I blatantly stole this idea from aalan94's thread on the Bridge at Remagen. Most of you know that there were a bunch of WWII training facilities and POW camps all across Texas. Almost all are gone or converted by now, but traces often remain, if you know where to look.

I thought it might be fun to find and link a few sites here. I'll start with the POW camp at McLean.

McLean POW Camp

It is located just NW of McLean on the current airport. Several foundations are still evident, and a few random lines of trees show where old roads and propety lines ran.

Google Maps Link

This image here is the former blimp base in Hitchcock, Texas, in Galveston County. At one time, it was the world's largest blimp base.

I first found this place in 1997. I was driving down this highway, and said, "Holy ****, what is that?" So I researched it and found out that it was this base that they used for blimps to search the Gulf for U-Boats.

http://www.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&q=&z=17&ll=29.330641,-95.044903&spn=0.004817,0.013497&t=k&om=1

If you look on the right side of the image, you will see four massive concrete pillars - the pillars are hard to see, but the shadows are very easy to pick out.

These things stick up about 120 feet in the air, and are probably 20-30 feet by 10 feet or so at the base. These were the four corners of the massive hangar.

Here is what they look like from the ground:


Notice all the old buildings around this. These are the original structures from the base. When I stopped by there in 1997, I walked around some of these buildings. Some were abandoned and run-down. One of them was standing with its door wide open, and I walked inside. There were business documents from a now-defunct oil company lying scattered all over, which I assume was from whoever bought the old WWII structure after it was decommissioned.

A cool side trip if you're going through Hitchcock. I say going through, because I can't imagine anyone actually trying to stop in Hichcock. Except for the blimp base.


[This message has been edited by aalan94 (edited 2/5/2007 12:34a).]

Excellant finds. Keep up the good work!

Rattlesnake Bomber Base

West of Monahans, Pyote Army Air Field was a B-17, and later, a B-29 training base. Several Rattlesnake dens were unearthed during initial construction, giving it its unofficial name.

Handbook of Texas online article

A little more history

A link to a Bomber Crew book The web page has several current pictures of RBB.

I worked once with a North Dakota native whose dad trained at Pyote. They were to fly a mission with a check pilot from another base. As they trundled down the runway on takeoff, the check pilot suddenly grabbed the throttles and yanked them back to idle.

A round of "What the Hell are you doing", "What the Hell are YOU doing" ensued between the crew and the check pilot. Turned out the check pilot was horrified that the crew was ignoring the bouncing, shuddering noisy takeoff run. The crew, used to flying from RBB in the summertime, knew what was happening.

A loaded and fueled B-17, sitting on the ramp in the extreme desert heat, would develop flat spots on the tires. These were annoying, but not dangerous, and were ignored by crews native to the base.

After WWII thousands of planes, especially B-29s were stored at the desert base. Among those rescued from Pyote, and thus the smelter, was the Enola Gay.


EDIT: A closeup of my first image

This shows the walls of a maintainence hanger.




[This message has been edited by CanyonAg77 (edited 2/5/2007 9:38a).]

These are good articles CanyonAg ... keep em coming. If you intend to mention all military bases in Texas in WWII you only have about 150 to go.

My favorite will be the story of Avenger Field at Sweetwater. My home during WWII was about 15 miles north of the field and apparently smack under a training area. Our days were filled with the noise of the engines on the AT-6 Texan trainers ... particularly during the couple of years the Women's Air Service Pilots (WASP) were being trained. Most of the ladies in the program were already experienced pilots so basic pilotage training was beneath their dignity ... and even though combat maneuvers were not part of their curriculum we were frequently entertained by some ferocious dogfights when a few of the lady trainees felt a bit frisky. The unofficial headquarters for the WASP was the Bluebonnet Hotel in Sweetwater ... just the sight of a group of those ladies hanging around the lobby of the hotel would blow this young lad away ... to me they were absolutely positively gorgeous ... and talk about swagger, Top Gun jocks today cannot hold a candle to those gals. The story of the WASPs in WWII is a classic read ... unfortunately for the ladies, all guts and no glory ... their unique contributions to the war effort were forgotten long ago except for a few of us who were fortunate enough to be somewhat in their presence.

Free French pilots trained at Avenger Field before the WASPs settled in. Word at the time was the Frenchies had a ritual just before solo graduation to fly up a box canyon somewhere south of Sweetwater up near the Double Heart Ranch. The ones who did not make it out of the canyon did not graduate ... and supposedly there were several.

Give us more CanyonAg.

