Bermuda became the primary base for the North America and West Indies Station of the Royal Navy in the North-West Atlantic following American independence.

Unlike aircraft carriers, the cruisers and capital ships which carried these floatplanes had very limited abilities to maintain their aeroplanes, or to protect them from the elements.

From 1933, an RAF Coastal Command detachment at the HM Dockyard, on Ireland Island, was responsible for the maintenance of the aeroplanes carried by the cruisers based at Bermuda, which belonged to the Fleet Air Arm's No.

Seaplanes and flying-boats were brought ashore via two slips and in July 1936 718 (Catapult) Flight was formed equipped with Fairey 111 and Osprey aircraft.

The Royal Naval Air Station was completed in 1939 and commissioned as HMS Malabar II, the year the Second World War began.

Air cover became an immediate requirement as the Colony resumed its Great War role as a staging area for the formation of trans-Atlantic convoys.

Once the USA entered the war, the US Navy began operating anti-submarine air patrols from RAF Darrell's Island, then from its own base, USNOB Bermuda, in the West End (the United States Army built Kindley Field at the same time, at the East End), and the FAA station ceased its own air patrol.

The station never re-opened, and Boaz and Watford Islands were part of the land disposed of by the Admiralty in 1957, following the reduction of the Dockyard to a base in 1951.