on the Grumman F4F Wildcat, F6F Hellcat and F7F Tigercat. The Museum of Florida History adds that NAS Vero Beach also saw use as a Marine Air Squadron Base, and it dates the final shift precisely: in December 1944 the mission of the field changed to night fighter training using F6F and F7F aircraft.

Keeping aircraft flying was a constant problem. The marker notes that the ingenuity of maintenance crews was required because of a shortage of repair parts. Training also carried a cost in lives. The marker states that records show over 100 lives lost in flight training accidents at the Vero Beach station, and the Jackie Robinson Training Complex timeline, quoting the engineer and historian George W. Gross, puts the figure at 105.

The pace was heavy right up to the end of the war. Training diminished after VJ Day, 14 August 1945, but the marker records that as of 2 September 1945, 237,102 hours of flight time had been provided since the first flight from Vero Beach in December 1942.

The station reached well beyond its own fence line. The Museum of Florida History lists Witham Field in Stuart, along with fields at Roseland, Sebastian and Fort Pierce, as auxiliary sites tied to NAS Vero Beach, so student pilots based in Vero Beach practiced landings across the Treasure Coast. Air-sea rescue of downed pilots was provided from Fort Pierce, a reminder that much of the flying took place over the Atlantic east of the Vero Beach shoreline.

Housing spilled into the town as well. The museum records that base personnel were quartered in the Beachland Hotel, The Sebastian Inn and other facilities in the community, which placed sailors, Marines and WAVES in hotel rooms on the Vero Beach barrier island and up the coast toward Sebastian. The Museum of Florida History also records that WAVES and women Marines trained at the Vero Beach field, alongside the Naval and Marine aviators who made up most of the station's population.

The wind down took more than a year and is dated slightly differently by different sources. The MLB timeline records that on May 10, 1946, the City of Vero Beach received the land and training facility back from the U.S. Government, on the condition that any use of the facilities was subject to federal approval and that money from use or sale of the airbase property be spent only on flight facilities. By June 1946 all training had ceased, and the base was left with a minimum crew of 30 civilian workers and 25 Navy men. The state marker likewise says the Vero Beach NAS was placed in caretaker status in June 1946 and deeded back to the city. The O'Malley family history gives the formal steps: the base was transferred from the Navy on March 23, 1947, and on April 12 that year to the city, and the last personnel left when it closed on August 23, 1947.

The city then had a large airport and a cluster of empty barracks to maintain. The answer came from baseball. The Baseball and Dodgertown marker states that, originally part of a World War II Naval Air Station, Dodgertown became the spring training home of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948. The MLB timeline adds that more than 600 players were housed in the former U.S. Naval Air Station barracks at Dodgertown that first spring, living on the old base beside the Vero Beach airport rather than in town.

Much of the station's footprint is still in use. The Museum of Florida History notes that the former NAS site serves today as the Vero Beach Municipal Airport and home to Piper Aircraft, and that two WWII era buildings remain in private use in the airport complex. The city history adds that part of the former station property is now occupied by the airport and Historic Dodgertown, the complex now known as the Jackie Robinson Training Complex.

Memorials sit on the airport grounds. The state marker, U.S. Naval Station, Vero Beach, World War II, was placed in 2000 at the site of the main hangar and control tower, and the Museum of Florida History says it was dedicated in January 2000 to the memory of the men and women who trained there. On August 18, 2017, Vero Beach Regional Airport held a ribbon cutting in its terminal lobby, as reported by the Indian River Guardian, to commemorate the airport's World War II legacy and a display of the flight gear of Lieutenant John Carney, a Navy pilot trainee at Vero Beach Naval Air Station. The Indian River County Historical Society arranged for those artifacts to be preserved in the main terminal of the city-owned airport.