Naval Air Station Banana River, the seaplane base that became Patrick

The base at Patrick began as a Navy seaplane base. During World War II, according to the Air Force Space and Missile Museum’s history of the base, the site south of Cocoa Beach was the Banana River Naval Air Station. Navy photographs from March 1943 show Martin PBM Mariner flying boats in its hangar and in the air nearby.

The seaplane base

The Navy’s own photographs are the best record of what the station looked like at its height. In March 1943 the photographer Edward Steichen photographed sailors gathered under a flying boat in the station’s PBM hangar, and another Navy photograph from the same month shows four Mariners in flight near the station, two older PBM-1s without wing floats and two newer PBM-3s with them.

The war years

The station predates America’s entry into the war by more than a year. The Museum of Florida History’s entry for it says NAS Banana River was authorized by the Naval Expansion Act of 1938 and commissioned on October 1, 1940, as a sub-base of NAS Jacksonville. When the United States went to war in December 1941, the Navy flew anti-submarine patrols along the Florida coast in PBM Mariners based here. In March 1942 the PBMs went back to training and OS2U Kingfisher seaplanes took the patrols over. Landing strips went in during 1943, so land planes could use the station too, and Free French naval officers trained in PBMs here.

It was a busy place. The museum lists a blimp detachment, an aviation navigation school, an experimental unit called Project Baker, and a major aircraft repair shop, and late in the war a small detachment of German prisoners from Camp Blanding worked cleanup details. At its peak the station had 278 aircraft, 587 civilian employees and more than 2,800 officers and men.

Training 49

The station’s worst night came after the war ended. On December 5, 1945, five Navy Avengers on a training flight out of Fort Lauderdale, Flight 19, went missing over the Bahamas. Two PBM-5 Mariners at Banana River were preparing for a routine night navigation flight and were switched to the search, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command’s account of the board of inquiry record. Both were airborne by 7:27 p.m. At 7:30 one of them, “Training 49,” flown by Lt. (j.g.) Walter G. Jeffrey with three pilots and ten aircrewmen aboard, made its last radio call. At 7:50 the tanker Gaines Mills saw a burst of flames leaping 100 feet high off the coast, then passed through a pool of oil. It searched with its lights and found no one.

The board never fixed the cause. NHHC notes that PBMs were prone to gasoline fumes collecting in their bilges, and that the type’s nickname was “the flying gas tank.” It calls Flight 19 the most significant event behind the Bermuda Triangle myth. The thirteen men from Banana River are the part of it that’s usually left out.

From Navy to Air Force

The museum’s history says it was inactivated in 1947, and NASA’s history of the first Cape launch describes it in 1950 as “an abandoned naval base.” Then the missile program needed it. The sequence, from the museum’s history:

Date	Event
1947	Banana River Naval Air Station inactivated
September 1, 1948	The Navy transfers the station to the Air Force
June 10, 1949	Renamed the Joint Long Range Proving Ground Base
August 1, 1950	Renamed Patrick Air Force Base, for Maj. Gen. Mason M. Patrick

The Florida State University study done for NASA in 1966 explains why. It traces the county’s growth to “the 1948 decision to locate the United States long range guided missile program on Cape Canaveral.” The Air Force took over the naval air station as the base for the launch area and as headquarters of what became the Eastern Test Range, a range that ran almost 10,000 miles into the Indian Ocean. NASA’s account of the choice of Cape Canaveral names the abandoned base, along with the area’s low population, as one of the two reasons the site was picked.

The first launch

The base was barely renamed when the range started work. On July 24, 1950, the first rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, a two-stage V-2 and WAC Corporal called Bumper 8. That story is on our Bumper page, and what the range did to the county around it is on Brevard in the space boom.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon