by Randy Kambic

Ponce de León, Thomas Edison, and Charles Lindbergh are just three of the many historic figures our region has attracted. But a whole host of not-so-famous folks have also come to these parts and made an impact on our local and national history, like the many men who prepared for World War II duties in Southwest Florida.

Spanning just a little more than ninety miles were six facilities that trained more than eighty thousand for bomber pilot and crew, fighter pilot, and mechanic duties?Venice Army Airfield (now a municipal airport), Punta Gorda Army Airfield (now Charlotte County Airport), Buckingham Field Gunnery School, Fort Myers Army Air Base (renamed Page Field in 1942), Immokalee Regional Airport, and Naples Airdome (now Naples Municipal Airport). All but one did not exist before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Besides offering flat, open spaces for new runways and facilities plus low, steady winds and predominantly sunshine-drenched skies for optimum conditions, this region became such an active training area due to its rich and colorful early aviation history.

The Wright Brothers considered Pine Island before choosing Kitty Hawk as the site for their first flight. The first-ever commercial flight was in 1914 in a seaplane from St. Petersburg to Tampa, with a dip south for a stop in Punta Gorda. During the barnstorming phenomenon of the 1930s, Phil Seward drew crowds to a grass strip in Arcadia, twenty-five miles northeast of Punta Gorda, tossing Roscoe the chicken out of his Ford tri-motor plane. And Lucky Lindy used the beaches, golf courses, and even present-day Sixth Avenue South in Naples as landing strips.

While the other four airports and gunnery school were built immediately after Pearl Harbor, the Page Field site was already a viable airport. In 1924, Lee County bought the 160 acres in Fort Myers that became Page Field, named for town resident and World War I flying ace Capt. Richard Channing Moore Page. The first to become an officer in the Army Air Corps after training at Carlstrom Field in Arcadia, Page won the Distinguished Service Cross by shooting down three German planes and possibly two more. He died along with two others when his Curtis Seagull crashed near Everglades City in October of 1920.

Page Field helped connect Fort Myers to other cities in Florida. Three, all-metal Ford-Stout “Tin Goose” planes began regular mail service between Tampa, Fort Myers, and Miami in 1926. Eight years later, National Airlines began connecting the three cities with commercial and mail service. The airport went into a hiatus in 1938 due to damage to the sod runways from frequent summertime rainfalls. Service resumed after the Works Progress Administration built three concrete runways in 1940.

By March of 1942, four hundred men and supplies from the 98th Bombardment Group arrived at Page Field, followed by the 93rd and 336th bomber groups. Jimmy Doolittle tested his concept of using stripped-down bombers there, before doing principal training at Eglin Field near Pensacola prior to the famous raid on Japan in April of 1942. Advanced fighter-pilot training in Bell P-39s, P-47s, P-40s, and P-51s ensued at Page in early 1943, and by a year later, 276 officers and 1,393 enlisted men were stationed there. Brigadier Gen. Paul Tibbets trained his unit at Page Field before it dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There were at least six crashes of Page planes during the war. Russian flight instructors were trained on P-40s there early in the war before returning to their homeland, and in February of 1945, 225 German POWs were interned at the facility.

Some six thousand acres of swampland in Buckingham were leased to the Army Air Corps in 1942. Officially activated in July of 1942 as Buckingham Field, it ultimately contained 483 buildings including mess halls, hangars, barracks, and hospitals, training fifty thousand airmen as gunners for T-6, RP-63, B-17 Flying Fortress, and B-24 Liberator planes.

Marco and Sanibel islands were used as targets for machine-gun and bombing practice, with bomb casings filled with enough sand to reach one hundred pounds. Pilots took aim at designated uninhabited areas of the islands; radio operators stationed there also cleared beaches ahead of time. According to George Speidell, trustee at the Military Heritage Museum in Punta Gorda, “mini-bombs,” which matched the weight and aerodynamics of larger bombs that would be used in actual fighter-plane combat, were loaded with shotgun shells and powder that would explode and dispense so accuracy could be monitored.

Another popular target area was the then-open land just southeast of Punta Gorda (now Babcock Ranch and the Cecil M. Webb Wildlife Management Area). Pilots tried to drop bombs within four-foot-by-eight-foot plywood-bordered areas that “left behind craters that fill up with water to this day after rain,” according to local historian Lindsey Williams.

