Vero Beach Museum of Aviation

Learn With Us Today!

Museum Exhibitions

Knowledge for All

Black & White Stills

World War II brought permanent changes to the homefront, even to towns as small as Vero Beach in the early 1940s.

The Navy opened an air station at the city airport in 1942 to train pilots to fly dive bombers and night fighters made possible by new radar technology, something Germany’s Luftwaffe was already doing. By the time the airbase closed in 1946, a total of 2,700 officers and enlisted men and 300 WAVES and women Marines had spent time in Vero Beach, nearly equaling the civilian population of 3,000.

GET YOURS HERE

History Revisited

Originally a small municipal airport with refueling and maintenance use by Eastern Airlines, this field became NAS Vero Beach in November 1942. Naval and Marine aviators as well as WAVES and women Marines trained here. NAS Vero Beach saw use as a Marine Air Squadron Base as well as a training facility for F6F Hellcat, SB2A Buccaneer, F4F Wildcat, and F7F Tigercat pilots.

Airplane Sketches

“These boys went out at night and they came back at 4 o’clock in the morning right over our house because I knew a couple of them,” she said in a radio interview. “My father would get furious! He’d wake up and stand on the balcony and shake his fist and try to get the number off the plane so he could call the base and say you’ve got to go tell those guys they can’t do that! They thought it was great fun, and later on we’d all get together at the Bucket of Blood (Ocean Grill) and laugh about it.”