Lamesa Field (9 miles NE of Lamesa, in Dawson County) used for elementary and advanced glider training.

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/LL/qcl1_print.html

http://www.airfields-freeman.com/TX/Airfields_TX_Lubbock.htm#lamesa

I went out there in the mid-1980s and there was still a few artifacts, and parts of gliders lying about ...



[This message has been edited by BrazosBendHorn (edited 2/5/2007 12:32p).]

Well fossil, I plan to do my share for West Texas/Panhandle sites.

BBHorn beat me to one of my favorites, though he forgot the "rule" of linking the Google Map photo.



My dad grew up at Ackerly, and when we'd go there on family Christmas outings, I'd always try to spot the hanger south of O'Donnell (boyhood home of Dan Blocker). The field was a few miles west of US87 between O'Donnell and Lamesa.

Close up view, zoom out to see surrounding towns

When I was there a few years ago, the hanger still existed, but there were no other signs of the auxiliary training field it once was. There was some farm machinery and even an old fire truck, but no glider parts that I could see. I probably would have taken them if I had seen them.

Dad was a teenager during the war (turned 17 in January 1946) and said he once helped a glider get back in the air. It had landed on a dirt road near their house, and the Army sent a truck out with a tow rope. They hooked on to the glider, and dad ran alongside holding the wing level until it gained enough speed to control on its own.

My photos are below:

View from the SW



Inside view



North Door



The old fire truck (converted for the outdoor sign business) should give you an idea of the size of the hanger. I'd estimate 100' wide, 300' long and 16 foot walls.

aalan94 ... The blimp base at Hitchcock was even more impressive when the old blimp hangar was still standing. Driving down highway 6 and suddenly to have that hangar come in sight truly was spectacular. Sorry but I could not locate a picture.

quote:

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Hitchcock Naval Air Station was a Naval Air Station built by the United States Navy during World War II to accommodate lighter-than-air aircraft, more commonly known as blimps. Located in the small town of Hitchcock, Texas, about fifteen miles northwest of Galveston, it was commissioned on May 22, 1943. The most prominent feature of the base was the 1,000 foot long, 200 foot tall largely wooden blimp hangar. The purpose of the base and its aircraft was to search for Axis power submarines in the Gulf of Mexico.

Because of damage sustained from Hurricane Carla in 1961, the wooden parts of the hangar were demolished in 1962. The only part of the hangar still extant are the four tall concrete corner supports and the concrete foundation.

---

Edit: I would guess the hangar was about 400 feet wide. Setting in the middle of a salt grass prairie no other sizeable buildings nearby it appeared even larger than the actual dimensions.




[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 2/5/2007 1:56p).]

Lake City Army Amunition Plant

http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=lake+city+ammunition+plant&ie=UTF8&sll=39.101308,-94.260335&sspn=0.01472,0.029569&z=14&ll=39.095164,-94.256258&spn=0.029443,0.059137&t=k&om=0

I did a project out there installing some new cooling towers for the brass lathes. They turned out 100,000 of rounds of ammo a week. The place was huge and very old. When we went outside you could here them test firing the 50-cals. I asked them who got that job and they said it was all automated.

I was copying some drawings and found one signed/stamped on December 11, 1941.

Great pics of the Glider Field, CanyonAg -

My mistake for forgetting the the rule

BBH-

You should never come to an Aggie forum and expect to get away with ANYTHING.



agracer, your link had a couple of extra https thrown in.

Try this one

Camp Barkely

45th infantry and 12th armored division training camp and German POW camp south west of Abilene was big chunk of land 77k acres - 8-10 miles wide and 12-15 miles deep or something like that - here's some of the roads and foundations near what is now a feedlot. The camp continued on SW from here to the "mountains" south of town

http://snipurl.com/19ftu

http://www.hispanicabilene.com/barkeley.htm

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/CC/qbc2.html

preparing for Italy & Germany in the wilds of West Texas

I even spent the night in Hitchcock just last month. At my 87 y/o grandmother's house. Her parents came over from Germany around 1912. Her brother fought against Germany in WWII. The rumour is that they tried to blow up the concrete supports at the blimp base, but they were too strong for however much dynamite they use.

Shiek-

Great one. I thought I knew a lot of West Texas and WWII history, and I had never heard of that place. What's cool about your link, too, is that you can scroll up and count the B-1 Bombers on the ramp at Dyess.

HollywoodBQ-

Who's the "they" you refer to that tried to blow up the blimp hanger? Your grandmother?

