Arizona and World War II

FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, THE ARIZONA DESERT AND THE ARIZONA SKIES WERE A VAST MILITARY TRAINING AREA. HERE'S A LOOK BACK AT

TEXT BY JAMES E. COOK

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DON B. STEVENSON Based at Mesa's Falcon Field, the Arizona Wing of the Confederate Air Force restores such vintage aircraft as this B-17 bomber. The shapely likeness of actress Betty Grable helped bolster Gl morale in every theater of World War II.

Yesterday at Falcon Field_

It hardly seems 47 years ago that I signed on as a civilian flight instructor at Falcon Field, where our mission was to teach Royal Air Force cadets to fly Stearman PT-17 Kaydet primary trainers without killing themselves.

The spectacular, sun-drenched Arizona countryside was a revelation to the lads from foggy old England. In the Stearman, the cadet rode in the rear cockpit, with the instructor up front. When it came time for instrument flight training, the rear hole was covered with a canvas hood. I remember one bright morning when a student, Albert Marsland, was flying his needle-ball-airspeed routine under the hood. Ahead I saw a pretty little cumulus cloud - a good opportunity to show him what real instrument flying was like. I directed him right into the stuff.

"Okay, Albert," I called through the speaking tube. "Open your hood now!"

Marsland raised the hood, looked around in amazement, and gasped, "My gosh, sir! This looks just like home!"

Falcon Field was one of many training fields established in the United States by the British Empire Training System. All the military fields in Great Britain were operational bases for aircraft actively involved in the war against Hitler.

One of the advantages of training young Britons in this country was the common language. That didn't mean, of course, that there weren't extensive differences in vocabulary. The British quickly contributed to our airman's lingo. You didn't "crack up" a plane, you "pranged" it. The propeller was an "airscrew"; the windshield, a "windscreen." There were dozens of other examples.

Falcon Field and two other airfields in the Valley of the Sun, Thunderbird I and II, were born of President Franklin Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor call for the training of 100,000 pilots a year. By June, 1943, a total of 700 instructors nationwide were training aviation cadets from 29 countries, mostly from the United States, China, and Great Britain.

Flight training began on March 22, 1941, at Thunderbird Field north of Glendale, and on September 14 at Falcon Field near Mesa. Thunderbird Field II, north of Scottsdale, was activated June 22, 1942.

The British cadets began arriving at Falcon in June of 1941, each with some 12 hours experience in Gypsy Moths, whose airscrews turned the opposite way from Stearman propellers. The prop-torque-induced tendency of an aircraft to turn is offset by applying "opposite rudder." To teach the cadets to hold straight on takeoff (since the corrective action had to be the opposite of a habit already formed), special "ground loop trainers" were devised, with steel wingtip bows and restricted throttle operation. (A ground loop is a sharp, uncontrollable turn of the aircraft during taxiing or on the roll before takeoff or after landing.) Even with the special training, wingtip repairs were an everyday matter as cadets ground-looped their way toward familiarity with Yankee airplanes.

There were other exciting moments, such as the time two nine-plane formations flew headlong through each other over the Superstition Mountains. Amazingly, only a few scraped wingtips resulted. Actually, these were North American AT-6 advanced trainers, which operated from a side of Falcon Field opposite from where the Stearmans parked. RAF cadets moved up from primary training to basic and on to advanced, all at the same airfield.

Frequently we flew up to an auxiliary field where planes from Thunderbird II practiced landings. One day I asked a Thunderbird instructor, Jimmy Netser, why his Chinese cadets seemed to learn so fast at first, then went into a slump. He explained: "Mister Netser, we think you greatest pilot in the world," one cadet had told him seriously. "If we get half as good, that's plenty!"

Near-accidents happened often, not only on landings but also in the sky. One day a lone Stearman was seen doing stalls in the airspace north of Falcon Field, where aerobatics were prohibited. At each recovery no power was applied, and the plane continued down in a series of stalls, lower and lower. The Stearman finally disappeared below a hill.

Later it reappeared and flew home, and the embarrassed pilots, two applicants for instructor slots, sheepishly told what had happened. Each believed the other was flying the aircraft, and not until they dipped into a dry wash did they realize what was going on. Both grabbed the controls and pulled up.

