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Health & Fitness

Field Guide to Coronado History: The Rise of the Naval Amphibious Base

Another in a regular series of fascinating, intriguing, or thoughtful tales about people and places in Nado history -- presented by your Coronado Historical Association Coronado’s Naval Amphibious Base … one of the largest single construction projects in the city’s history! Today, NAB is the home of two of Coronado’s “world headquarters,” (the Navy’s Surface Forces and Special Warfare Command) and it stands as an economic engine generating millions of business dollars for both Coronado and the San Diego region. NAB is over seventy-years-old, is part of today’s huge Naval Base Coronado complex, and began … well … underwater. In the early days of World War II American strategy called for attacks from the sea against Fortress Europe and the capture of hundreds of Japanese island bastions across the Pacific. The Navy had to establish a brand new specialty on a grand scale, one with new kinds of ships, new tactics, and unique training for hundreds of thousands of men. The Navy and Marine Corps had to invent Amphibious Warfare. All of this called for a brand new base in San Diego, but land was scarce – so the Navy established a base that, literally and mystically, rose from the sea. In July 1943, several large dredges arrived at Glorietta Bay and began to dig up sediment, mud, and sand from the surrounding waters for deposit within a surveyed 134-acre rectangle jutting perpendicular from the Silver Strand. It was a crash program and dredging crews worked night and day near the site of old Tent City. Hour by hour, the transformation proceeded. Those in Coronado first spotted muddy tidelands reaching directly out into the bay and then the muck was covered with earth as dry and sandy as the Strand. Bulldozers and builders arrived in mass including, even, some prisoners from a nearby German POW camp. Grids of streets appeared followed by an array of barracks, offices, classrooms, and then a dozen short boat piers along the new shoreline of the base. A second site also rose three miles to the south as an advance base and conditioning area that, today, is largely a nature preserve. Naval Amphibious Training Base, Coronado was formally commissioned on 15 January 1944 and by the end of the war had trained 4,600 officers and an astounding 60,000 men in the art of amphibious assault. (BL) www.coronadohistory.org Photos courtesy US Navy

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