Myrtle Beach Intl

Myrtle Beach Army Air Field was established in 1940 as a fighter training base. P-40 Warhawks and P-47 Thunderbolts trained here before deploying to Europe and the Pacific. German POWs were held in camps near the base. During the Cold War, it became a Strategic Air Command installation with F-100 Super Sabres. The base closed in 1993 and was converted to the current commercial airport. The old runway layout is still partially visible.

Moored across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington, USS North Carolina (BB-55) was the first of the fast new battleships to join the fleet in World War II and, at her commissioning in 1941, considered the world's greatest sea weapon. She earned 15 battle stars across the Pacific — more than almost any other US battleship — screening carriers at Guadalcanal, the Philippine Sea, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and was rumored sunk so often the Japanese nicknamed her the "Showboat." Slated for scrap in 1960, she was saved by a statewide campaign in which North Carolina schoolchildren donated their dimes to bring her home. She's now a memorial to the state's 11,000 WWII dead, open to walk her decks, turrets, and engine rooms.

On the Mount Pleasant side of Charleston Harbor, at the base of the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, sits a nine-hundred-eighty-foot WWII aircraft carrier moored to the bank. The USS Yorktown (CV-10) was the tenth American carrier in U.S. Navy service, commissioned in April 1943. She fought through the Pacific offensive — Marcus Island, Wake, the Marshalls, Truk, the Marianas Turkey Shoot, Leyte Gulf — earning eleven battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation. She recovered Apollo 8 in December 1968 and was decommissioned in 1970. In 1975, after a campaign by South Carolina veterans to save her, she was towed up the Cooper River and moored permanently here. Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum opened January 3, 1976. Today the site holds nearly a million square feet of exhibit space. Aboard Yorktown: twenty-seven historic aircraft on the flight deck and in the hangar bay including an F4F Wildcat, an F6F Hellcat, an SB2C Helldiver, an A-4 Skyhawk, an F-4 Phantom, an F-14 Tomcat, an A-7 Corsair, and a TBM Avenger. Walk through the chief petty officers' mess, the bridge, the captain's cabin, the engine rooms, and the carrier's sick bay. Alongside Yorktown is the destroyer USS Laffey, "The Ship That Would Not Die" — survived a five-minute kamikaze attack off Okinawa in April 1945 in which she was hit by six kamikaze aircraft and four bombs and stayed afloat. (The third major vessel, the submarine USS Clamagore, was scuttled in 2024 for use as an artificial reef after costs of preservation exceeded funds available.) Also on-site: the Medal of Honor Museum, run by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the three-acre Vietnam Experience exhibit — a recreated firebase with helicopters, simulated patrol routes, and audio overlays.

Charleston is one of the best-preserved historic cities in America — founded in 1670, it was one of the wealthiest cities in colonial America, built on rice, indigo, and the slave trade (nearly half of all enslaved Africans brought to North America came through its harbor). Its peninsula of pastel single houses, church steeples (the "Holy City" nickname comes from its skyline of spires and its early religious tolerance), cobblestone streets, and the grand mansions of the Battery facing the harbor survived largely intact. Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began in April 1861, sits on an island in the harbor. The whole peninsula, ringed by water and historic to its bones, is a National Historic Landmark district.