Houma WWII Blimp Naval Air Station

Between May 1943 and September 1944, the Navy ran a blimp station south of Houma — one of only two on the Gulf Coast. The blimps flew anti-submarine patrols over waters where German U-boats had been sinking Allied ships the year before. Coast Guard aircraft and blimp patrols eventually pushed the U-boats out of the Gulf. The massive hangars are gone. The station site is mostly developed land now. The invisible war just offshore left almost nothing above ground, but it shaped the coast for the rest of the war. The Regional Military Museum in downtown Houma holds the most complete account of this chapter — the closest you'll get to what happened over the water when the Gulf was a hunting ground.