Military History | Plage des Américains — Where the Base Went Into the Houses

The United States Navy called it Arcachon; the village calls it the plage des Américains. The naval air station stood on the Bassin d'Arcachon, on the sheltered eastern shore of Cap Ferret, and it was built to hunt submarines. Ground was broken on 5 November 1917 under a contract with the French Navy; labour strikes and material shortages slowed the work, and the station was not placed in commission until 8 June 1918. Regular convoy and patrol flights began on 14 September. The interpretive board that stands here now records about fifteen Curtiss HS-1L flying boats, shipped in crates from the assembly plant at Pauillac up the coast, flying 106 patrols before the Armistice.

Lieutenant Zeno W. Wicks commanded it, over 19 officers and 318 enlisted men on the day the war ended, by the Navy's own count; local accounts say simply "close to three hundred." The Americans left on 7 January 1919.

What they left behind went into the village. The board records that the station's generator kept the neighbouring houses lit, and that part of its beams and floorboards were built into the new villas going up along the point. A tuberculosis sanatorium was proposed for the vacant huts and came to nothing; in the 1920s the ground became a seaplane flying school, and when that closed the buildings were sold and pulled down.

Today the beach has lost almost every trace. A few concrete slabs are set into the neighbouring seawall; the water tower that fed the base was demolished in the early 2000s. No monument was ever raised. What marks the station is this board, by the car park at the end of the allée des Grisets, and a plaque on the sailing club.

📸 Cover: sailors handling a Curtiss HS-2L flying boat, 16 May 1918 — U.S. Navy, National Museum of Naval Aviation 2003.316.029, public domain. Representative of the HS type flown from Arcachon, not the station itself; no freely licensed photograph of the base was found. Second image: the Bassin d'Arcachon shore at Cap Ferret today, area view, photograph by Maarten Sepp, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.