Abstract
This paper traces Tampa Bay’s military development across the two World Wars, from the modest aviation and coastal-defense role of the First World War to the founding and wartime expansion of MacDill Field, the installation that would define the region’s modern military standing. It argues that the First World War established Florida’s suitability as a place for military aviation and drew federal attention to the defense of the Gulf coast, and that the pre-war buildup of the late 1930s converted that interest into a permanent base at Tampa Bay. It examines MacDill’s role in training bomber crews—on the B-17, the B-26 Marauder with its notorious “one a day in Tampa Bay” reputation, and later the B-29—and the parallel drama of the Gulf home front, where German U-boats mounted a devastating offensive against merchant shipping in 1942. It closes by assessing how the wartime buildup transformed Tampa demographically and economically and fixed MacDill as the anchor of the region’s military future.
1. Introduction
The Tampa of Paper VI was a port of embarkation for a single season of war in 1898. The Tampa of the World Wars became something more lasting: the site of a permanent major military installation and the center of a region reshaped by federal defense spending. The path from the one to the other ran through two developments that the First World War introduced in embryo and the Second brought to maturity—military aviation and the defense of the Gulf coast. This paper follows that path from 1917 to 1945, and its central subject is the base whose founding in this period would determine the whole of Tampa’s later military history: MacDill.
2. The First World War: Aviation Comes to the Region
Tampa’s direct role in the First World War was modest, but the war planted two seeds that would define its military future. The first was aviation. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, the Army Air Service needed airfields to train pilots quickly, and it found in Florida what it needed most: open land and year-round flying weather. Of the roughly thirty-two training camps the Air Service established in 1917, two were built in the Tampa region, near Arcadia in DeSoto County some fifty miles southeast of the city—Carlstrom Field and Dorr Field, where cadets learned to fly the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” (see Note 1). Arcadia styled itself the “Aviation City of Florida,” and the Carlstrom and Dorr fields constituted the Army’s dominant aviation presence in the state during the war (Gannon, 1996).
The significance of these fields for the present study is not local but regional and prophetic. They demonstrated that Florida’s climate made it an ideal place to train military aviators, establishing a pattern that the interwar and Second World War years would enlarge enormously and that MacDill itself would come to exemplify. The federal military interest in Florida aviation that would build a great air base at Tampa Bay had its first expression in these First World War training fields.
The second seed was coastal defense. The entrance to Tampa Bay was guarded by a pair of coastal-artillery forts of the turn-of-the-century Endicott system—Fort Dade on Egmont Key and Fort De Soto on Mullet Key—positioned to command the passes into the bay (see Note 2). These installations embodied the concern, latent in the First World War and acute in the Second, that the Gulf coast was a vulnerable seaward frontier. Tampa’s World War I contribution was therefore small in scale but consequential in kind: it introduced to the region the two military functions—air training and coastal defense—around which its far larger World War II role would be built.
3. The Founding of MacDill, 1939–1941
The installation that would carry that role was a creation of the pre-war emergency. As the international situation darkened in the late 1930s and the Army Air Corps prepared for the possibility of war, the War Department moved to expand its network of air bases, and Tampa Bay was selected as the site of a major new field. Construction began in 1939 on the southern tip of the Interbay Peninsula, the finger of land dividing Old Tampa Bay from Hillsborough Bay a few miles south of the city, under the name Southeast Air Base, Tampa (see Note 3). The base was formally dedicated and its flying operations begun in the spring of 1941, and it was named MacDill Field in honor of Colonel Leslie MacDill, an early Army aviator and pioneer of military aviation who had been killed in a crash near Washington in 1938.
MacDill’s initial mission reflected the anxieties of the moment. With war raging in Europe and fears already circulating that German submarines might attack shipping in the Gulf of Mexico, the base’s first assigned purpose was the defense of the Gulf, and its early flying operations began in 1941 with bombardment squadrons flying the B-18 and the B-17 (Craven & Cate, 1948–1958). With the entry of the United States into the war at the end of 1941, however, MacDill’s principal function became what it would remain through the conflict: the training of bombardment units for combat overseas.