There was a POW camp outside of Hereford, too.

Here's what I had on VT about it a while back:

__________________________________________


During WW II, a fairly large POW camp was in operation just a couple of miles south of Hereford. As you head south towards Dimmitt or Easter, when you look to the west, you can still see the remnants of the old water tower - it could easily be mistaken for a silo. To get there, head south out of Hereford on US385. As soon as you get out of town, look for and take Farm Road 1055 south and look to the west. Soon youll see the water tower in the distance, and you can head west on County Road 1. I forgot which road takes you to the chapel (see below), but you'll be able to see it to the south before you pass the silo, I promise. It sticks out like a little sore thumb against the Panhandle sky :-)


The camp housed approximately 5000 Italian prisoners (there was a German internment center located on the other side of the Panhandle near McLean) and was in operation until January,1946 when all of the POW's were finally repatriated. Contrary to the treatment of Japanese prisoners (and even Japanese-Americans), Italian and German prisoners were used to work in the surrounding areas and were well treated and well received by the Panhandle populace to the point of forming friendships that lasted beyond their years of internment.



The chapel was built by the Italians as a memorial to 5 POW's who died while interned here. Inside are some very ornate carvings done by the artisans among them and a simple but beautiful cross and altar. The site having been on private property was bought back and set aside as a registered historical site, so hopefully its preservation that was begun in 1987 will be maintained for years to come, "... so that none shall forget."


Here's the Google Maps Link


Eventually I'll get the link right.

This is about where I think it is. The dot next to "CR507" is where I believe the Chapel is. The tower should be in the midst of that area to center left.

[This message has been edited by Boozoo (edited 2/6/2007 9:29a).]

I know it's commonly known, but Amarillo AFB was started in WWII to train B17 crews also...

Overall Area
The air strip is the Amarillo Airport now.

To the left just off of US60 is what's left of English field. There's two hangars left that I'm reasonably sure are WWII vintage (have to ask the air museum folks to be sure) The aircraft you see in the zoomed in map are for an air museum they're trying to build there. The building south of the the airplanes is the old abandoned civilian air terminal from before the Amarillo Int'l Airport days.

To the right of the airfield also just next to US60 (old 66) is where all the base's buildings used to be. There's also another series of hangars. Nearly all of the base building are being torn down now. Even the old street signs are being ripped out. The hangars are all pretty much occupied now by local businesses.

I have some ground level pictures... but of course I don't have them here at work or uploaded to the web. :-/

Canyon - no, my grandfather had a great dynamite story during WWII in The Philippines, though.

I think the guys who tried to blow up the pillars at the blimp base were with Mecom Oil. Local legend has it that John Mecom owned that land and much other land around there.

Boozoo-

A little up and to the right of your link is

The Pantex Weapons Plant

Today, it is the only assembly/disassembly plant in the Nuclear Weapons Complex.

Current Pantex web page

But it began in WWII as a conventional weapons plant, and included a company town built for the workers. On the link above, the current complex is the right upper part of the photo. The extremely high security areas appear to have a white border around them. This is a double security fence. I would suspect if even a rabbit strayed onto the white area, security would know.

These are the bunkers where the bombs and artillery shells were stored during WWII. While not inside the current secure area (high chain link fence), they are on Pantex property and you will be visiting with the security guys if you jump the cattle fence to go explore them.

If security does not get you, the rattlesnakes will. The roofs have collapsed on almost all of these old earth-bermed concrete bunkers, and they are now ideal snake habitats.

Scroll up and to the left of the old bunkers and you can see some of the remains of the old train tracks and loading areas from WWII.

And here on the west edge of the plant is all that remains of the town of Pantex, the company town for the WWII workers.

quote:

---

Here's what I had on VT about it a while back:

---

What's VT?

Here's the Google Maps link

On the Google Map aerial photo, the water tower is the circle on the lower right. You can barely make out it's shadow to the NW of the circle. The chapel is in the upper right, just off County Road 507. There are a few abandoned foundations near the water tower, and last time I was there, there were some old barbed-wire covered corner posts from the compound. The structure NNE of the water tower is an above-ground concrete swimming pool, apparently built for the guards.

We discussed this site on an earlier thread so I won't repost my photos, though there are some there I took of the site.

I also have a short length of barbed wire from the camp. There are rolls and rolls of it there, I guess I ought to check with ebay about selling it.

If you scroll a little to the west, this photo puts the water tower in the lower right of the photo. This area looks really strange to me. There's no reason a farm would look like that. I'm guessing it's some remnant of the camp, perhaps the main entrance?

