World War II

Carbon County, MT

This memorial honors the 10th Mountain Division, the U.S. Army's specialized mountain-warfare unit organized during World War II. Trained to fight and survive in snow, ice, and high altitude, its soldiers saw fierce combat in the mountains of Italy in 1945. Many of its veterans came home to help build America's postwar ski and outdoor-recreation industry, giving the division a legacy that reached far beyond the battlefield.

Gatlinburg, TN

During World War II the U.S. Army raised an unusual unit trained to fight on skis and scale mountains — the 10th Mountain Division. After early service in the Aleutian campaign at Kiska, its soldiers went on to break entrenched German lines in the rugged Apennines of northern Italy, at fearful cost. This memorial honors the Southern men among them who never came home.

Abilene, TX

Established in 1940, Camp Barkeley grew into one of the nation's largest World War II training bases, at its peak housing more than twice the population of nearby Abilene. The 12th Armored Division arrived in November 1943, drilling day and night with tanks, armored infantry, and field artillery until it qualified for combat and shipped to Europe in September 1944. Nicknamed the 'Hellcats' and dubbed the 'Mystery Division' in General Patton's drive to the Rhine, the division earned more than 800 battle decorations before the camp was deactivated in 1945.

Philadelphia, PA

This towering steel barrel once formed the center gun of Turret 1 aboard the USS New Jersey, an Iowa-class battleship that stands today as a museum ship on the Camden waterfront across from Philadelphia. Each of these 16-inch guns could hurl a shell weighing as much as a small car more than 20 miles, and this one spoke in two very different wars — bombarding enemy positions in the Pacific during World War II, then again off the Korean coast a decade later. A single artifact like this collapses the distance between the factory floor of American industrial power and the far shores where that power was felt.

East Honolulu, HI

This memorial remembers nine U.S. naval aviators who died on April 5, 1942, when their Consolidated PBY-5A 'Catalina' crashed near here while returning from a 12.5-hour patrol of Hawaiian waters. In the anxious months after Pearl Harbor, such long over-water patrols hunted for enemy forces; in foul weather and darkness the crew mistook the Makapu'u light for Barbers Point and struck the hillside. Placed by the Hawaii Museum of Flying, it names each man lost.

Smithfield, RI

In the summer of 1943, the United States was deep in World War II, and the skies over the home front were crowded with military aircraft ferrying crews, training airmen, and testing planes bound for the war effort. Accidents were tragically common: thousands of servicemen died not in combat overseas but in crashes on American soil. This marker in Smithfield remembers three such men — an officer from Virginia, a sergeant from New Jersey, and a lieutenant from nearby Pawtucket — who lost their lives together when their aircraft went down on August 5, 1943.

Santa Fe, NM

New Mexico's Eternal Flame in Santa Fe, dedicated in 1966, honors the state's war dead and is tied to the 200th Coast Artillery — the New Mexico National Guard regiment sent to the Philippines and caught in the fall of Bataan in 1942. Many of those men endured the Bataan Death March and years of captivity, and New Mexico suffered some of the war's heaviest per-capita losses.

Victoria, TX

After German U-boats sank its oil tankers, Mexico declared war on the Axis in 1942 and negotiated to train a fighter squadron in Texas. The 201st Fighter Squadron of the Mexican Expeditionary Air Force—the "Aztec Eagles"—brought 300 volunteers to Foster Field near Victoria in 1944 before deploying to the Philippines in 1945. Flying with the U.S. Fifth Air Force, the unit carried out 96 combat missions against Japanese forces.

Harris Township, PA · est. 1947

Pennsylvania's 28th Infantry Division traces its lineage to 1917, and it went on to earn a fierce reputation in the trenches of the First World War and again in the hedgerows and forests of the Second. Colonel Theodore Boal founded this hillside shrine to honor the division's fallen, and Pennsylvania made it an official state memorial in 1932. The site gathers the memory of two generations of Keystone State soldiers into one place of reflection.

Brackettville, TX

Activated at Fort Clark in February 1943, the 2nd Cavalry Division brought together the legendary 9th and 10th Buffalo Soldier regiments with newer Black cavalry units, making it the U.S. Army's only all-Black cavalry division. More than 5,000 horses trained here alongside M3 Stuart tanks, even featuring in a wartime newsreel, as troopers endured hard drills and the racial injustices of a segregated army. Deemed unnecessary by the War Department, the division was dismounted, shipped to North Africa, and inactivated in March 1944.