I was fortunate in having excellent RAF cadets to work with, and in each of the first four classes to graduate, one of my lads was topmost in the group. Typical was Roy Walter Frederick Charles Westgate, a handsome fellow who went on to log more than 22,000 hours around the world.

During the years of World War II, an estimated 15,000 cadets earned their wings at Falcon and the two Thunderbird fields. There were many other military fields in Arizona, from the large Williams, Luke, and Davis-Monthan air bases to small contract operations at municipal airports. But I'm proud to report that Falcon Field was rated one of the best installations in the nation.

In the Pacific. The 92nd Division followed, en route to Europe. Both units comprised black soldiers in the still-segregated Army. When the first student pilots arrived at the new Luke Field west of Phoenix in June, 1941, runways were not finished. But that was only a minor problem. The men were given sack lunches and taken to Sky Harbor, the Phoenix municipal airport, for their flying lessons. Later, Luke became the nation's largest school for fighter pilots. The base was so crowded that cadets were often trucked to one or another of Luke's many auxiliary landing fields, where instructors met them with AT-6 trainers or P-40 fighter planes. Williams Field southeast of Phoenix was under construction at the time of Pearl Harbor. After the attack, "They flew planes [into Williams] from West Coast factories because they knew darn well the Japanese were coming on from Pearl," recalled the late Kenneth H. Cook, who helped build the field. "They took British and French insignia off some planes and put Uncle Sam's on. Lockheed and other manufac-turers took over four or five barracks and brought their mechanics and armorers in to finish outfitting those planes." Barry M. Goldwater, who later became a United States senator from Arizona, was In 1941 an infantry lieutenant attached to the air corps and assigned to Luke Field. On December 7 he was playing golf. "When I heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, I couldn't believe it," he remembers. "But I quit the game, called the base, and sure enough everyone was being called back. We had warnings about the Japanese possibly attacking us from the Mexican border. We had to fly an escort ship with every airliner that passed." Goldwater became a gunnery instructor and helped plan a vast gunnery and bombing range in southwestern Arizona. When some cattlemen in the area refused to sell their ranches to the government, the land was acquired by presidential executive order. Anita Bender McGee of Phoenix relates that her father patriotically recognized the need for the range and leased his ranch to the government. But he refused to move. "My dad didn't run easily from anything. We stuck to that ranch amid some pretty harrowing experiences-daily seeing the planes from Luke overhead, pulling targets behind them while fighter planes practiced firing at the towed targets.

"Sometimes when they got too close, my feisty 80-year-old grandmother would grab the U.S. flag, run outside, and wave it. She was sure the pilots would see it and leave us alone."

The Benders, who had been promised the return of their ranch after the war, eventually were required to sell their property to the government instead. In 1987, the area was renamed the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range.

A company called Southwest Airways, operating under government contract, trained 17,500 student pilots. Some of them were from Great Britain, China, Brazil, Turkey, and the Philippines.

One of the best-known contract installations, Thunderbird Field, is now the campus of the American Graduate School of International Management in north Glendale. Thunderbird II became Scottsdale Municipal Airport. Falcon Field, where Royal Air Force cadets trained, is now Mesa's airport. (See page 39.) RAF Cadet Jack May came to Falcon in the winter of 1942. "London was the jaws of hell," he recalls. "We were being bombed out of our minds. There was carnage daily, and no food. When I got here, it was all sunshine and citrus."

May said cadets were forbidden to buzz Camelback Mountain, the premier landmark of Phoenix, making that a most attractive activity. "If they caught you 'scratching the camel's back,' you were washed out and sent back to England."

The British were taught low-level night-formation flying. The palm trees and sedate homes of North Central Avenue were too much to resist. "The night we graduated, we flew right down Central Avenue, bombing the town with pop bottles and streaming toilet paper."

May later flew in combat over Europe and helped flush German submarines from the fjords of Norway. While at Falcon Field, the cadet had been befriended by the family of legendary

ARIZONA AND WORLD WAR II

Friendly Pines Camp at Prescott (see Arizona Highways, June, 1987). "I haven't looked back since," May says.

Within days of Pearl Harbor, the President committed the United States to active support of Allied forces fighting the Germans and Italians in North Africa. To prepare American troops for this campaign, Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., established the Desert Training Center with headquarters near Indio, California. Eventually the center's maneuver areas took up much of southeastern California and western Arizona. Facilities were austere-primarily tent encampments. Patton wrote to the War Department: "...I propose to hold the housekeeping arrangements here to the minimum, that is, to spend just as little as possible on 'prettying up' and as much time as possible on tactical and technical instruction."