At Buckingham, shotguns were used before air-to-air and air-to-surface gunnery training equipment was installed. Ground-based instruction used moving target ranges and gunnery simulators. Buckingham and Page Field sometimes worked together, with Page-based fighters doing mock attacks on Buckingham-based bombers, often over the Gulf of Mexico?“our firing range,” according to ninety-one-year-old Oscar Corbin of Fort Myers, who served as an instructor at Buckingham. “Certain areas were designated [for training],” he says. “Fishing boats had to stay out as we’d fire over them.”

He recounts a one-wheel landing (due to mechanical failure) from a training flight he flew on. “The first guy I saw on the runway was a baby doctor,” says Corbin. “Even though he was a pediatrician, he was running out to us in case someone got hurt.”

Bombers from Buckingham also got some on-the-job training over the water, sinking three German U-boats in the Gulf. Some Buckingham-trained servicemen took part in the air raid of the Ploesti oil fields and refineries in Romania on August 1, 1943, one of the most deadly in the war. Of 1,733 men in 178 planes that took part, 446 were killed.

The proper alignment of machine guns on fighter planes was attained in Punta Gorda by having stationary planes fire at a lean-to building filled with sand, remnants of which remain today. The results were evaluated “to make sure [bullets from both wings] converged properly for maximum accuracy” says Speidell, with alterations “sometimes made with the whack of a hammer.”

Jack Miller, a native of Iron Mountain, Michigan, who resides in Englewood, trained in P-51s at Punta Gorda. As a member of the 354th Pioneer Mustang Group, he was shot down twice over France, the second time in September of 1944 after making three kills in five minutes of dog-fight combat. Before he was sent to Stalag Luft 1 prison near Barth, Germany, he led a wine toast to Franklin D. Roosevelt during a dinner thrown for him by his captors, after they had done the same for Hitler. His inmates attempted a tunnel escape, similar to what was depicted in The Great Escape starring Steve McQueen, but it was thwarted. By the time his camp was liberated by advancing Russians in May of 1945, he weighed just 148 pounds, down from 215.

The Punta Gorda airfield was busiest from December of 1943 through the following April when 103 planes (sixty-six of them P-40 fighters) used three separate asphalt runways, each 150 feet wide and five thousand feet long. The Naples airfield was activated in 1943 and reached several hundred men training in seventy-five aircraft. Venice Army Airfield was primarily used to train mechanics to repair Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney fighter plane engines, along with fighter-pilot training. Immokalee Regional Airport provided bomber training. The worst loss of life during the war at any of the Southwest Florida facilities was from a mid-air collision of a bomber and fighter from the Naples airfield. All ten crew members on the bomber died, but the pilot of the fighter plane parachuted to safety.

The men training here were putting their lives on the line for their country, and several big names visited the soldiers to show their support. During USO tour stops, Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, and Louis Armstrong entertained servicemen in Fort Myers. Mina Edison, widow of the preeminent inventor, was given a tour of Page Field in 1942 and Buckingham in 1945, where she asked for and was granted permission to shoot off a round at a moving target. She also had lunch with soldiers at the mess hall (which she preferred to dining at the officers’ club). She then invited twenty-five GIs to her home for a Sunday lunch and swimming in the pool. In January of 1944, former heavyweight boxing champion and then–Army sergeant Max Baer refereed matches and gave advice on exercising.

The influx of so many GIs boosted the local economy, as “anything you had that you wanted to sell, any service you could provide, you did,” notes Victor Zarick, a historian and educator at the Southwest Florida Museum of History in Fort Myers. Many of these veterans returned after the war to buy homes and work in the area.

All six facilities in Southwest Florida were transferred to local cities and counties after the war, and many barracks were turned into affordable housing. They all became viable civilian airports, with commercial, charter, fractional-ownership, and private service, with the exception of Buckingham, which became the Lee County Mosquito Control District airfield. Immokalee Regional Airport also serves as a business enterprise zone. Folks can still get flight training at most of the facilities, and sightseeing flights are offered at the Naples and Page Field airports.

The area’s role in World War II aviation training is showcased with permanent exhibits at the Military Heritage Museum and the Southwest Florida Museum of History and heralded annually at the Florida International Air Show at Charlotte County Airport. It’s also highlighted by many memorials, including those at Heritage Park in Venice, at Charlotte County Airport, and in Centennial Park in Fort Myers.

But an even easier way to show appreciation for these members of the Greatest Generation? The next time you look up at our beautiful clear skies, take a moment to remember the many young men who flew this “wild blue yonder” and made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of future generations.

Randy Kambic has had a lifelong interest in history, including the World War II era, and would like to thank the many people who provided their expert comments, information, and photos to help make this story possible.