Caledonia, WI

The 32nd Division—nicknamed "Les Terribles" by the French—was drawn largely from Wisconsin and Michigan National Guardsmen and earned a fearsome reputation across two world wars. In WWI it broke the German line at battles like Aisne-Marne and Meuse-Argonne; a generation later it fought a brutal Pacific campaign from Buna through Leyte and Luzon. This memorial highway strings those hard-won battle honors together like a service record carved in stone.

Abilene, TX

The 45th Infantry Division — the 'Thunderbirds,' drawn from National Guard units in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma — was among the first divisions called into federal service in 1940 and relocated to Camp Barkeley near Abilene in early 1941. Finding the camp little more than a tent city on undrained prairie, the soldiers nicknamed it 'Camp Smokey Okie' and trained hard before shipping out through North Africa to Europe. Across 511 days of combat in Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany they earned eight Medals of Honor and helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945; the division was recalled for the Korean War, where it suffered further heavy losses.

Savannah, GA

This memorial stands in Savannah, the coastal Georgia city that sent thousands of its sons to fight in World War II, a conflict that pulled ordinary Chatham County men into battlefields across Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa between 1941 and 1945. Titled "A World Apart," it honors those who never came home — the local cost of a global war fought to halt fascist aggression and defend the freedom of the United States. Coastal Georgia itself was on a wartime footing in these years, with nearby shipyards, airfields, and the ever-present threat of enemy submarines just offshore.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth's first Jewish congregation, Ahavath Sholom, dedicated this six-acre cemetery in 1909, and a Ladies Cemetery Society formed the same year to tend the grounds. Later generations buried three World War II soldiers side by side here and raised a monument to the millions of Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. The chapel and a maintenance trust reflect a community caring for its own across more than a century.

Weymouth, MA

This Weymouth square honors Master Sergeant Aime M. Arsenault, a career U.S. Army soldier who survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and went on to serve through World War II and the Korean War. Survivors of Pearl Harbor carried firsthand memory of the day that thrust the United States into global war, and hometowns later dedicated squares and plaques to keep their service in public view. Arsenault lived from 1922 to 1995, a lifetime that spanned the nation's mid-century conflicts.

Corsicana, TX

As war loomed in 1940, the U.S. government turned to civilian flight schools to help train the pilots it would soon need in vast numbers, and Corsicana Field became one of them. Built on a 400-acre tract beginning in 1941, it delivered primary flight training to cadets in ten-week cycles—by 1944 more than 8,000 airmen had passed through in 37 classes, and the school employed over 550 civilians, reshaping the local economy. When peace came the field was no longer needed, and the site went on to house a junior college and later a municipal airport.

Beeville, TX

This American Legion post honors Charles H. Lytle, Beeville's first African American serviceman killed in World War II, who died when the USS Ommaney Bay went down near the Philippines in 1945. Chartered in 1946 for Black veterans in the Jim Crow era, the post became a vital community hub — hosting the segregated proms that African American graduates were barred from attending at the local white high school.

New York, NY

Annadale is a quiet neighborhood on the South Shore of Staten Island, and like communities across the country it sent its young men to fight in World War II. This memorial gathers the names of a dozen local residents who did not return from the war that raged from 1941 to 1945 across Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa. Neighbors raised tablets like this in parks and squares so the cost of the war would stay visible in the places these men had left behind.

Rockport, TX

This airfield grew out of the U.S. Navy's urgent need for pilot-training sites during World War II. In 1942 Aransas County offered land to the Civil Aeronautics Administration, voters approved a bond issue, and the county bought 700 acres for an auxiliary military landing field. Leased to the Navy for the war, it hosted landing practice for pilots based at Beeville, Kingsville, and Corpus Christi, and has served both military and civilian aviation ever since.

Saint Louis County, MO

This memorial honors the comrades who gave their lives helping defeat the German armies in the Ardennes — the brutal winter fighting of late 1944 and early 1945 better known as the Battle of the Bulge. It was Hitler's last great western offensive, and American troops absorbed its full fury in the frozen forests of Belgium and Luxembourg.

