"Boot Camp in Paradise" Timed with Anniversary of Conflict's End

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - This September marks 80 years since World War II ended, and a Miami Beach photography installation recalls the sultry city's transformation into U.S. Army training grounds.

During the Bloodiest Battle, in fact, Miami Beach helped establish the Air Force as a major military branch.

The World War IK. installation on the Ocean Drive lawn across from the neon lighted hotels of South Beach's acclaimed art deco district showcases images of "the most beautiful World War II base camp in America" and the more than half-million recruits that it attracted.

The Air Force by the time Pearl Harbor was bombed had grown from a small US Army aeronautical division that in 1909 tested and accepted Orville Wright's Wright Flyer to an autonomous arm struggling to produce needed personnel from three training centers. The army swiftly established new centers in places where flying space was unhindered and Japanese-American internment camps were at a distance, according to the US Air Force.

The army for those places selected Miami Beach and St Petersburg, Fla. as well as Atlantic City, NJ and Greensboro, NC, the US Air Force reports.

A relatively wide open Florida particularly afforded a climate that was conducive to year-round recruit training, the State Library and Archives of Florida reports.

In Miami and Miami Beach, the Army Air Forces transformed guest rooms at 300 hotels into barracks and dining spaces into mess halls for more than 78,000 troops, the organization notes.

Actor Clark Gable was among some half million service members in Miami Beach for the Army Air Force's Technical Training Command that represented a combination of flight and technical training for pilots, flying specialists and combat crews, according to the Miami-Dade Preservation League.

A group of young women intercepted enemy messages and broke codes and, for those efforts, was credited with shortening the war, Miami Beach Vets contends.

Civilian volunteers helped with recycling efforts, served on defense counsels and kept watching for aircraft, the State Library and Archives noted.

Federal spending, combined with that of service members and their visiting families, made up for lost Miami Beach tourist revenue during that time, the State Library and Archives of Florida reports.

As for the fledgling air command: By the end of the war, it was a major military organization, with 26,500 men and and 2,200 aircraft in 1939 swelling to 2.253 million men and women and nearly 64,000 aircraft in 1945, the Air Force notes.

One-quarter of all officers and one-fifth of all enlisted men had been trained on Miami Beach, according to Miami Beach Vets.

Elsewhere in Miami and Florida:

* The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables became Pratt General Hospital, a place where wounded soldiers were treated until 1968.

* Camp Blanding in Pensacola formed to the fourth largest city in the state.

* Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach and an African-American issues advisor to then-US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, served on an advisory board and helped to establish a training center at Daytona Beach.

* The state's primary industries, agriculture and shipbuilding, took off.

* The federal government during the war and for military purposes purchased virtually all fruit grown in Florida. By 1945-46 citrus farmers had sold 29 million more boxes of fruit than they did before the start of the war in 1940-41.

Source: State Library and Archives of Florida