b'U . S .M i l i t a r yThe bill signed by FDR funded 12 Naval Air Stations throughout the country, theAbove/Left: Japanese naval aircraft attacked the U.S. Navys Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor, largest of which was the 20,000-acre facility in Corpus Christi, in what would be- Hawaii, on December 7, 1941; Above/Right: President Franklin D. Roosevelts day which live in infamy come the largest naval air training base in the world. In addition to the main facilityspeech before Congress, the next day; Below L to R: Rep. Richard Kleberg, former Corpus Christi Mayor on Flour Bluff, multiple auxiliary airfields were constructed throughout the CoastalRoy Miller, Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson in Naval uniform; Bottom: N3N-3 trainers at NAS Corpus Christi, 1942.Bend where specialized training was conducted. Waldron and Cabaniss Fields, lo-cated in Flour Bluff and at Saratoga and Crosstown, respectively, are still used for touch-and-go training today. Rodd Field, once located at the end of what is todays Rodd Field Road, past Yorktown, was once the site of hundreds of N3N-3 Yellow Peril bi-planes taking off and landing, one after another, starting in 1942, but was immediately cleared and abandoned after the war ended. Chase Field near Beeville was leased by the Navy to support the WWII training mis-sion, closed then reopened in support of jet training for the Korean War, and later Vietnam, during which the base was designated a full NAS in 1968. Chase Field was decommissioned in the 1990s, and is today a private aviation facility and industrial park. Kingsville Naval Air Auxiliary Station (NAAS) was commissioned in 1942, also to support NASCC, and was transitioned into a primary jet training base during Korea, and like Chase Field, was upgraded to full NAS status in 1968but unlike Chase Field, NAS Kingsville is today a fully operational Navy jet training base.For Corpus Christians who have always wondered why Airline Road runs in an odd, diagonal direction as compared to the other thoroughfares that cross SPID, the an-swer is aviation guidance. Airline runs in a precise north/south, or 0 to 180 route, as a guide for aviators in training, long before satellites. During WWII, the neighbor-hood known as Peary Place off Paul Jones Avenue, was a radar training base, complete with barracks, and Ward Island, where TAMUCC is now, was the site of a top secret radar stationone could face court-martial for uttering the word radar off-base.Construction on NAS Corpus Christi started just ten days after it was funded, and the City of Corpus Christi, seeing the economic boom that the new facility would bring, gave 640 acres of undeveloped land to the Navy, as well as $2 million for con-struction. Houston-based Brown & Root, along with famed builder Henry Kaisers Columbia of California construction company, were awarded the contract to build the massive, new base, at a cost that started at $24 million, and ended up at over $100 million ($3 billion today).One of the Navys most senior and battle-tested leaders was brought in to manage the project, Vice Admiral Alva Bernhard, who commanded multiple warships during World War I, had trained and became one of the Navys first aviators in 1927, and whose immediately prior assignment was skipper of the first USS Lexington (CV-2), Americas second aircraft carrier that was later lost in 1942 at the Battle of the Coral Sea. More than 9,000 construction workers and support personnel were 70% com-plete on the base when it was dedicated nine months later, on March 11, 1941.96THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE TheCoastalBend.com'