Camp Kearny

Camp Kearny
San Diego, Southern California
View of the flight line at Camp Kearny, 1942
Type	Military base
Site history
Built	1917 (1917)
In use	1917 - 1946

Camp Kearny was a U.S. military base (first Army, later Navy) in San Diego County, California, on the site of the current Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. It operated from 1917 to 1946. The base was named in honor of Brigadier General Stephen W. Kearny.

The camp was established by the Army in 1917 on 12,721 acres (51.48 km²) of land on a mesa north of San Diego. The area included the 2,130-acre (8.6 km²) Miramar Ranch, which had originally been established by newspaperman E. W. Scripps and later sold to the Jessop family. It was Scripps who named the area Miramar, meaning "view of the sea".

The new base was named in honor of Brigadier General Stephen W. Kearny, a leader in the Mexican-American War who also served as a military governor of California. Camp Kearny was one of 32 new camps created by the Army in 1917 as a mobilization and training facility for troops on their way to battlegrounds of World War I. The first commander was Major James Stuart McKnight. Army aircraft occasionally landed on the parade ground, but an actual airfield was not established during World War I.

After the war, the camp was used as a demobilization center and was closed in 1920. It was largely abandoned after 1920 but was retained by the government for use as a military and civilian airfield. The U.S. Public Health Service used it for a time. In 1927 the Ryan Aircraft Company used the field to weight-test the plane The Spirit of St. Louis which they were then building for Charles A. Lindbergh. During 1929-1930 the facility was known as Airtech Field, operated by the San Diego Air Service Corp.

In 1932 the Navy installed a mooring mast for helium dirigibles on the base. The mast was used for visits by the Navy's two enormous airships, the USS Akron and USS Macon, each 785 feet (239 m) long. The Akron first visited Camp Kearny on May 11, 1932. That mooring ended in disaster when a gust of wind carried the airship upward, killing two ground handlers and injuring a third. However, the Navy continued to use the facility, and the Macon moored at Camp Kearny four times during 1934. The airships were homeported at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, California, whose civic leaders had won a vigorous public relations battle with San Diego in the late 1920s to become the host of the Navy's airfield for dirigibles.