California State Military
DepartmentCalifornia State Military
DepartmentEureka is located 280 miles north of San Francisco. The local North Peninsula is ten miles long and one mile wide between the Pacific Ocean and Humboldt Bay. The community of Samoa is located on the peninsula and in 1878, a U.S. Life Saving Station was built nearby. The U.S. Coast Guard took over the station in 1915. Eugene Ely conducted the first landing on a warship, the USS Pennsylvania, in San Francisco Bay on January 18, 1911. In May, Ely and his aircraft arrived in Humboldt Bay on a steam boat and held a flying exhibition with a Curtiss pusher aircraft on the peninsula.
Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, a Japanese submarine torpedoed the tanker Emidio just south of the Bay. This act abruptly brought the distant war to the area. In a few weeks, an activated Mississippi National Guard cavalry unit arrived with caissons and horse drawn equipment. The Guard set up camp in the buildings of an old lumber mill and later received motorized equipment. Before the Guard departed, it had been joined on the peninsula by an increased Coast Guard complement of 80 men that patrolled the beaches. The Humboldt Bay area became a strategically important area with the only harbor and airfield along the mountainous coast of Northern California. The Army began operating antisubmarine patrols out of Murray Field, a grass field northeast of Eureka. The Navy built a section base near the Coast Guard station and a small seaplane facilty at the Samoa boat basin with a wooden seaplane ramp. Fleet Air Wing 8 Headquarters Squadron 3 operated three Vought OS2U Kingfishers from here during the winter of 1942-1943. The seaplane facility never commissioned. The Navy then built a blimp base nearby commissioning NAAF Eureka on August 6, 1943, as an auxiliary of Moffett Field.
Moffett's ZP-32 then maintained a detachment of one to two K-ships at the facility except in the dead of winter. Operations were further complicated by the fact that Humboldt Bay had some of the foggiest weather in the U.S. Meanwhile, NAAS Arcata, a heavier-than-air station, was built 10 miles north of Eureka and commissioned in July 1943. In March 1944, Eureka had a complement of 19 officers and 72 enlisted men with barracks for 50 officers and 441 men. The base's 429 acres had a 700 x 1400-ft. paved blimp operating mat with two mooring circles and a 2400 x 200-ft. asphalt runway over the mat. Kingfisher scouting aircraft continued to operate from the seaplane base throughout the war and a taxiway was eventually built to the airfield for use by amphibian aircraft.
The Navy closed the facility on October 15, 1945. Following the war, the airfield became the Eureka Municipal Airport and remains so to this day. In 1995, the former BOQ had been converted to a bed and breakfast establishment.
Copied with the permission of the author from United States Naval Air Stations of World War II.