Patton and his armored corps were soon fighting in Africa, but his standards for desert training continued to prevail.

The 77th Infantry "Statue of Liberty" Division of the New York National Guard found itself detraining at raw Camp Hyder, 100 miles southwest of Phoenix. The 77th's citizen-soldiers, fresh from big-city streets, forlornly surveyed acres of ankledeep dust laced with rattlesnakes.

HISTORIC ARIZONA PRINT

From the Arizona Highways Cavalcade Series comes this print by artist Bill Ahrendt. Originally created as an oil painting, "The Presidio of Tubac" colorfully portrays a 1774 pack train arriving in Tubac with supplies for the Spanish garrison, located in what is now southern Arizona. Handsomely reproduced on acidfree archival-quality paper, this offset-lithographic print is offered unmatted with a border for your display preference.

Order the Historic Arizona Print for $20.00 (includes U.S. postage) through the attached order card or by writing or visiting Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009. Telephone orders may be placed by calling (602) 258-1000 or by dialing toll-free within Arizona 1-800-543-5432.

It was tough duty in the desert. A stone pyramid still stands in memory of seven soldiers of another division who died during training at Camp Horn, a few miles southwest of Hyder. The inscription reads, "Here trained for victory under desert skies the 81st Infantry Division, The Wildcats, 1943...."

Tanks churned the desert sands as the 3rd, 6th, and 9th armored divisions trained at and near Camp Laguna, north of Yuma. There the men of the 79th Infantry Division also were learning the tactics of ground warfare.

Activities at Hyder, Horn, and Laguna were generally public knowledge. But at the time and for nearly 40 years after, mystery shrouded Camp Bouse in the Butler Valley, 140 miles northwest of the capital city. Bouse has the most visible relics of Army operations, but few knew who trained there or what they were doing. Then a group of military buffs, the Council on America's Military Past, asked the Pentagon to declassify the information. Although the Army had no objection, its historical files yielded nothing. CAMP researchers finally obtained the story from British sources. In a 1982 CAMP monograph, co-authors John Kennedy, John Lynch, and Robert Wooley described the tight security that covered the 9th TankGroup and its assignment. Since then, this writer has talked with veterans who were stationed at Bouse.

Their mission was part of the Canal Defense Light project, a secret British effort. Tanks were mounted with shuttered, filtered arc lights that were supposed to confuse the enemy and make the tanks elusive targets. The training was exhausting, the camp Spartan, and security so tight soldiers could leave only if they stayed in groups. When they got passes to Phoenix or Los Angeles, they gravitated not to bright lights and seductive girls but to cafes serving fresh milk and fresh eggs.

But eventually the project fizzled. The Canal Defense Light did not work well. "Thank God we did not have to go into combat with those things," said one veteran now living in Arizona.

The migration of former GIs back to postwar Arizona to help make it one of the fastest growing states in the nation is another important thread in our story of World War II.

This interesting figure recently surfaced: Bombardiers Inc. has organized to reunite veterans of this highly specialized occupation. Of 7,500 former bombardiers on its roster, about 1,000 live in Arizona!

A. E. (Bud) Gomes, formerly of Boston, was a member of a company of recruits that entrained at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, in November, 1942. "It took us seven days to cross the country," Gomes said. "We were making jokes that they must have built a railroad across the Pacific directly to Japan. We finally got off the train at Florence, and I remember it was sunny and warm for November. All we could see was sand and desert shrubs. We thought we were in the French Foreign Legion."

The New Englanders were marched to the site of a new camp for German and Italian prisoners of war, where they took basic training and became military police escort guards.

That POW camp is now Florence Gardens, a community of large mobile homes with a golf course. Two former German prisoners have bought lots there.

Gomes rose to first sergeant and married a local girl. They lived in Boston for a while after the war, then returned to Florence. Gomes became assistant warden (sometimes acting warden) of Arizona State Prison.

