Naval Air Station Pensacola or NAS Pensacola is a United States Navy base located next to Warrington, Florida, a community southwest of the Pensacola city limits.
It is best known as the initial primary training base for all U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard officers pursuing designation as naval aviators and naval flight officers, the advanced training base for most naval flight officers, and as the home base for the United States Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, the precision-flying team known as the Blue Angels. The air station also hosts the Naval Education and Training Command (NETC) and the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute (NAMI). With the closure of Naval Air Station Memphis in Millington, Tennessee, and the transition of that facility to Naval Support Activity Mid-South, NAS Pensacola also became home to the Naval Air Technical Training Center (NATTC) Memphis, which relocated to Pensacola and was renamed NATTC Pensacola. NATTC provides technical training schools for nearly all enlisted aircraft maintenance and enlisted aircrew specialties in the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Coast Guard. The NATTC facility at NAS Pensacola is also home to the USAF Detachment 1, a geographically separated unit (GSU) whose home unit is the 359th Training Squadron located at nearby Eglin AFB. NAS Pensacola contains Forrest Sherman Field, home of Training Air Wing SIX (TRAWING 6), providing undergraduate flight training for all prospective naval flight officers for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps, and flight officers/navigators for other NATO/Allied/Coalition partners. All USAF Undergraduate CSO Training (UCSOT) for all USAF aircraft is consolidated at NAS Pensacola as a strictly USAF organization and operation under the 479th Flying Training Group (479 FTG), an Air Education and Training Command (AETC) unit. The 479 FTG is a tenant activity at NAS Pensacola and a GSU of the 12th Flying Training Wing (12 FTW) at Randolph AFB, Texas. The 479 FTG operates USAF T-6A Texan II and T-1A Jayhawk aircraft.
Other tenant activities include the United States Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels, flying F/A-18 Super Hornets and a single USMC C-130T Hercules; and the 2nd German Air Force Training Squadron USA (– abbreviated "2. DtLwAusbStff"). A total of 131 aircraft operate out of Sherman Field, generating 110,000 flight operations each year. The National Naval Aviation Museum (formerly known as the National Museum of Naval Aviation), the Pensacola Naval Air Station Historic District, the National Park Service-administered Fort Barrancas and its associated Advance Redoubt, and the Pensacola Lighthouse and Museum are all located at NAS Pensacola, as is the Barrancas National Cemetery.
History The site now occupied by NAS Pensacola has been controlled by varying nations. In 1559, Spanish explorer Don Tristan de Luna founded a colony on Santa Rosa Island, considered the first European settlement of the Pensacola area. The Spanish built the wooden Fort San Carlos de Austria on this bluff in 1697–1698. Although besieged by Indians in 1707, the fort was not taken. Spain was competing in North America with the French, who settled lower Louisiana and the Illinois Country and areas to the North. The French destroyed this fort when they captured Pensacola in 1719. After Great Britain defeated the French in the Seven Years' War and exchanging some territory with Spain, British colonists took over this site and West Florida in 1763.
In 1781, as an ally of the American rebels during the American Revolutionary War, the Spanish captured Pensacola. Britain ceded West Florida to Spain following the war. The Spanish completed the fort San Carlos de Barrancas in 1797. "The Forts of Pensacola Bay" (history), Visit Florida Online, 2006, webpage: VFO-Forts. "Fort San Carlos de Barrancas" (history), National Park Service (NPS), webpage: NPS-fort2. Barranca is a Spanish word for bluff, the natural terrain feature that makes this location ideal for the fortress.
Pensacola was taken by General Andrew Jackson in November 1814 during the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States. British forces destroyed Fort San Carlos as they swept through the area. The Spanish remained in control of the region until 1821, when the Adams-Onís Treaty confirmed the purchase of Spanish Florida by the United States, and Spain ceded this territory to the US.
In 1825, the US designated this area for the Pensacola Navy Yard and Congress appropriated $6,000 for a lighthouse. Operational that year, it "is said to be haunted by a light keeper murdered by his wife."Shettle, Jr., M. L., "United States Naval Air Stations of World War II, Volume I: Eastern States", Schaertel Publishing Co., Bowersville, Georgia, 1995, , , p. 178. Fort Barrancas was rebuilt, 1839–1844, the U.S. Army deactivating it on 15 April 1947. Designated a National Historic Site (NHL) in 1960, control of the site was transferred to the National Park Service in 1971. After extensive restoration during 1971–1980, Fort Barrancas was opened to the public. It has a visitor center.
Navy Yard Realizing the advantages of the Pensacola harbor and the large timber reserves nearby for shipbuilding, in 1825 President John Quincy Adams and Secretary of the Navy Samuel Southard made arrangements to build a Navy Yard on the southern tip of Escambia County, where the air station is today. Navy captains William Bainbridge, Lewis Warrington, and James Biddle selected the site on Pensacola Bay.
