CAMP RUCKER DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Alabama Heritage, Summer 2004 by Noles, Jim

BUILT FROM THE FARMLAND AND WOODS AROUND OZARK, ALABAMA, CAMP RUCKER TRAINED THOUSANDS OF SOLDIERS WHO WOULD GO ON TO HELP THE UNITED STATES WIN THE SECOND WORLD WAR. BY JIM NOLES

FIVE SUNDAYS AFTER THE JAPANESE attack on Pearl Harbor, the American military skidded into yet another desperate week. The German Navy began a submarine offensive against American merchant ships destined to sink forty-six Allied vessels by the end of the month. On the other side of the globe, the Japanese knocked the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga out of action, invaded the Dutch East Indies, raced toward Singapore, and launched their first attacks on American and Filipino troops trapped on the Philippines' Bataan Peninsula.

Even as it staggered in the face of these disasters, the American "sleeping giant" shook off the cobwebs of its peacetime slumber. And though the German and Japanese warlords did not know it at the time, the rumbling roar of bulldozers that winter week in a once quiet southeastern corner of Alabama signaled that the future did not necessarily belong to the Axis powers.

On Thursday ofthat grim week, January 15, 1942, the J. A. Jones Construction Company commenced work on the so-called Ozark Triangular Division Camp. At the time American divisions were built around three regiments, each of which contained three battalions-hence the adjective "triangular." Such camps would provide the facilities to train the scores of divisions-both newly formed and those of the mobilized National Guard-that the Pentagon knew would be needed to defeat Germany, Japan, and Italy. The selection of a plot of ground outside Ozark, Alabama, as a site for one of these camps represented a personal triumph for veteran U.S. Congressman Henry B. Steagall. Steagall had campaigned hard for an army post to be located in his Depression-ravaged home district.

"The [camp's] reservation was well adapted to training," noted lieutenant Colonel Horace L. Sanders in his memoir Helpmate Ready. Sanders would eventually command a field artillery battalion activated at Camp Rucker. With streams, rolling country, open and wooded areas, it afforded the varied terrain necessary for the training of troops and was sufficiently large for artillery maneuvers," Sanders wrote.

Within four months, construction workers had carved from the Alabama farmland, woods, and creek bottoms a training camp capable of supporting thirty thousand troops. On May 1, 1942, while the sawdust was still flying, the army announced that the camp would be named after Edmund Rucker, a Confederate general and latter-day Birmingham industrialist.

Camp Rucker's first camp commander was General Frederick Manley, a 1905 graduate of West Point. Rumor had it that Manley, an avid horticulturist, used much of the camp's construction budget to ensure that a pleasing number of trees and shrubs were planted around the base. Colonel Lloyd S. Spooner, who had won a record seven medals in various marksmanship events at the 1920 Olympic Games in Belgium, succeeded Manley as camp commander on August 31, 1943.

By then the army had already activated the 284th Field Artillery Battalion at the camp on june 25,1943. It populated the battalion partly with soldiers who had gone through basic training elsewhere as tank destroyer crewmen and partly with raw recruits. Molding these men into artillerymen was the battalion's first challenge. lieutenant Colonel Sanders reminisced on the new recruits' first days at the camp:

To most of these men, coming as they did from the northern states, the heat of Alabama was a new experience.... With the exception of a few, the recruits were civilians who had left their jobs or who had just finished high school. For the s first few days, much of the time was devoted to the issue of clothing, and equipment and to familiaring themselves with the camp itself. The change from home life to that of a soldier was one of the most severe adjustments facing a new soldier. This included living with forty or fifty men in one barrack, eating with a hundred or more men in mess hall, and showering with ten or twelve in facilities which were adequate for five or six. However, all of these inconveniences vanished after a few weeks as the men gradually became adjusted to the daily military duties.

Howard Nixon, a draftee from Michigan, arrived at Rucker in the fall of 1943 to train with the 575th Ambulance Company after a stint of basic training at Camp Grant, Illinois. When he was not mastering the operation and maintenance of his ambulance, the army kept Nixon in shape with a variety of physical exercises: obstacle courses, wrestling, swimming, boxing, and even crawling under live machine gun fire. Of course, he took his turn on guard duty, where he learned that Alabama was not always hot: "We stood guard at night.... it was damp and cold. I had all the clothes I could get on, plus an overcoat, and I don't know as I've ever been as cold," he recalled years later.

Eventually, larger units such as the 81st Infantry Division ("Wildcats"), 35th Infantry Division ("Santa Fe"), and the 98th Infantry Division ("Iroquois") trained at Camp Rucker. The 66th Infantry Division ("Panthers"), under the command of Major General Herman F. Kramer, also passed through Rucker's gates. One of its soldiers was a young man named Ray Roberts. The army had called Roberts to active duty just before his sophomore year at the University of Detroit. At Rucker, he trained as a mechanic with the division's 766th Ordnance Company.