Houma Plays Role in War Effort

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Houma plays role in war effort The base’s administration building was completed in June 1943.

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by Emma Discher Staff Writer

ike everyone around at the time, C.J. Christ remembers where he was and what he was doing when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

“I had been out getting the cows out of the pasture and my sister, who was a little bit younger than I, was sitting on the fence at the gate and she said, ‘Hawaii has

just been bombed,’ ” Christ, who was 13 at the time, recalls. “Nobody knew what Pearl Harbor was.”

Christ, president and a founder of the Regional Military Museum in Houma, has dedicated much of his life to researching the area’s connections to and involvement in World War II, including the efforts to keep the Gulf of Mexico safe for marine traffic.

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Houma played a role in that effort as home to a Naval Air Station that housed blimps which patrolled the Gulf for German submarines that could threaten marine traffic, including merchant ships heading into and out of the Mississippi River.

“German submarines came into the Gulf of Mexico and started torpedoing our ships, mostly tankers coming out of refineries all along the coast,” Christ said.

“So it was immediately obvious that we had to protect our tankers from being sunk by the German submarines.”

Airplanes had been used for the job, but blimps were ideal as they can slow down

and even stop to get a better look at the water below, Christ said.

Many locals also felt the impact of the ensuing wars as millions of young men and women enlisted or were drafted.

Christ’s older brother quickly left home for the Navy and his younger sister started nursing school after the bombing.

“My sister had been trying to get into … nursing school in New Orleans and she was too young,” Christ said. “They immediately realized that they were going to need more nurses and they lowered the enlistment age. She immediately enlisted in nursing school.”

The blimp base, commissioned May 1,

1943, was distinguished by its massive blimp hangar, which measured about 200 feet high, 1,000 feet long and 300 feet wide. Its two 50-ton doors slid on rails to open and close, and some records say it was the largest wooden structure in the world during its existence.

In 1947, the base was turned over to the city of Houma and now is the site of the Houma-Terrebonne Airport and its industrial park, Terrebonne Parish’s Vocational Technical High School, the School for Exceptional Children and Terrebonne ARC, which serves residents with mental or physical handicaps.

The base’s main gate on March 27, 1944.

Sailors prepare for memorial service on April 29, 1944. The service was for nine men killed after a blimp went down in the Gulf of Mexico during a storm 10 days earlier.