When pre-World War I events began heating up in Europe, however, a series of pioneering firsts occurred at Pensacola.
Manila Bay hero Admiral Harris Dewey recommended to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels that Pensacola be reopened as the nation's first Naval Air Station. The advice was wisely taken and the proposal was realized in 1914, when the fledgling flight program, created to prepare the U.S. Navy for very probable involvement in what would be called World War I, was made up of only nine officers, fewer than two dozen enlisted men and nine flying boats.
Of the Navy's first three planes, one was built by the Wright brothers and two by Glenn Curtiss.
Barely two years later, in 1916, as the European war caught up the major countries of the world and the advantages that air power could provide in combat were recognized, the rejuvenated air station began training pilots in greater numbers. By war's end, over 1000 men had been taught to fly in Pensacola.
Lighter-than-air craft (LTA), known also as blimps or dirigibles, were first introduced into the Navy at Pensacola in 1916. LTA pilots were trained there until 1921, when the training was relocated to NAS Lakehurst, New Jersey.
The USS Jupiter, a collier, or coal ship, was reconfigured to become the Navy's first aircraft carrier and renamed the USS Langley, in Norfolk, in 1922. (Following the demise of sailing vessels, all naval vessels were powered by coal, until 1913, when oil was used.) The Langley was transferred to Pensacola, where several months of experimentation with carrier landings took place, giving the base another distinction: that of becoming the home of carrier-based aviation.
Chevalier Field, named for Godfrey de Couralles Chevalier, Naval Aviator Number Seven, was constructed in 1921, on 25 acres on the eastern side of the base. Ten years later, it was enlarged to include 62 acres.
When hostilities erupted in Europe again in the late 1930s and in the Pacific in the early 1940s, Pensacola Naval Air Base, like a stubborn, unconquerable phoenix, fluttered to life yet again.
The earlier flying boats, especially the glamorous PBYs, or Catalinas, even though retained, were deemed second in importance to land-based airplanes, which dictated new guidelines for all new naval air bases.
It was determined in 1943 that the Naval Air Command, under the Chief of Naval Operations, would be established and headquartered in Pensacola.
To be the seat of all U.S. naval flight activities, NAS Pensacola needed to look the part, therefore, a gigantic building program was initiated to provide mass housing for the thousands of enlisted personnel. flight students and support personnel, as well as mess halls, administrative offices, athletic facilities, and housing for officers.
The two and three-storied structures erected at Pensacola naval base featured Georgian-style, red-brick architecture, with lavish uses of ornate wooden trim tall, white wooden columns supporting classic Grecian-style porticos, all aesthetically set among gigantic, ancient Spanish moss-laden oaks, and broad, open expanses of green lawns.
The grand, graceful white houses of Officer's Country and Admiral's Row, with inviting screened porches, were set perfectly and romantically among the profuse oaks trees.
The long stretches of 30-foot high brick walls standing along the bay front, seemingly for no apparent function, remained as mute testimony to the folly of mistaken tactical or medical notions. Some historians and archeologists have written that the walls were constructed by the Spanish to keep out night marauders. Others contend the walls were supposed to hold back the "bad air," or mal-aria, which blew in from the bay. Still others suggested the walls were erected to keep out the actual carriers of malaria---mosquitoes---since it was believed they could not fly high enough to go over the walls.
Regardless of the reasons for the walls, they contributed to the romance of the picturesque and lush base, which contrasted radically with the unimaginative, temporary-looking frame buildings of NAS, Memphis, with its acres of flat asphalt-paved grinders, virtual absence of trees and only occasional, accidental splotches of grass.
Where the Memphis runways were virtually at the center of all base activities, Chevalier Field was laid out and constructed near the water, far off to the side of the main entrance. Outlying fields, or OLFs, for training in Florida's Panhandle and southern Alabama allowed NAS Pensacola to be much more than just one enormous paved surface.
Bronson, Bauer, Choctaw, Harold, Helm, Holley, King, Lyons, Milton, Pace, Santa Rosa, Saufley, Spencer, and Whiting were among the many auxiliary fields in Florida within a 35-mile radius of the main Panhandle base. Other supplementary fields within a 60-mile range of Pensacola, in contiguous Alabama, included Barin, Brewton, Evergreen, Magnolia, Silverhill, and Summerdale.
Where NAS Memphis was noticeably as level, bare and monotonous as a prairie---transitory in appearance and depressing psychologically in its gray monotony---NAS Pensacola was located on gently undulating landscaped topography, permanently green and calming in look and mood.
Naval Air Station Memphis bore all the brutish earmarks of the no-frills Army engineers who designed it, to hastily meet the coarse demands of wartime efficiency. Naval Air Station Pensacola, by sharp comparison, seemed to have been lovingly and thoughtfully conceived---by Jeffersonian, artistic, military gentle-men---while sitting around a linen-covered wardroom table; sensitive scholars who loved natural and classical beauty as much as they loved flying.
Pensacola was not the only center of aviation activity in Florida, however. By the end of World War II, there were literally hundreds of Army and Navy airfields in the low-lying and clement Sunshine State, permitting year-round training.
Despite the proliferation of other airfields in the state and in the nation, NAS Pensacola resolutely and steadfastly remained the reigning monarch of naval aviation training, graduating 28,562 pilots during World War II, confirming its title, "Cradle of Naval Aviation."

For more excerpts see: Stearman Airplane, Yellow Peril, Billy's First Night Flight, and WWII Planes. Don't miss out on any of the excitement of the WWII Book; Flights of Angels. To purchase a copy, click on Purchase The Book.