The prisoners were Italian, and they were often used on work details on area farms. Many formed friendships with the residents of the German community of Umbarger, near Canyon. After the war, and before they were sent home, they painted frescoes and carved an altar for the Catholic church there.

Labor was in short supply outside the camp, food in short supply in it. The prisoners were usually well fed by the farm wives, and guards would look the other way when the prisoners smuggled food back into their comrades. Supposedly the guards would use their rifles to shoot the occasional rabbit that was also smuggled back for the communal cookpot.

Prisoners helped build concrete grain elevators in Happy, Texas, which are still in use. They were granted permission to use surplus concrete and that's what the prisoner's chapel is made of.

[This message has been edited by CanyonAg77 (edited 2/6/2007 11:05a).]

OK Canyon, how do you do those links like that?

The building near the center of this link is what I suspect to be the only survivor of the South Plains Army Air Field. It was used to train pilots in the huge WACO troop-carrying gliders. Zoom out to see where it stands in relation to the current Lubbock International Airport.

In this view you can see the current terminal building to the east, and the old terminal (abandoned about 1980) to the west. The old terminal, at the east end of the Independence Drive loop is the one that should interest history nuts. It is now the home of The Silent Wings Museum, moved to LBB some years ago from Terrell. It's a nice little museum, with a restored WACO inside, and a DC-3 outside. The DC-3 arrived after the aerial photo was taken.

agracer, you can click "edit" on my posts and see it, but you can't change my posts.

In a nutshell, let's say you have a link like

http://texags.com/main/main.asp

Normally to link it, you do it like this

(url)http://texags.com/main/main.asp(/url)

except you use [ ] instead of ( ) and it looks like

http://texags.com/main/main.asp

I knew you could do it differently on other web sites, but it wasn't until I saw someone else do it on TexAgs that I realized this site allowed it. All you do is type the url as below, again with brackets instead of parentheses:

(url=http://texags.com/main/main.asp)Link Name Here(/url)

And it shows on the screen as:

Link Name Here


And I would appreciate you fixing your first link. It's hard on an old fart to scroll left and right.







[This message has been edited by CanyonAg77 (edited 2/6/2007 11:49a).]

Thanks for the lesson Canyon. I haven't felt like spending the time to figure it out. Thanks for helping me step up my message board game

for fossilag

Avenger Field
just off I-20 in Sweetwater, Tx

Home during WWII to the WASP
Women's AirForce Service Pilots

quote:

---

During World War II, a select group of young women pilots became pioneers, heroes, and role models...They were the Women Airforce Service Pilots, WASP, the first women in history trained to fly American military aircraft.

---

The Museum


check out these interviews
















and thanks for the tip on imbeded links. I never had sat and figured that out.



[This message has been edited by TheSheik (edited 2/6/2007 3:27p).]

These ladies still looked pretty good to me at their 50th Reunion.



After checkout in the AT-6 trainer the job assigned to these ladies was as ferry pilots to fly planes from factories as they were turned out to the gaining organization of the plane whereever that might be. No time was allowed for checkout in the type aircraft to be ferried; orientation normally consisted of a cockpit briefing and a trip around the pattern. They ferried every type aircraft in the inventory during WWII. They had guts and they had class. Several died in the course of duty (with no military benefits) and the rest were merely let go when the war ended (unrecognized as military veterans.)

It was not until the late 1970s that WASP finally received veteran status and DD-Forms 214, Record of Military Service. It was not until 2002 that the first was allowed to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.



[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 2/6/2007 3:40p).]

One of the WASPs was from Canyon. In a book about them, I read that she and her wingman (woman?) decided to add a little excitement to a long cross country flight.

They supposedly buzzed the main street of Canyon in their AT-6s, at below rooftop level. Her dad was on the phone to chew her out as soon as she got back to Sweetwater.

A family with that name is still in town, but I don't know if she is still with us.

Florene Miller-Watson lives in Pampa and often appears at veteran's events.

I heard a B-52 dropped a nuke on that runway at Amarillo in the '50s. All hush, hush got a HE but not the nuclear one (safety features do work). Anyone care to confirm or deny that?

BQ78 ...I searched through the records of Broken Arrow incidents ... USAF aircraft incidents involving nuclear weapons ... and could find nothing involving Amarillo AFB. I was closely involved with the subject from '57 to '70 and I do not remember any event of that nature.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/ops/broken-arrow.htm

It is possible that a Bent Spear incident occurred ... that would be an incident that involved a nuke but there was no damage to the weapon and no explosion.