Stamford, TX

As the United States braced for World War II, General Henry 'Hap' Arnold turned to civilian flight schools to give air cadets their first training, and the City of Stamford bought a slice of the old SMS Ranch to build Arledge Field, named for the businessman who led the effort. Dedicated in May 1941, the field trained cadets in Stearman PT-17 and Fairchild PT-19A biplanes under civilian instructors until the final class graduated in September 1944. After the war the buildings became Stamford's public airport.

Brackettville, TX

Standing on the site of Fort Clark's first guardhouse, this 1938 frame building served as the post's Army Service Club — a recreation center for soldiers and, during World War II mobilization, a non-commissioned officers' club — until the Army closed the fort in 1944. Set on a limestone webwall foundation, its banks of casement windows and louvered vents were built to catch the South Texas breeze. In later years it lived on as a country club and community center.

Celeste, TX

Born to tenant farmers near Celeste in 1924, the sixth of nine children, Audie Murphy left school after the eighth grade and honed his marksmanship hunting for the family table. Rejected by the Marines for his slight build, he enlisted in the Army on his eighteenth birthday and became the most decorated American soldier of World War II, earning the Medal of Honor and two dozen other decorations. He later portrayed himself in the film of his memoir, To Hell and Back, before dying in a 1971 plane crash.

Roanoke County, VA

Atop Brush Mountain in Roanoke County stands a stone monument marking the spot where Audie Murphy, the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II, died in a plane crash in May 1971. A poor Texas farm boy who lied about his age to enlist, Murphy earned the Medal of Honor and dozens of other awards before becoming a Hollywood film star and country songwriter. The remote ridgeline memorial draws hikers and veterans who climb to pay their respects far from any battlefield.

Farmersville, TX

On his 18th birthday Audie Murphy enlisted in the U.S. Army, and over more than two years of combat across North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France he became the most decorated American soldier of World War II, earning every Army valor citation, including the Medal of Honor. When he came home to Farmersville on June 15, 1945, thousands packed the town square, and Life magazine put the reunion on its cover.

Grand Prairie, TX

With housing critically short near defense plants in the early 1940s, federal officials seized on Avion Village as an experiment in fast, low-cost quality housing through prefabrication and mutual home ownership. Designed by Roscoe DeWitt and David Williams with modernist architect Richard Neutra, the 300-unit project launched in May 1941 amid a publicized race that saw the first house framed in under an hour and the whole development finished in 100 days. Workers from North American Aviation were the first residents, and in 1948 they bought the community, which remains resident-owned.

Baltimore, MD

Across the United States, towns and city neighborhoods raised memorials like this one to the local men and women who left home for military service in World War II, the vast global conflict that consumed the nation from 1941 to 1945. The plaque's language frames that sacrifice in the war's own terms—a fight to see that freedom and justice would endure against Axis tyranny. Simple community tributes such as this turned an abstract world war into something rooted in a single Baltimore block, honoring neighbors by name or by the streets they came from.

El Paso, TX

When the railroads reached El Paso in 1881, their tracks became a wall through the growing downtown, snarling pedestrians and cars for decades. Between 1948 and 1950, an enormous civil-engineering effort sank the main lines into a trench below street level, excavating over 4,500 carloads of dirt and spanning the cut with eight bridges. Dedicated in 1950, the project was named for the American and Filipino prisoners of war who died after the fall of the Bataan Peninsula — many of them trained at nearby Fort Bliss.

Bay City, TX

Built in 1941 on land loaned by the Pierce Estate, the Bay City U.S.O. was one of sixteen such centers raised that year across Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma to serve both townspeople and soldiers training at nearby Camp Hulen. Dedicated in 1942 and run by the Y.M.C.A. under U.S.O. auspices, its programs drew more than 150,000 service personnel before operations ended in 1945 and the building passed to the American Legion. With its banded windows, cantilevered overhangs, and flat roof, the buff-brick, International-style hall is the last of five Gulf Coast wartime U.S.O. buildings still standing.