4. Training the Bomber Crews
MacDill became one of the Army Air Forces’ important bomber-training bases, and the aircraft that passed through it tell the story of the air war’s development. Transitional training on the B-17 Flying Fortress began in 1941, and in the anxious early months of the war the base served as a staging point for reinforcement: dozens of B-17s were ferried from MacDill across the South Atlantic and Africa to the Pacific in a matter of weeks (Craven & Cate, 1948–1958). From the middle of 1942 the base’s primary training aircraft became the B-26 Marauder, the fast twin-engine medium bomber built by the Glenn L. Martin Company, and it is to this aircraft that MacDill owes its most enduring legend.
The early B-26 was a difficult and unforgiving machine. Its short wings, high wing loading, and fast landing speed made it hard for inexperienced pilots to fly and land safely, and its early accident rate was high enough to earn it grim nicknames—the “Widowmaker” chief among them—and to give rise to the phrase for which MacDill is still remembered: “one a day in Tampa Bay,” the claim that a B-26 crashed into the waters around the base every day of training (Craven & Cate, 1948–1958; see Note 4). The phrase captures a real problem, but it should be handled with the same care this series has applied to other pieces of martial folklore. Historians regard the literal “one a day” as an exaggeration; the accidents were serious but not so constant, and the aircraft’s early faults were substantially corrected in later models, which added wingspan and improved engines. The B-26 went on to compile the lowest loss rate of any American bomber in the European theater, and the majority of the Marauder groups that flew in Europe were trained at MacDill—an irony that the notorious slogan conceals. Later in the war the base added training on the B-29 Superfortress, and at its wartime peak it housed on the order of fifteen thousand personnel, supported by a ring of auxiliary fields—Drew, Henderson, and others—across the Tampa region (see Note 5).
5. The Gulf Home Front: U-boats and the War Offshore
While MacDill trained crews for the air war abroad, a very real war came to the waters off Tampa Bay. In 1942, as part of the U-boat offensive against American shipping known by the German code name Drumbeat—the “Second Happy Time” of the German submarine force—German U-boats extended their campaign into the Gulf of Mexico (Gannon, 1990). The first entered the Gulf at the end of April 1942, and over the following months the submarines mounted a devastating assault on the merchant traffic there, above all on the oil tankers carrying fuel from the refineries of Texas and Louisiana. From May through September of 1942, on the order of fifty-eight vessels totaling roughly three hundred thousand tons were sent to the bottom in the Gulf, and in June of that year the U-boats operating in the Gulf, the Caribbean, and their approaches destroyed more shipping than in any previous month of the war in all theaters combined (Gannon, 1990; see Note 6).
The offensive succeeded so completely at first because the American defenses were unready: there were few escorts, no convoy system in the Gulf, and no coastal blackout, and ships were torpedoed at times within sight of shore. Fearing panic along the Gulf coast, the government censored news of the losses. The tide turned only as convoys, armed escorts, and air patrols were organized, and here the region’s new air base played a part: MacDill’s bomber crews, along with the volunteer fliers of the Civil Air Patrol, flew anti-submarine patrols over the Gulf. The cost of the campaign was heavy enough that its principal historian judged the 1942 U-boat assault on shipping in American home waters and the Caribbean a graver strategic setback for the Allies than the defeat at Pearl Harbor (Gannon, 1990). For Tampa Bay, the episode meant that the Second World War was not only a matter of training crews for distant fronts but a war fought, and felt, in its own coastal waters.
6. The Wartime Buildup and the Transformation of Tampa
The military presence that MacDill anchored was part of a transformation of Florida so large that it reshaped the state. By the war’s end Florida hosted well over a hundred and fifty military installations, and tens of thousands of service personnel trained and were stationed there, drawn by the same year-round flying and training weather that had first attracted the Air Service in 1917 (Mormino, 2005). Around Tampa the concentration was dense: MacDill and its auxiliary fields, the training base at Drew Field on the site of the future Tampa International Airport, and the shipbuilding and defense industries that the war called into being all brought soldiers, workers, and payrolls into a city that had been a modest regional center.
