A History of the Ozarks, Volume 3 by Brooks Blevins

Author:Brooks Blevins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252052996
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Facility for constructing “demountable houses” for Fort Leonard Wood, Newburg, Missouri, 1941. Courtesy of Mary Alice Beemer Photograph Collection (R0496), State Historical Society of Missouri, Rolla.

By far the most transformative developments were the two U.S. Army installations that came to life in southern Missouri. The first and largest of these, Fort Leonard Wood, took shape in Pulaski County in a rugged stretch of hills and hollers flanked by the Big Piney River and Roubidoux Creek. Construction of the massive fort, which eventually grew to more than seventy thousand acres, began in January 1941. In a foretaste of the speed of the American war machine, in half a year’s time more than thirty thousand workers built fifty-eight miles of roads, a twenty-mile spur from the Frisco Railroad, and 1,600 buildings, including 600 barracks, 205 mess halls, 9 infirmaries, and 5 theaters. At the peak of the frenzy in March 1941, work crews completed a new building every forty-five minutes. The Fort Leonard Wood workforce was reportedly the largest in the nation at the time, and each payday pumped well over one million dollars into the area’s economy. Upon completion the fort housed up to forty-five thousand troops, most of them engineer replacement trainees. More than three hundred thousand soldiers received basic and specialized training at what they not so affectionately called Fort-Lost-in-the-Woods, Misery.64

At about the same time that Fort Leonard Wood’s first trainees were leaving for field duty, some 170 miles to the southwest the dizzying process was repeating itself. In August 1941 work crews in Newton and McDonald counties began construction on the more than 350 buildings that would comprise Camp Crowder, a training site for signal corps replacement troops. In addition to teaching radio operation and repair, Camp Crowder hosted a band-training unit and the army’s pigeon breeding and training center. Though destined for a much shorter lifespan than Fort Leonard Wood, Camp Crowder left a larger footprint on American popular culture. The Camp Crowder experiences of Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner inspired an early episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Another G.I. who passed through Camp Crowder, Kansas Citian Mort Walker, used the place as inspiration for Camp Swampy in his long-running comic strip Beetle Bailey. And it was a collection of letters written by gay soldiers stationed at Camp Crowder that provided the foundation for Allan Bérubé’s groundbreaking book, Coming Out Under Fire, and the award-winning documentary of the same name.65

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