Dudley, MA

Beresik Square honors Stephen E. Beresik, a young sailor from the mill town of Dudley, Massachusetts, who became the community's first resident killed in World War II. He died on August 9, 1942, aboard the heavy cruiser USS Quincy, which was sunk that night in the ferocious Battle of Savo Island off Guadalcanal — one of the U.S. Navy's costliest surface defeats of the Pacific war. Barely twenty-three, Beresik was among the hundreds lost when Japanese warships caught the Allied fleet by surprise in the war's early, uncertain months. His hometown answered that loss by naming a public square in his memory.

Berkeley, CA

This building was dedicated by the Berkeley War Council to the city's young men and women who gave their lives in World War II. Across the country in the 1940s, communities built 'living memorials' — halls and youth centers rather than statues — to honor their war dead by serving the next generation. Berkeley channeled its grief into a place devoted to its youth.

Longview, TX

When German U-boats began sinking American oil tankers off the East Coast in early 1942, the nation's fuel lifeline was suddenly in peril—most East Coast crude came by sea from Texas fields. In response the government built the Big Inch, a twenty-four-inch pipeline running 1,476 miles from Longview to Illinois and on to eastern refineries, the largest ever attempted. At its wartime peak it moved over 300,000 barrels a day, keeping oil flowing safely to the Allied war effort.

Copperton, UT

This memorial in Copperton, Utah, honors service members from the Bingham mining district who died during World War II. Bingham Canyon was a booming copper-mining community whose ore was vital to the wartime industrial effort, even as its young men served and fell overseas. The memorial ties a hardworking mining town to the nation's sacrifice in the global conflict.

Nacogdoches, TX

When Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College was funded in 1921, the legislature paid for only one building—the Austin Building, or "Old Main." President Alton W. Birdwell, convinced the young college needed more, arranged its first athletic field in 1923, even before the campus moved to North Street. Over the following decades the college added Aikman Gymnasium, a 3,500-seat multipurpose hall given by philanthropist Frank Aikman, and a Women's Recreation Center built in 1935 with Public Works Administration help, which doubled as a WAAC post exchange during World War II. Memorial Stadium later replaced Birdwell Field, honoring the college's WWII dead.

Kingston, TX

On a farm near Kingston in 1925, Audie Murphy was born into the hardscrabble life of a Texas sharecropping family. He enlisted in the army on his seventeenth birthday in 1942 and became the most decorated American soldier of World War II, honored with the Medal of Honor and a string of American and European awards for valor. He turned his fame into a Hollywood career, even portraying himself in the film of his memoir "To Hell and Back," before dying in a plane crash in 1971 and being buried at Arlington.

Denison, TX

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth president of the United States, was born in this Denison house on October 14, 1890, the third son of David and Ida Eisenhower. A 1915 graduate of West Point, he rose to command the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, later served as president of Columbia University, and won the presidency in 1952. The modest frame home marks the beginning of one of the 20th century's most consequential American lives.

Fredericksburg, TX

Carl Basse built this typical early Fredericksburg house in 1866, and the Henke family—who ran a butcher business from its front porch and back yard—expanded it for their twelve children. In a small back room on February 24, 1885, Anna Henke Nimitz gave birth to Chester W. Nimitz. He rose from the U.S. Naval Academy to command the Pacific Fleet after Pearl Harbor, was made Fleet Admiral in 1944, and signed the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945.

Commerce, TX

This marker honors the birthplace of Claire L. Chennault (1890–1958), the Louisiana-born aviator who became one of World War II's most inventive air commanders. Retired from a pioneering flying career, he was recruited in 1937 to help China build an air force against Japanese raids, and by 1941 he had assembled the American Volunteer Group—the legendary "Flying Tigers," their shark-toothed noses mistaken for tiger stripes. His band of pilots studied Japanese tactics so closely that they downed hundreds of enemy planes while losing only a fraction of their own, helping check Japan's invasion of China.

Williamsburg, VA

Blue Star Memorials began during World War II, when the National Garden Clubs adopted the blue star—taken from the service flags families hung in their windows for loved ones in uniform—as a symbol of remembrance. The program grew into a nationwide network of markers honoring all branches of the Armed Forces, often planted along highways and in public gardens. This dedication in Colonial Williamsburg, sponsored by the area's garden clubs in 2016, carries that mid-century tradition into the present in a city already steeped in the nation's founding history.

