Naval Air Technical Training Command Navy Memphis Embroidered Patch

Millington, Tennessee, sits hundreds of miles from salt water, and for half a century it was where the Navy taught its sailors to keep airplanes flying. The ground began as Park Field, an Army Signal Corps training field opened in 1917 and named for 1st Lt. Joseph D. Park. The Navy commissioned a Naval Reserve Aviation Base there on September 15, 1942, and renamed it Naval Air Station Memphis on January 1, 1943. That same year its ground crew school became the Naval Air Technical Training Center. Headquarters for Naval Air Technical Training moved to Memphis in 1946, all of its operations were consolidated there in 1947, and the place earned the title of the largest inland naval base in the world.

The ground school was laid out for 10,000 students at a time, on a complex of more than 3,500 acres served by an 8,000-foot runway. During World War II the station was also a primary flight training center, with 600 to 800 aviation cadets in training at once. The Korean War made Memphis permanent, with $64 million set aside for a six-year building program, and by the late 1950s nearly 13,000 military and civilian people worked there. By 1971 about 23,000 students a year were rotating through its enlisted aviation A and C schools, learning the maintenance, ordnance and electronics trades that kept squadrons flying from carrier decks and shore stations. The 1993 BRAC round directed NATTC Memphis disestablished and its schools moved to NATTC Pensacola. NAS Memphis became Naval Support Activity Memphis on September 30, 1995, and Naval Support Activity Mid-South on October 1, 1998, and the Navy Personnel Command is headquartered there today.

The patch is a 4 by 4 inch round with a black merrowed edge. NAVAL AIR TECHNICAL TRAINING COMMAND runs around the top of a blue ring in white letters, NAVY MEMPHIS runs along the bottom, and a pair of white stars sits on each side. In the center a gray aircraft carrier steams through bright blue water with her island near the stern, and three gray jets climb past the clouds above her. The carrier is where Memphis graduates went to work, and the jets are what they kept in the air. Below the ship, gold wings spread around an anchor and a red, white and blue shield, the mark of naval aviation. The backing is iron-on, and it can be sewn on too.

Generations of airmen came to Millington straight out of boot camp, learned a trade in its classrooms and hangars, and left for squadrons, carriers and air stations around the world. Sailors and Marines trained there side by side. Most of them remember the Tennessee heat, the long days in the schoolhouse and the barracks full of people chasing the same rate. Memphis was where a recruit first became an aviation mechanic, an ordnanceman or an electronics technician. The schools closed there after BRAC 1993, and the men and women who passed through still call it Memphis.

It fits a shadow box with your squadron patches and a photo of your A school class, or the jacket you wear to a ship or squadron reunion. It also makes a good gift for a shipmate who still talks about Millington. A carrier, three jets and a set of wings, with Memphis stitched underneath.