A better-known camp for German POWs was located at Papago Park, just east of Phoenix. It had satellite camps throughout central Arizona. The Papago Park camp gained notoriety when 25 German naval officers and men tunneled to temporary freedom two nights before Christmas, 1944. (See page 44.) Unfortunately, Italian and German military personnel were not the only internees in Arizona during World War II. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation rounded up all Japanese-Americans living in certain zones and held 20,000 of them at Poston Relocation Center on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. Two camps on the Gila River Indian Reservation south of Phoenix held 10,000 more. An Indian boarding school at Leupp, east of Flagstaff on the Navajo Indian Reservation, became a prison for a handful of "hard-core" security risks, although the installation's administrator told officialdom few of his charges seemed dangerous.

Today America has come to look with shame on the imprisonment of Nisei and other Japanese-Americans during World War II. Even Arizonans who helped build and administer "relocation" camps here reflect sadly on their part in it.

Most Nisei in the Arizona camps were from California. Many of them later settled in Arizona because they had lost their California holdings in forced liquidations. Farmer Mas Inoshita, who became a prominent citizen of Glendale, Arizona, was forced to sell his family's California holdings for five cents on the dollar.

The 400 Japanese-Americans living in Arizona were divided by an arbitrary ruling: those residing on one side of an imaginary boundary remained free; those on the other were interned.

Kay and Richard Takemori, who had two young daughters, had just equipped and opened a new grocery store near downtown Phoenix; but it was on the wrong side of the boundary. Because Richard was

Bombs and Hogans at Bellemont

Artfully woven rugs and photographs of Navajo Indians decorate the walls of the Navajo Depot Activity at Bellemont, 12 miles west of Flagstaff on Interstate Route 40. But the rugs and pictures are not a decorator's enhancement of a drab military headquarters; they are, instead, a poignant reminder of the impact World War II had on both Arizona Indians and U.S. Army personnel sent to establish a munitions depot in the high grasslands of northern Arizona.

On February 5, 1942, the U.S. Army created what was then referred to as the Navajo Ordnance Depot on 29,978 acres along the Santa Fe Railroad's main line. The proximity to the railroad was important because, during World War II, the depot was constantly receiving, storing, and shipping ammunition and other explosives. Most of the shipments went to the West Coast and ultimately to the battlefields of the Pacific.

Another reason the depot was located in this vicinity was the availability of a large work force from the region's Indian reservations. That labor pool, however, created some unusual demands for an Army immersed in a war effort.

Many of the Native American men and women employed at the depot came from isolated homes or tiny communities scattered across the high northern plateau. Many had had little if any contact with non-Indians, most spoke no English, and many were unfamiliar with U.S. currency.

This culture gap for a time proved frustrating to both Indians and Army officers; and in the early days, some of the workers found the adjustment too difficult to make and abandoned their jobs to return to the reservation.

William Young, who with his brother-in-law Hubert Richardson built a trading post at the depot, recalled that "Indians who worked there would get paid and go into Flagstaff to do their shopping. But because they didn't speak English, they'd get frustrated trying to deal with the stores, and they'd get discouraged, and they'd finally just leave and go back home."

To remedy the situation, the only Army-built Navajo "town" on record, including hogans and the trading post, was constructed nearby. Sheep (a staple of both Navajo diet and textiles) were imported, looms were provided for the women, and Navajo interpreters were hired. Eventually the depot had a 43-bed hospital, a church, a school, and two Indian communities. At the height of World War II, the installation employed nearly 2,500 people, most of them Native Americans.

Over the years the depot's name changed several times, most recently in 1971. Today, operated by the Arizona National Guard, the facility employs fewer than 20 Indians on the skeleton maintenance staff. The Indian camps have long since been dismantled; but in scrapbooks in the headquarters building, dozens of photographs tell the story of a now-distant war and its role in changing the lives of thousands of American Indian civilians.

The Greatest Escape

At about 2 A.M. on Sunday, January 28, 1945, Sgt. Gilbert Brady of the Phoenix Police Department was hailed by a streetmaintenance foreman at the corner of Central Avenue and Van Buren Street. A tall, lean stranger had just asked for directions to the railroad station. Clarence Cherry was suspicious: “He had a German accent,” the foreman said.

Brady caught up with the tall man in the yellow checked shirt at Third Avenue and Van Buren. “Sir, could I see your Selective Service registration?” the police officer asked.The man replied that he had left it at home.

“Where is home?” “Glendale.”

“Glendale, Arizona, or Glendale, California?”

A pause. “Glendale — back east,” said the man.

“Come with me to the police station,” responded Brady.

