World War II in Miami-Dade County

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Part 2

Miami 1941-1945
From VIP Suites to GI Barracks

by Daniel Markus

Outdoor class

Exercise on the beach

Clark Gable

Art Deco hotel

The Army established three major schools on Miami Beach: the Replacement Training Center, the Officer Candidate School and the Officer Training School. In 1942 the Army spent over $3 million on the Beach. By 1944 those schools occupied almost 400 hotels on the Beach plus the Nautilus and Biltmore hotels which had been converted into hospitals.

The federal government paid hotel owners $20 per man per month, which was considerable less than the normal seasonal rate. The dearth of tourists, however, made the owners happy to get any amount for their rooms. The government’s payments also had the added benefit of being spread evenly throughout the year rather than being limited to a short winter season.

Sub Chaser School

The Navy moved into Miami hotels in a similar manner, setting up the Submarine-Chaser Training School. It used 11 hotels, a restaurant, a showroom, and a school to teach seamanship, navigation, administration, communications, engineering, gunnery, and anti-submarine warfare.

Other smaller schools in South Florida included the Naval Air Gunners School and a navigation school in Hollywood. The Key West Sound School trained sonar operators. Fort Lauderdale’s Merle Fogg Airport housed a radar range-finding school and pilot training facilities. The Army maintained the Depot Overhaul School, Inspection and Maintenance School, and the Fourth Service Command School for Bakers and Cooks in the Miami area.

Embry Riddle

Private schools like Embry Riddle and the University of Miami, which trained British aviators before the United States entered the war, continued to train allied pilots and navigators throughout the conflict. The Armed Forces’ schools also trained allied troops in South Florida.

Well over 600,000 men trained in southern Florida during the war. Twenty-five per cent of the Army Air Force’s enlisted men and 20 per cent of its officers trained on Miami Beach. The Navy processed over 50,000 men through its subchaser school and over one-third of the naval gunners in the Pacific learned their trade in Hollywood. Besides the Americans, over 3,300 Brazilians went through the subchaser school and 1,016 men from seven different countries learned how to use sonar in Key West.

POW

Even German soldiers made their way to Dade County. German prisoner-of-war camps were located in Kendall and Homestead. The prisoners cleaned Miami Beach’s streets, worked in military garages and an ordinance maintenance shop in Hialeah, and helped South Dade’s farmers who were short of laborers because of the war. When the United States repatriated the POWs at the end of the war, the camps could not account for 25 of the 650 enemy in their care.

Red Cross

USO dance

Singer and band

With all this allied military personnel in the country, Dade’s citizens responded to the need to make the soldier’s stay as enjoyable as possible. Toward that end several servicemen’s clubs provided entertainment for the troops. However, most of those facilities excluded servicewomen and all of them refused to admit blacks. To make up for these inequities, the United Service Organization (USO) started some recreation programs for women and the Dade County Defense Council opened the Colored Service Men’s Club.

The Miami Beach Servicemen’s Pier was the most famous of the recreational centers in southern Florida. The pier welcomed both servicemen and women. It featured dances, swimming, and fishing, but also provided mathematics classes, Spanish lessons, concerts, chess lessons, bridge, gin rummy, and parchesi games, jig-saw puzzles, ping-pong, pianos for individual use, quiet areas, radio shows, drawing materials, boxing matches, and floor shows from local night clubs. Celebrities appearing at the pier for the benefit of the troops included Bob Hope, Orson Welles, and Rita Hayworth. Over four million allied troops availed themselves of the pier’s services during the war.

HISTORICAL MUSEUM
OF SOUTHERN FLORIDA