On Sunday, June 19th, I celebrated Father’s Day as part of a panel of authors of military literature, an event sponsored by the Friends of the San Juan Capistrano Library. The other panel member was Frank McAdams, who wrote the Pulitzer nominated book, Vietnam Roughrider: A Convoy Commander’s Memoir.
Before the panel started, the moderator, Pat Forster, also a Vietnam veteran and a contributor to a Vietnam military history book by Keith Nolan, asked me a simple question – “Where was Camp Young?”
I had to admit I couldn’t remember anything about Camp Young. At Pat’s insistence that it was indeed mentioned in Immigrant Soldier, I spent the next few minutes looking through the chapter titled, “Army Time.” Nothing. Then, on page 187, in the following chapter “The Letter,” I found it.
“Within a week he [Herman] received orders that his entire battalion was being sent to Camp Young in the Mojave Desert. . . . He hoped it was the first step toward being sent to North Africa.”
Once located in the high desert near what is now Joshua Tree National Monument, this military installation had settled in my memory as “the Desert Training Center.” I had totally forgotten its given name. Of course, after the memory jolt delivered by Pat Forster, I came home and made a point of “Googling” Camp Young.
In the early days of World War II, with the upcoming North African campaign in mind, the US War Department realized the need to prepare troops for combat in harsh desert conditions. In March of 1942, Major General George Patton was sent to the west to locate, create, and command a training center to prepare United States Army and Army Air Corps units in desert warfare and to develop equipment that would withstand extreme heat, sand, and other factors associated with the desert climate and topography.
Patton was a good choice for this job as he had been raised in Southern California and was familiar with the Mojave and Sonora deserts. He selected an area 50 miles east of Indio and Palm Springs. There he purchased 28 acres to be used as an airstrip and headquarters from a local pioneer, Joseph Chiraiaco, for five dollars an acre. In June, over 3,000 additional acres of adjoining land suitable for large-scale military maneuvers was acquired from the Department of the Interior. The military facility thus created surrounded a small settlement with a store and restaurant owned by the Chiriaco family and known as Shavers Summit (now called Chiriaco Summit).
Construction of camp facilities was begun in the spring of 1942 according to a plan laid out by General Patton. The first soldiers at Camp Young, men of a medical battalion and a tank destroyer battalion, began clearing brush with machetes and hauling it away. Within a few weeks, engineering units arrived to bulldoze streets, set up tents, and construct a few temporary wooden structures to serve as an administrative center and a hospital. Set well back from the one highway and surrounded by miles of arid country, the camp location had been chosen for its proximity to the Los Angeles Municipal Water Department Aqueduct built in 1938 which allowed easy access to water. Power was brought down from Parker Dam on the Colorado River and a railroad spur was built to allow delivery of heavy equipment.
Accommodations for the men were always simple – everything somewhat temporary in nature. Camp Young, an immense tent city laid out in straight rows, had as many as 3,000 large pyramidal tents, all without electricity and furnished only with beds and foot lockers. Bathhouse tents and hundreds of latrines completed the picture. Other facilities such as a post office, mess halls, an officers’ club and warehouses clustered near the headquarters. The camp, ultimately 350 miles long and 250 miles across, encompassed 18,000 square miles of some of the most rugged and desolate territory on earth – the largest simulated theater of operations in the history of military maneuvers. Ten auxiliary camps were soon established in an area stretching from Boulder City, Nevada, to the Mexican border and from Phoenix, Arizona, to Pomona, California.
In the spring and summer of 1942, Camp Young served as the center of the maneuvers area for General Patton’s 3rd Armored Division which focused on tank warfare. Then, in July, General Patton was ordered to Washington to help plan and later lead Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. Under a new commander, Camp Young continued to fulfill its original mission as a Desert Training Center. In the late spring of 1943, Herman, the hero of Immigrant Soldier, arrived at Camp Young where he experienced the intense training and harsh conditions of the Mojave Desert. I’m sure it was during this time that he heard stories of the larger than life personality of Patton, the original commander of the camp. Perhaps it was at Camp Young that the seed for Herman’s devotion to General Patton was first planted.
After October of 1943, as the tide of war shifted in favor of the Allies, the camp’s primary mission became the preparation and movement of units to be shipped overseas. By this time, Herman was in Maryland at Camp Ritchie. In 1944, plagued by supply and equipment shortages, Camp Young was closed. Active as a training center for little more than two years, it never-the-less helped prepare twenty separate divisions, consisting of more than one million men, for battle in harsh desert terrain and climate.
Today, the General Patton Museum is located at what was once the headquarters for the Desert Training Center at Chiriaco Summit. The museum offers group tours, a remembrance wall, displays and preserved buildings, and a gift shop where the novel, Immigrant Soldier, The Story of a Ritchie Boy can be purchased.
http://generalpattonmuseum.com/
A Bureau of Land Management brochure about The Desert Training Center can be downloaded at::
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