Columbia County, GA

Blue Star Memorial Highways date to 1945, when garden clubs began planting trees and setting markers along American roads to honor the men and women of the armed forces. The name echoes the blue star service flags that families hung in their windows during World War II, each star standing for a loved one in uniform. The National Council of State Garden Clubs carried the idea across the country, and local clubs like Willow Wood have tended these roadside tributes ever since.

Augusta, GA

The Blue Star Memorial program was created in 1945 by the National Garden Clubs to honor those who served in World War II, its emblem taken from the blue-star service flags families hung in their windows for loved ones in uniform. This Augusta marker, placed by the Garden Club of Georgia with the state highway department, carries that early wartime tribute into Richmond County. It is among the markers that name World War II directly rather than service in general.

Toombs County, GA

The Blue Star Memorial was created in 1945 by the National Garden Clubs to honor those who served in World War II, its blue star taken from the service flags families displayed for loved ones in uniform. In Toombs County this marker was set by the Garden Club of Georgia with the state highway department, the county commissioners, and the Lyons Garden Club. It is one of the markers that names World War II directly.

Vancouver, WA

This marker belongs to the earliest wave of the Blue Star Memorial Highway program, founded in 1945 and here dedicated specifically to the nation's armed forces who served in World War II. The blue star echoes the service flags families displayed in their windows, one for each member in uniform. Sponsored by the Washington State Federation of Garden Clubs with the state highway department, it stands near the Columbia River at Vancouver.

St. Marys, GA

Blue Star Memorial Highways began in 1945, when the National Garden Clubs planted a ribbon of dogwoods along a New Jersey highway to honor the servicemen and women of World War II. The blue star echoed the flags families hung in their windows for a loved one in uniform. The idea spread across the country, and markers like this one now stand along thousands of miles of American road, turning ordinary highways into quiet corridors of remembrance for all who have served.

Lebanon, NH

This Blue Star Memorial marker honors the members of the armed forces who served in World War II, placed by the New Hampshire Federation of Garden Clubs together with the state highway department. The Blue Star program began in the mid-1940s, when garden clubs planted trees and set markers along highways as living tributes to service members — a tradition that soon spread across the country.

Louisville, GA

The Blue Star Memorial program was launched in 1945 by the National Garden Clubs, who planted trees and set markers along American highways to honor the men and women who served in World War II. The blue star itself came from the service flags families hung in their windows, a single blue star for each loved one away in uniform. This Georgia marker, placed by the Garden Club of Georgia with the state highway department, extends that living tribute across the roads of Jefferson County.

Ware County, GA

The Blue Star Memorial was created in 1945 by the National Garden Clubs to honor those who served in World War II, its blue star drawn from the service flags families hung for loved ones in uniform. This Ware County marker was placed by the Garden Club of Georgia with the state highway department. It names the World War II generation directly rather than service in general.

Klamath County, OR

In the final spring of World War II, Japan launched thousands of paper-and-silk balloons carrying incendiary and antipersonnel bombs across the Pacific on the jet stream. On May 5, 1945, a Sunday-school picnic party in the Oregon woods discovered one of these fallen devices; it exploded, killing a pregnant young woman and five children. Theirs were the only deaths caused by enemy action on the American mainland during the entire war.

Lubbock, TX

When Lubbock lacked an airport in the 1920s, civic boosters raised money for a municipal field, opened in 1930 and managed by local flyer Clent Breedlove. In 1941 Breedlove opened his own 219-acre airport east of the Tahoka Highway, complete with four runways, hangars, a café and a control tower. During World War II the field trained thousands of cadet pilots through the Civilian Pilot Training Program and Texas Tech's pre-flight detachment, feeding the nation's desperate wartime need for aviators.

Hyde County, NC

During the spring of 1942, German U-boats hunted so successfully off the Outer Banks that sailors called these waters 'Torpedo Junction.' The armed British trawler HMS Bedfordshire, sent to help defend the American coast, was torpedoed on May 11, 1942, with the loss of all aboard; only four bodies were recovered and buried here. The small plot is cared for to this day as a piece of Britain on American shores.

