Uncertain Fate of Monuments to Bygone Era

World War II blimp pilot Hugh Tolford remembers floating home in the darkness after many a patrol hunting for Japanese submarines in the Pacific, awestruck every time by the man-made wonders rising from the Santa Ana citrus groves.

Towering before him, bathed in Navy floodlights, were two gargantuan blimp hangars. At 18 stories high and nearly a quarter-mile long, they remain the largest wood-frame structures in the world, according to one engineering group.

“It was just a sea of blackness, and then the lights would come on. Oh, boy, was that a sight,” said Tolford, 86, a retired lieutenant commander who lives in Sherman Oaks. “Even from the air, they’re impressive. They are just so massive.”

Relics of a forgotten era of military aviation, the cavernous slate-gray hangars at the deserted Tustin Marine Corps Air Station are so enormous they’ve been known to support their own weather patterns--including fog. They are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and still dominate the suburban landscape at the northern tip of Irvine.

Tolford arrived at the base--which in World War II was called Naval Air Station, Santa Ana--when the hangars were under construction, and he witnessed crews struggling to erect the mammoth skeletons. The parabolic trusses that frame the buildings were prefabricated from Douglas fir; the structures are covered in corrugated aluminum.

Built in 1942 at a cost of $2.5 million apiece, the hangars were each capable of housing half a dozen helium blimps. Each structure stands 183 feet high, 1,088 feet long and 297 feet wide and covers almost 300,000 square feet. The Navy Department’s Bureau of Yards and Docks supervised the construction, which from design to completion took 18 months.

The huge wooden doors of the Tustin hangars have six leaves that weigh between 26 and 39 tons each, and slide open like accordions on steel rails.

The hangars are two of 16 the Navy built during World War II along the West Coast and Eastern seaboard.

Including the two in Tustin, seven remain; two are in Lakehurst, N.J., two are at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, and one is in Tillamook, Ore.

The hangars were built to house a fleet of giant airships that patrolled the Pacific from Del Mar to Santa Barbara, hunting for Japanese submarines.

Each blimp was equipped with four 325-pound depth charges, a .50-caliber machine gun and newly developed radar that could detect subs sneaking up on the California coast.

The mammoth Navy airships patrolled the sea for 12 to 18 hours at a time and traveled as far as 150 miles out to sea. Each was manned by two pilots and eight crewmen.

No sub was spotted off the California coast, however.

After the war, blimps were phased out of the Navy’s fleet, and over the years the hangars have been drafted for a variety of nonmilitary uses. In 1949, Howard Hughes rented space in one hangar for a blimp that his company used to advertise the movie “The Outlaw.” The Goodyear blimps used the hangars in the late 1940s.

After the Korean War began, Tustin was recommissioned as the first Marine helicopter base, in 1951. Each hangar was able to house almost 100 helicopters.

The fate of the twin hangars has remained uncertain since the Pentagon decommissioned the base in 1997.

They have been leased out for an “X-Files” convention and as a makeshift prayer hall for 12,000 Muslims to mark the end of Ramadan. Movies have been filmed in the hangars, including the HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon,” the Disney war epic “Pearl Harbor” and “The Hindenburg.”

In August, Orange County supervisors set aside $88,000 to see whether the northern hangar could be transformed into a military museum to honor the county’s 250,000 veterans. The hangar is part of an 84-acre parcel the military has deeded to the county.

The museum is being pushed by a local veterans group that already has $2 million worth of donated vintage tanks, landing craft, uniforms and other military equipment that was restored for the recent movie “Windtalkers” about Navajo encryption experts during World War II.

The southern hangar, easily visible from Jamboree Road and the Eastern Transportation Corridor, is being leased from the Navy by Tustin. Unlike its twin, it has been battered by weather and is the one more likely to be torn down.

“The city will undertake an analysis to see what the potential reuse may be, and whether it’s worth restoring,” said Tustin City Manager William Huston.

Tolford and other veterans would like to see at least one of the hangars preserved. “They’re unique monuments to a time that should be remembered,” he said.

“They’re unique, not only because of how big they are, but because of their wood frames,” agreed Fred J. Meier, a retired civil engineer from Santa Ana.

“They used wood, of course, because all the steel was used for armaments during World War II.”

After a three-year campaign by Meier, the American Society of Civil Engineers officially recognized the two hangars as the largest wood-frame structures in the world.

“Inside, you can’t help but feel like a peanut,” Meier said.