VT is Virtual Tourist.

I used to maintain a site over there until they overhauled it... and I was far too lazy to follow suit and clean up what they did to me.

My parents live close enough to that Hereford POW site to see the tower most of the time. Pretty cool stuff. What's sad though is a bunch of juvie's have decided that vandalizing the chapel is more cool than having it. Personally, I think they ought to be shot on sight.


Edit: forgot to say I actually interviewed at Pantex coming out of A&M. I may yet interview there again if this current location keeps irritating me enough.

[This message has been edited by Boozoo (edited 2/6/2007 8:33p).]

Boozoo-

The spouse works at Pantex. Let me know if you have any questions.


BQ78-

The incident you refer to sounds a lot like one that is documented at Albuquerque. I believe it was a B-29 and it was the late 50s. Were 29s still flying then?

Regardless, procedure at that time was if an emergency go-around were necessary, the pilot would salvo the bomb and save the plane. It might go HE, but I don't think they flew with the nuke trigger installed. The planes were so underpowered, and the bomb so heavy, I think this was the only option to save the aircraft, especially if one or more engines quit.

The bomb had some sort of safety pin installed to prevent accidental drop. So on the "Before Landing" checklist was the item "remove bomb safety pin before landing". Some poor airman would shinney out into the bomb bay, pull the pin, and get back to his seat.

This time though, they were on final approach, the airman pulled the pin and....bye-bye bomb, right through the bomb bay doors. Imagine some poor aircrewman staring down through the hole where the doors used to be, watching the desert pass by underneath...holding the safety pin in his hands.

It did not go nuclear (my wife lived in ABQ at the time, so this is a good thing.) and I believe the procedure got changed after that.


EDIT: It was a B-36, and it was carrying a "Mark 17" 15 megaton hydrogen bomb. The bomb weighed 42,000 pounds. The HE went off and killed a cow.

ABQ Broken Arrow

[This message has been edited by CanyonAg77 (edited 2/6/2007 8:52p).]

can I cheat and jump past WWII ?

still cool and worth looking at
The Atlas Missile program lived around Abilene back in the late 50's early 60's -

http://www.atlasmissilesilo.com/
http://www.atlasmissilebase.com/webpages/lambhome.html

One of my buds says during the Cuban Missile crisis, the Atlas' were held at T minus 18 minutes for days on end. The fuel they ran on was too volatile to hang out in the tanks, so an inert liquid that took 18 minutes to vacate and replace sat in the rockets. So basically those guys were locked and loaded and waiting only for a go signal. . . .

there were twelve I think in roughly a circular pattern around Abilene. All linked and cross linked with hardwire. The engineering on these things is unbelievable. Huge blast doors on the surface protect the missile silo.

I used to sneak into this one outside Anson now the Anson ISD Ag Farm.

The Lawn silo mentioned in one of the links above is now an underground catering or party facility for rent.


I think this is the Shep silo that is now an indoor scuba facility

not much to look at now, but still kind of cool

quote:

---

VT is Virtual Tourist.

---

It's late, and my eyes read this as "virtual terrorist"

Kind of a freudian thing there. Google Earth gives every country in the world an Intel source that even WE didn't have 25 years ago.

More Dyess Atlas info
see about 2/3 down the page

http://w3.uwyo.edu/~jimkirk/atlas.html

Canyon ... The 50s-70s was an interesting time to be flying in Lemay's Strategic Air Command. Bombers and tankers routinely operated at maximum takeoff gross weight loads of bombs and/or fuel. Loss of an engine on takeoff shortly before through shortly after takeoff required emergency fuel dump for tankers and at last resort weapon jettison by bombers. And through this time the quest was for reduced time in getting an alert force off the ground in the event of war alert. (Reaction time when USSR developed sub launched ballistic missiles in the 60s was 15 minutes.) The procedure to do this was the MITO Launch (Minimum Interval Take Off.) We practiced launching six B-52s followed by six KC-135s at 15 second intervals. Four of the heavies would be on takeoff roll at one time. By the time 3 had lifted off black smoke had reduced vis to zero ... and turbulence after takeoff would rattle your brains. It was pucker time if one plane had to call ABORT before reaching decision speed and all others on TO roll picked up the call on Emergency channel ... LBJs first action on becoming Pres was to shut down Bergstrom AFB in Austin to SAC.

Camp Howze was a training facility and also a POW camp for Germans located around Gainesville. They're still digging up live rounds of artillery every so often.