World War II Bases and Training in Florida

Florida's military installations grew from eight to more than 170 during the war years, according to the state's Museum of Florida History.

The museum, run by the Florida Department of State, ties the buildup to geography: planes and ships from Florida bases guarded sea lanes in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, and the state was treated as a first line of defense for the southern United States, the Caribbean Basin and the Panama Canal (Museum of Florida History, Military Training in Florida).

The installations covered every service. The Army trained infantry at Camp Blanding near Starke and amphibious troops at Camp Gordon Johnston at Carrabelle. Army Air Force fields included Eglin Field at Valparaiso, Drew and MacDill fields at Tampa, Dale Mabry Field at Tallahassee, Buckingham and Page fields at Fort Myers, Tyndall at Panama City, and airfields at Avon Park, Boca Raton, Homestead, Sarasota and Venice. Major naval bases or naval air stations were established or expanded at Daytona Beach, DeLand, Fort Lauderdale, Green Cove Springs, Jacksonville, Key West, Melbourne, Miami, Pensacola, Richmond, Sanford and Vero Beach, and the Coast Guard and its female auxiliary, the SPARS, set up a training center in St. Augustine (Museum of Florida History).

The Division of Historical Resources counts 248,000 Floridians among the 16 million Americans who served in uniform (Division of Historical Resources).

Pensacola trained naval aviators, Camp Blanding trained infantry, Camp Gordon Johnston and Fort Pierce trained beach landings, and Army airfields such as MacDill and Tyndall trained bomber crews and aerial gunners.

Civilian contractors also trained 14,000 cadet pilots at Lakeland and Avon Park from 1940 to 1945, many of them from Great Britain (Museum of Florida History).

Florida's climate allowed flight training all year, and the Museum of Florida History says perhaps more Navy and Army Air Force pilots and air crews trained in Florida than in any other state.

The cost was real: hundreds of student pilots died in training accidents, and crashes around the Tampa Bay airfields were frequent enough that flyers said "One a Day in Tampa Bay" (Museum of Florida History, Aviation). In the Panhandle, Eglin Field served as an aircraft armament proving ground and research center, and in 1942 Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle trained his pilots there for the raid on Tokyo. Orlando Army Air Field was established in late 1940 to train American pilots in enemy technology and tactics, and B-29 Superfortress crews trained there later in the war; Homestead Army Air Field was established in 1942 as a departure point for aircraft shipped overseas and to train transport crews; and an Officer Candidate School in Miami turned out thousands of so-called Ninety-Day Wonders for the Army Air Force.

Pensacola's numbers are given two ways on the same National Park Service lesson for Pensacola and Escambia County, an American World War II Heritage City: over 28,000 pilots in the narrative and 28,625 pilots in its by-the-numbers box, which also lists 2,775 British and 58 French pilots trained there (National Park Service). The Park Service lesson lists the outlying fields as well: Saufley Field, commissioned as an auxiliary air base on August 26, 1940; Ellyson Field, operating from October 1941; and Corry Field, a ground crew training base whose station held over 2,500 officers, enlisted men and students in 1944.

Troops practiced beach landings at Camp Gordon Johnston on the Gulf coast, about sixty miles southwest of Tallahassee, and at the Navy's Amphibious Training Base at Fort Pierce.

The Museum of Florida History says tens of thousands of soldiers trained at Gordon Johnston, most living in tents or prefabricated barracks with sand floors among snakes, wild hogs, mosquitoes and chiggers; General Omar Bradley, who commanded the 28th Division there, later said whoever picked the site should have been court-martialed (Museum of Florida History, Amphibious). From September 1943 the camp was an Army Service Forces Training Center where small boat crews and amphibian truck companies learned the DUKW, nicknamed the Duck.

The Navy opened the Fort Pierce base in early 1943. The amphibious page counts about 15,000 Army, Navy and Marine personnel there, including the Underwater Demolition Teams known as Frogmen, while the museum's overview page says some 150,000 Navy, Marine Corps and Army personnel passed through the amphibious training (amphibious page; overview page). Both figures come from the same state museum; neither page explains the difference.

Camp Blanding in Clay County grew from about 30,000 acres to one of the largest facilities of its kind after the government bought or leased 140,000 more acres in 1940 and 1941.

The State Armory Board picked the site in the late 1930s as a Florida National Guard training ground and named it for Major General Albert Blanding; construction began in 1939 for several thousand troops (Museum of Florida History, Land Warfare). Nine infantry divisions and other units trained there, and late in the war it became an Infantry Replacement Training Center preparing soldiers to fill gaps in units that lost men in combat. The museum says it trained more men than any other training facility in the state, that perhaps as many as 800,000 servicemen passed through it, and that after the war it went back to the Florida National Guard.

The state's Florida World War II Heritage Trail guidebook lists more than 150 World War II sites and military assets in 74 Florida cities from Pensacola to Key West.

The 72-page guide was produced by the Division of Historical Resources with the Florida Department of Veterans Affairs World War II Memorial Project and is available to read online or download as a PDF from the division's page (Division of Historical Resources, World War II Heritage Trail). Several of the bases remain active installations: MacDill now hosts U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command (MacDill AFB), and Tyndall still trains foreign students, now in weapons controller courses, a tradition that began in 1943 with French gunnery students (Tyndall AFB).

The Park Service lesson notes that one wartime naval air station in western Escambia County, commissioned on November 18, 1942 and decommissioned in 1946, is now the Blue Angel Recreation Park (National Park Service). The Florida military bases overview covers the installations that are still open.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by re-reading four Museum of Florida History training pages, the Division of Historical Resources heritage trail page, the Park Service Pensacola lesson, and the MacDill and Tyndall base histories.