Brunswick, GA

During World War II, the J. A. Jones Construction Company's Brunswick shipyard employed more than 16,000 men and women who built 99 steel 'Liberty Ships' between 1942 and 1944. Turning out roughly four of the 447-foot cargo and troop carriers each month, the workers once built seven in a single December as the Battle of the Bulge raged in Europe. Their ships helped keep the Allied supply lines open.

Bryan, TX

Rising from displaced farmland in 1942, Bryan Army Air Field became a key World War II training ground—home to the nation's only instrument-instructor school for a time, more than a thousand Women Airforce Service Pilots, and a segregated corps of African American servicemen. From here Col. Joseph Duckworth made the first intentional flight into a hurricane in 1943. Reactivated for the Korean War as a racially integrated jet-training base, it trained Tuskegee airmen, foreign pilots, and future astronauts before its land became part of Texas A&M University.

Marfa, TX

Built in 1920, Building 98 served as the Officers Club and Bachelor Officers Quarters for Fort D.A. Russell near Marfa. In the final years of World War II, from 1943 to 1945, the fort held German prisoners of war from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps — and their ornate murals, depicting West Texas scenes, still survive on the building's interior walls. Its adobe-and-concrete construction and distinctive A-shaped footprint earned it recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Caldwell, TX

When the United States entered World War II, rural Burleson County answered far above its size: roughly 1,300 of its 18,000 residents put on a uniform, many leaving the county for the first time in their lives. Their war reached from the deck of the U.S.S. California at Pearl Harbor—where Somerville's Thomas J. Gary died saving his crewmates and earned the Navy Cross—to the bloody landings at Salerno, the Ploesti oil-field raids over Romania, the Bataan Death March, and the beaches of Normandy. At home, families ran short-handed farms, joined recycling drives, and sent their nurses and defense workers to the effort.

Junction, TX

Founded in May 1919, this American Legion post honored a local man killed in France during the First World War and quickly became one of Kimble County's best-known organizations. In 1938 members built a native-rock home on this site, lining its walls with wartime keepsakes, and added a memorial hall after the Second World War. In 1966 the old "Legion hut" passed to the county historical museum.

Town of Brigham, WI

On the storm-lashed night of November 25, 1944, an Army C-47 cargo plane flying from Chicago to Minneapolis iced over and slammed into Blue Mound just north of this monument. The wartime crash claimed its crew on the Wisconsin hillside, far from any battlefield but squarely part of the home-front cost of World War II. The workhorse C-47 was the era's most vital military transport, and accidents like this shadowed its constant flights.

Port Lavaca, TX

Before World War II, Calhoun County lived by farming, ranching, and seafood — but after Pearl Harbor the Gulf Coast became a front line. The government condemned much of the shoreline, cleared Matagorda Island, and residents patrolled beaches after German U-boats sank Mexican cargo ships within sight of Port O'Connor. Camp Hulen trained anti-aircraft artillery, gunnery ranges rose on the barrier islands, and citizens spotted aircraft and even caught a man signaling submarines with a fishing-pole antenna.

Alto, TX

As the U.S. Army scrambled to house prisoners of war during World War II, it opened small branch camps to meet local labor shortages. Camp Alto, a tent facility for roughly 100 German POWs, operated as a satellite of the larger Camp Fannin near Tyler beginning in the fall of 1944. The prisoners cut pulpwood for an East Texas ice-storm salvage project until the camp closed in the spring of 1945 as the war wound down.

Caps, TX

From 1941 to 1945, Camp Barkeley was one of the nation's largest World War II training posts, holding up to 60,000 men at its peak — a military city twice the size of 1940s Abilene. It trained famous infantry and armored divisions, hosted the country's largest medical replacement center and an officer candidate school, and even held German prisoners of war, some of whom escaped or tried to tunnel out. It was named for Private David B. Barkeley, killed on a scouting mission in the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I.

Chireno, TX

During World War II, with American men overseas and an East Texas timber industry short of labor, two lumber companies petitioned to open Camp Chireno as a branch of Camp Fannin. On leased private land the War Manpower Commission built a 30-acre compound in an area flattened by the devastating January 1944 ice storm, using Chireno's rail links to move men and timber. From May 1944 until the camp closed in March 1945, some 300 German prisoners of war cut and salvaged timber and pulpwood here.