Civilian employment
Civilian employment began in April 1826, with the construction of the first buildings at the Pensacola Navy Yard, also known as the Warrington Navy Yard. Pensacola would later become one of the best equipped naval stations in the country, but the early navy yard was beset with recruitment and labor problems. Skilled workers were simply unavailable locally, housing limited, and living conditions in Pensacola rough. At first, skilled tradesmen were recruited from Boston and other northern naval bases. Many of these new civilian employees were dissatisfied with local conditions and especially their wages and hours. As a result, on 14 March 1827 was the first labor strike. Captain Melancthon Taylor Woolsey was able to make sufficient adjustments to the workday that the men returned to work after a couple of days.
One factor that inhibited both military and civilian workers from remaining in Pensacola was the lack of an adequate hospital. On 3 November 1828, naval surgeon Isaac Hulse, physician in charge of the Naval Hospital in Barrancas, wrote Commodore Melanchthon Taylor Woolsey a status report. His account covers the period of March to November 1828 and details the 66 sailors and marines admitted, their names and rank, diagnosis or the nature of their injury, and the date of their discharge or death. Mortality at Pensacola would remain high due to the prevalence of yellow fever and malaria. Many naval officers and men considered the Navy Yard an unhealthy and potentially lethal assignment. For example, Naval Constructor Samuel Keep, writing to his brother in July 1826, stated emphatically, "I shall not remain here unless I am obliged to do so." Despite heroic efforts by the medical community, yellow fever would revisit the navy yard intermittently, e.g. in 1835, 1874, 1882, etc., the disease only coming under control with the work of Major Walter Reed in 1901.
From its foundation until the Civil War, enslaved labor was extensively utilized at Pensacola Navy Yard. In May 1829, the monthly Pensacola Navy Yard list of mechanics and laborers enumerates a total of 87 employees, of whom 37 were enslaved laborers. Pensacola Navy Yard was built with enslaved labor. Captain Lewis Warrington, the first commandant of the Pensacola Navy Yard, complained to the Board of Navy Commissioners, "neither laborers nor mechanics are to be obtained here." As early as April 1826, Warrington had requested and received permission to hire enslaved labor, "for I would recommend the employment of black laborers in preference to white, as they suit this climate better, are less liable to change, more easily controlled, more temperate, and more will actually do more work.". Even after Warrington was finally able to get skilled white journeymen mechanics from Norfolk, he asked for and received permission to continue utilizing enslaved labor, since due to the unhealthy conditions and poor pay white laborers simply would not remain at the new naval station. As a consequence, Pensacola Navy agent Samuel R. Overton advertised for 38 enslaved workers, promising local slaveholders "17 dollars per month with common Navy Rations."Pensacola Gazette 6 April 1827, p. 5. The bondsmen's names are found on the May 1829 list of navy yard employees. To allay slaveholder concerns, Commandant William Compton Bolton advertised that enslaved workers would have the benefit of medical attention at no charge at the shipyard hospital.Floridian and Advocate 10 September 1836 p. 1
Pensacola was not the first to use enslaved labor; Washington Navy Yard, established in 1799, and soon after, Gosport Navy Yard in Virginia, both employed enslaved labor. The enslaved quickly "constituted a majority of the employees at the shipyard. They performed nearly every task required including ship construction and repair, carpentry, blacksmithing, bricklaying and general labor." While not explicitly stated in Pensacola Navy Yard log entries, enslaved black workers were listed as "laborers" while white workers were categorized as belonging to "the ordinary" (see thumbnail: station log entries, 1 July 1836)..
Slavery remained integral to the Pensacola Navy Yard workforce throughout the antebellum period. As late as June 1855, the navy yard payroll listed 155 slaves. Scholar Ernest Dibble concludes his study of the military presence in Pensacola with this coda: "In Pensacola the military was not just the most important single force creating the local economy, but also the most important single influence to the spread of the slaveocracy in Pensacola.". The civilian payrolls of Pensacola reveal that the navy yard leased slaves from prominent members of Pensacola society.. Enslaved labor continued on at the Pensacola Navy Yard until the American Civil War..
On 13 August 1859, Commandant James K. McIntosh wrote to the secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey, "I have the honor to report that the steam sloop of war was successfully launched ..." with this "launching the Pensacola naval facility became a true navy yard." This was followed by the sloop that same year.
In its early years, the garrison of the West Indies Squadron dealt mainly with the suppression of the African slave trade and piracy in the Gulf and Caribbean. The US and Great Britain had outlawed the international slave trade effective 1808, but smuggling continued for decades, especially as Cuba and certain South American nations continued with slavery.
On 12 January 1861, just prior to the commencement of the Civil War, the Warrington Navy Yard surrendered to secessionists. When Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862, Confederate troops, fearing attack from the west, retreated from the Navy Yard and reduced most of the facilities to rubble. At the time, they also abandoned Fort Barrancas and Fort McRee.
After the war, the ruins at the yard were cleared away and work was begun to rebuild the base. Many of the present structures on the air station were built during this period, including the stately two- and three-story houses on North Avenue. In 1906, many of these newly rebuilt structures were destroyed by a great hurricane and storm surge.