Thus quietly ended what has been termed the greatest escape by Axis prisoners of war from a United States compound during World War II.

The man with the accent was Capt. Jurgen Wattenberg, former commander of the German submarine U-162 and more recently the senior prisoner of war at the Papago Park POW Camp just east of Phoenix. Two nights before Christmas, Wattenberg and 24 comrades had undertaken their daring exit through a 180-foot tunnel that led under the camp fence and surfaced on the west bank of the Arizona Crosscut Canal.

Wattenberg had been at large for 35 days. He was the last of 25 escapees to be recaptured.

The possibility that carefully guarded prisoners could dig an accurately engineered tunnel longer than the width ofa football field through desert caliche, all undetected, had never occurred to the camp's officers. The strenuous, surreptitious effort had gone on for three months, despite minimal tools and the constant danger of discovery.

When at last the escape route was completed, the action came quickly. On the night of December 23, boisterous prisoners using the ruse of celebrating Germany's success in the Battle of the Bulge caused disturbances that distracted guards' attention. In rapid succession, ten teams of two or three men squeezed into the tunnel and crawled to freedom.

Wattenberg and two of his former U-boat crew, Walter Kozur and Johann Kremer, were the fifth team out. Wading the canal, then quickly changing into dry clothes in the bushes of the canal's east bank, they struck out to the north.

For a plot so successfully executed to this point, the scenario began to fall apart quickly. Within the first day five of the escapees, cold and wet, surrendered to Valley residents.

Puzzled officers and guards started a search for the escape route, but it was not until the day after Christmas that Pfc. Lawrence Jorgensen discovered the camouflaged exit hatch in the brush alongside the canal. Jorgensen, who now lives in Scottsdale, entered the burrow and followed it to a portal under a coal bin beside the bathhouse.

For nearly 40 years after his recapture, Captain Wattenberg refused to discuss the escape with journalists. Nevertheless, fascinated by the episode, I established a correspondence with him; and at Christmas, 1983, he wrote from his home in Lubeck, West Germany, agreeing to an interview. We met in May, 1984, at a vacation retreat in Austria.

At age 83, he remembered in amazing detail the activities of the trio during their absence from the camp. Soon after they left the canal it started to rain, and they took shelter in a shack. Next evening, after a portion of their hoarded rations became Christmas Eve dinner, Kremer took out his harmonica and softly played Stille Nacht, “Silent Night.” In the days that followed, they cautiously worked their way into the Phoenix Mountains, finding cover in an eroded alcove near Squaw Peak. On December 28, they celebrated Wattenberg's 44th birthday.

On New Year's Eve, they hiked all the way to Cave Creek Dam impoundment, a distance of at least 12 miles, where they bathed and swam, ate, and drank schnapps to toast the new year and Frau Wattenberg's birthday.

By the end of the first week of January, 1945, the men's anxiety about their fellow escapees' fate was intense. Kremer and Kozur ventured into Phoenix after nightfall, returning with several newspapers. Blared one headline, “Two Nazis Apprehended at Mexican Border.” Most of the prisoners, it appeared, had by now been caught. In the next two weeks, during forays to replenish their dwindling food supply, Kremer and then Kozur were recaptured.

Wattenberg determined to make his way into the city and somehow quit the Phoenix area, perhaps by freight train. But fate decreed otherwise. On January 28, the tall naval officer once again became a prisoner of war.

Postscript: Out of my visit with Captain Wattenberg, a memorable event developed. On January 5, 1985, he and eight other former prisoners of war participated with several of their ertswhile guards in a ceremony of commemoration at the site of the Papago Park camp. On a banner appeared these words: “To renew in friendship an association commenced in anguish.” The Purple Heart is conferred on any person wounded or killed in action while in the armed forces of the United States. (FAR RIGHT) The 371st Military Police (Escort Guard) Company in 1942. The guidon bearer is A. E. (Bud) Gomes, who later became a first sergeant. COURTESY OF A.E. GOMES When the New Englanders arrived at their destination-the prisoner of war camp at Florence, Arizona-"all we could see," recalls Gomes (FAR RIGHT, BELOW) "was sand and desert shrubs. We thought we were in the French Foreign Legion." Gomes now resides in Florence.

