Charleston Army Airfield, ten miles northwest of the old port city, was running antisubmarine patrols within weeks of Pearl Harbor. The 16th Antisubmarine Squadron flew B-18s and B-25s east over the Gulf Stream looking for U-boats, which were sinking American merchant ships in sight of the Carolina beaches through the spring of 1942. By the time the antisubmarine campaign was won, the base had been transferred to the Air Transport Command, which used Charleston as a transatlantic staging point for ferry flights to Europe and North Africa. After the war it became Charleston Air Force Base, the strategic airlift hub that grew into today's Joint Base Charleston. From this field through every American war since, the C-17 Globemasters of the 437th Airlift Wing have hauled outsized cargo around the world.

Most of the South Carolina fields were training stations. Columbia Army Air Base, southwest of the capital, trained the 309th and 329th Bombardment Groups before becoming Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Greenville Army Air Base, south of Greenville, became Donaldson Air Force Base after the war and is now Donaldson Center Airport. Florence Army Airfield turned into Florence Regional. Shaw Army Airfield outside Sumter became the basic flying school of the Eastern Flight Training Center; its sub-bases at Rembert, Monaghan, and Burt Gin have mostly vanished into farmland, but Shaw itself never closed - it remains an active Air Force base and headquarters of the Ninth Air Force. The pace of training was relentless. Cadets cycled through in months, not years, and the casualty rate even during training was high enough to fill small cemeteries near every base.

South of Orangeburg, a contract civilian flight school called the Hawthorne School of Aeronautics took over a curious mission in 1942: training Free French Air Force pilots. After France fell in June 1940, French aircrews who had escaped to British or American territory needed somewhere to qualify on American aircraft so they could fly again - against the Axis on the Mediterranean and Atlantic fronts. The 58th Flying Training Detachment at Orangeburg ran them through primary and basic training on PT-17 Stearmans and BT-13 Vultees, with auxiliary fields at Jennings, Hagood, and Kennedy nearby. The cadets were officially American trainees on paper but spoke French in the barracks and wore Lorraine Cross patches when they could get away with it. After the war the Hawthorne fields reverted to non-aviation use. The pilots went home to liberated France.

The story of these fields is half military history and half archaeology. Myrtle Beach Army Airfield became Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, closed in the 1993 BRAC round, and reopened as Myrtle Beach International Airport. Congaree Army Airfield southeast of Columbia is now McEntire Joint National Guard Base, flying F-16s. Aiken Army Airfield became Aiken Municipal. Greenville Municipal Airport - the contract glider pilot school - is now Greenville Downtown Airport. Some of the smaller fields are nearly gone: Roddey Airport near Rock Hill, an emergency landing strip, was abandoned around 1965 and is now indistinguishable from the surrounding pasture. Lane Intermediate Field northwest of Charleston went out of service in 1983. Manning Airfield near Allendale has no known wartime history at all - just a runway shape visible from above and a footnote in an old Army index. Hundreds of the temporary frame buildings that housed the trainees have outlived everyone who slept in them, repurposed now as garages, churches, hangars, and barns across the state.