The demographic and economic consequences outlasted the war. The influx of military personnel and defense workers swelled Tampa’s population and its economy during the conflict, and, as the historian Gary Mormino has emphasized, the wartime experience seeded the state’s later explosive growth: many of the service members who trained in Florida’s sunshine returned after the war to live there, helping to touch off one of the great population booms of the postwar era (Mormino, 2005). The war that built MacDill also began the making of modern Tampa.
7. Assessment and Transition
The World Wars converted Tampa Bay’s military role from the episodic to the permanent. The First World War introduced the two functions—aviation training and coastal defense—that would define the region’s importance; the Second built, in MacDill, a major installation to embody them, trained through it the bomber crews of the air war, defended through it the waters of the Gulf, and transformed the surrounding city in the process. Unlike the temporary camps of 1898 or the frontier post of 1824, MacDill did not dissolve when the war ended. It survived the postwar demobilization, and with the establishment of the United States Air Force as an independent service in 1947 it became MacDill Air Force Base—a fixture of the American military establishment.
That permanence set the stage for the base’s next role. In the global standoff that followed the Second World War, MacDill would become an instrument of strategic deterrence, its bombers and its position a few hundred miles from Cuba giving it a significance that the coming decades would only magnify. The Cold War at MacDill is the subject of Paper VIII.
Notes
- Carlstrom Field opened southeast of Arcadia in December 1917 and Dorr Field, its auxiliary, shortly after; both trained pilots on the ubiquitous Curtiss JN-4. They lay in DeSoto County, roughly fifty miles from Tampa, and are treated here as regional rather than strictly local; their importance to this paper lies in what they demonstrated about Florida’s suitability for aviation training. Carlstrom would be reactivated for pilot training in the Second World War.
- Fort Dade on Egmont Key and Fort De Soto on Mullet Key were coastal-artillery installations of the Endicott-era fortification program built around the turn of the twentieth century to defend the entrance to Tampa Bay. They are cited here to establish the coastal-defense dimension of the region’s military role; a detailed operational history of these forts lies outside the scope of this paper.
- Sources give somewhat different dates for the base’s establishment (construction beginning in 1939, formal dedication and the start of flying operations in the spring of 1941). The base was first designated Southeast Air Base, Tampa, and renamed MacDill Field in 1941. The month-level chronology is secure; readers should treat single-day dates in popular sources with caution.
- The nicknames attached to the early B-26—”Widowmaker” and others—and the slogan “one a day in Tampa Bay” are part of the aircraft’s folklore. This paper follows the scholarly consensus that the literal claim was hyperbole: the early accident rate was genuinely high and the aircraft genuinely demanding, but the losses were not a daily occurrence, and the type’s later record was excellent. The slogan is best read as a vivid exaggeration of a real early problem.
- Precise figures for MacDill’s wartime personnel and for the number of B-26 groups trained there vary among sources. The round figures used here—on the order of fifteen thousand personnel at peak, and a majority of the European Marauder groups—reflect the general record rather than an exact accounting.
- Figures for shipping sunk in the Gulf of Mexico in 1942 vary with the criteria and the sources; totals in the range of the high fifties of vessels for the May-through-September period are commonly given. The comparison to Pearl Harbor is the assessment of the campaign’s leading historian and is presented as such.
References
Craven, W. F., & Cate, J. L. (Eds.). (1948–1958). The Army Air Forces in World War II (Vols. 1–7). University of Chicago Press.
Gannon, M. (1990). Operation Drumbeat: The dramatic true story of Germany’s first U-boat attacks along the American coast in World War II. Harper & Row.
Gannon, M. (Ed.). (1996). The new history of Florida. University Press of Florida.
Mormino, G. R. (2005). Land of sunshine, state of dreams: A social history of modern Florida. University Press of Florida.