Text continued from page 42 an alien, not yet naturalized, dairies and bakeries refused to sell to the Takemoris. Given six weeks' notice of "relocation," they could find no buyers for the market. Their shelves were stripped by intruders, and they had to sell thousands of dollars worth of equipment for $800.

Kay Takemori has spent decades trying to forget the internment at Poston. "My baby was only seven months old. She got sick, and I couldn't get a doctor to look at her enough to say what was wrong. I missed the freedom-you couldn't do what you normally took for granted."

The family was released in 1944, after a farmer offered them jobs. Kay and Richard rebuilt their lives, and their daughters became schoolteachers. But the Takemoris could never get enough money ahead to open another store.

In 1942 Navajo Ordnance Depot was established west of Flagstaff, on the main line of the Santa Fe Railroad, to store and ship munitions. (See page 43.) Several now-prominent Navajos, including artist R. C. Gorman, spent part of their childhood at the depot. Some scholars believe the experience helped bring many Navajos into the 20th-century mainstream economy, and nurtured leaders who have modernized the tribal government.

Elsewhere in the state, the nation's requirements for war materiel had major impacts. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. had established large cotton farms in Arizona in 1916 to provide cords for earlyday pneumatic tires. At the beginning of World War II, the firm's aircraft division moved overflow operations from its Akron plant to the new town of Goodyear. The plant recruited workers from all over the nation, and ran three shifts around the clock. Don Goodman of Vernon, Arizona, has spent most of his life as a working cowboy. But he remembers a brief stint as a test driver for Goodyear, which was trying to get new synthetic rubber to adhere to the cords. "We'd take two or three sets of tires along and come back without any," he said. "They'd throw the caps-the treads."

Goodyear was one of several defense plants in Arizona. There also were Aluminum Company of America (later Reynolds) and AiResearch (now Garrett Turbine) in Phoenix, and Consolidated Aircraft in Tucson.

Goodyear took Consolidated airframes, converted them to amphibious aircraft, and test-flew them over the Grand Canyon. Then the planes were turned over to the Navy at Litchfield Naval Air Facility, now Phoenix-Goodyear Municipal Airport.

It seemed that the war, which had so absorbed the energies of the state and the nation, would never end. But it came to an abrupt stop after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in the summer of 1945.

The rapid winding down of its military role brought a brief lull to Arizona. Many of the temporary installations-the roster reads like a state atlas, from Ajo and Avra to Winslow and Yucca-reverted to other uses or returned to desert, surviving only as snapshots in albums and records buried in a National Archives warehouse.

Major posts survived. Luke, Williams, and Davis-Monthan are today active air force bases. The military field at Yuma became a Marine Corps station. Fort Huachuca is headquarters of the Army's worldwide Information Systems Command and home of key communications and intelligence schools.

Site Six, an auxiliary field of Kingman Army Air Field, became a planned community called Lake Havasu City.

But even more important to Arizona's future were the thousands of veterans and their families who stayed on or returned after the war. Americans had found a new mobility during World War II. The timing proved just right for the state. For several reasons, it was about ready for sudden and dramatic growth, and the development of effective aircooling systems now made the desert climate much less forbidding.

Veterans who remembered Arizona fondly began to return, seeking space, freedom, and opportunity. They ranged from top brass to GI truck drivers of the then-obscure Persian Gulf Command. The gearjammers hauled materiel through Iran to fuel Russia's defense against Germany on the eastern front. In 1946, Persian Gulfveterans in Tempe organized one of the first World War II reunion groups-now a thriving national association.

ARIZONA AND WORLD WAR II

George W. Howard, first commander of Patton's Yuma Test Branch (now Yuma Proving Ground), became head of the University of Arizona's engineering experiment station.

The late Tom Darlington, executive of a wartime defense plant, later developed the community of Carefree.

Ben Anderson, a young first lieutenant from New York, first saw Fort Huachuca with the 93rd Division in 1942. Anderson was not much impressed with the territory at first, but he returned gladly in the 1970s -this time as post commander.

After retirement, still active in Cochise County civic matters, he recalled: "I didn't have any choice the first time. But it was always my hope to come back-and I've been in 50 countries. I got my wish. The Army's pretty good to colonels who are about to retire."

James E. Cook writes a historical column for The Arizona Republic and is the author of Arizona Landmarks, published by Arizona Highways. Don B. Stevenson is a free-lance photographer whose editorial and corporate photography appears in numerous national publications.