Camp Wallace & the Bay Area at War

During World War II the small Galveston County town of Hitchcock found itself at the center of the war effort. Just outside town, Camp Wallace trained the antiaircraft gunners who would defend fleets and beachheads, later served as a Navy boot camp, and for a time held German prisoners of war. A few miles away, the Navy built one of the strangest and most impressive structures on the Texas coast: a wooden blimp hangar a thousand feet long, home to the lighter-than-air ships that hunted submarines over the Gulf. This driving tour links those wartime sites around Hitchcock, tracing how a quiet bay-area community became a training ground and a submarine-patrol base. The camp and air station are largely gone, so several stops mark sites and vantage points rather than standing structures — read them from safe public roads.