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D uring World War II, the U.S. Army Air Corps constructed training bases in Florida to

try to fill the tremendous need for pilots and gunnery crews to fight in Europe. By the end of the war a total of 54 bases had been constructed with thousands of military men and women introduced to the Sunshine State for the first time. Buckingham Army Air Field, just east of Ft. Myers, opened in 1943 as home to the 2117th AAF Base Unit – a Flexible Gun-nery Training Squadron. The air field was built for heavy bombers like the B-17, better known as the “Flying Fortress.” Buckingham’s commanding officer Gen-eral E.B. Lyon stated the goals: “Operate attack missions on Buckingham’s B-17s in the development of student gunners of that base and to teach our own pilots the functions of combat training.”

An airfield was built in Naples to be used by fighter planes flying out to simu-late attacks on the Flying Fortresses com-ing out of Buckingham. Limestone was planned to be the base for the Naples run-ways but was too expensive at the time, so shell from the Calusa Indian mounds of Goodland was purchased from the Pettits and trucked to the location of the current Naples Airport to be mixed with asphalt

and native materials into a 6 inch sub-base with a two inch layer of asphaltic concrete added over the top. After 2 years, the Na-ples Army Air Field was completed on De-cember 23, 1943, at a cost to the govern-ment of $1.5 million dollars.

Young men, who had graduated from Buckingham’s gunnery school, but were inexperienced in combat or aerial gun-nery, were sent up in the air with pilots who, themselves, had just completed flight training. Two planes were typically used: an advanced trainer, the AT-6 (nick-named the “Texan”) which held a pilot in the front cockpit and a gunner in the rear. The Texan’s 550 hp Pratt & Whitney en-gine could reach speeds of 205 mph and it could cruise for 170 miles at 5,000 feet, while the other aircraft typically used was

the B-17 (“Flying Fortress”) a four engine bomber painted in olive drab that usually carried a crew of 8-10. Fully loaded the B-17 weighed up to 72,000 lbs and, as a result, could only make emergency land-ings at the Naples air field.

During the six weeks of training in SW Florida, each pilot was given 3,500 rounds of ammunition to be used, part of which was for the 15 hours of simulated combat attacks on the Flying Fortresses. They would fire 100 rounds from a fixed wing gun at a towed target while flying at 150 mph, the target was a mesh rectangle, 4’ x 20’, covered with colored grease that when hit stained the target.

Being assigned to a Florida air base was not “light duty” - within the first 20 months after the opening of the Naples

field, 20 separate crashes or incidents occurred and over 15 officers lost their lives. During the year 1944, when pilots were flying B-26 medium bombers out of Tampa’s MacDill Air Base, the death rate for simulated combat pilots from DeLand, Vero Beach and Ft. Lauderdale was one per day – prompting the sad phrase: “One -a-day in Tampa Bay.”

The practice range for Southwest Florida was established off the coast from Naples to Cape Romano, an area where

Air tragedy at Hurricane passCOLLIER COUNTY’S LARGEST DISASTER:

COASTAL HISTORY

Craig WoodwardCWoodward@wpl-legal.com

PHOTO CREDIT – MUSEUMOFFLIGHT.ORGThe WW II B -17 “Flying Fortress” flying over the water.

PHOTO CREDIT – ALVIN LEDERERPostcard from Buckingham Army Air Field.

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