World War II

Boston, MA

During the Second World War, Boston's shipyards became a busy haven for the Royal Navy, as British warships crossed the Atlantic to be built, repaired, and refitted in American yards. Thousands of British sailors passed through the city, where local families and institutions offered them hospitality far from home. This plaque was the Royal Navy's thank-you to Bostonians for that wartime friendship.

Ridge, TX

Drawn by rich soil and reliable water, pioneers settled western Mills County in the 1870s and 1880s, founding the communities of Regency, Ebony, and Ridge, each with churches, schools, and a post office. During World War II the U.S. government bought regional land to create Camp Bowie, and many residents who left never returned. Today only faint traces of these once-thriving towns remain.

Sayersville, TX

As the U.S. mobilized for war in 1940, the government seized this area for Camp Swift, giving landowners just 30 days to leave. The displacement erased farms and whole rural settlements—among them communities dating to the 19th century, a French immigrant's winery, and a lignite-mining village with its own cemeteries. After the war, many former residents could not buy their land back, and the National Guard retained much of the acreage.

Crescent City, CA

On December 20, 1941, just weeks after Pearl Harbor, the tanker S.S. Emidio was attacked by an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine off the Northern California coast, becoming one of the first American vessels struck in those waters. The assault brought the shock of the Pacific war directly to the shores of the mainland United States. Wreckage and memory of the Emidio have long marked the coast at Crescent City.

Sandwich, MA

This trail climbs a rise in Sandwich, on Cape Cod, where the layers of the past sit one atop another. Long before Europeans arrived, Sagamore Hill served as a council gathering place for the region's Native people — a "sagamore" being a subordinate chief among the Algonquian nations of the Northeast. Centuries later, during World War II, the same commanding ground was pressed into service as a coastal military installation, part of the chain of defenses that watched the Atlantic shoreline for enemy ships and submarines.

Austin, TX

Saint Edward's University grew from a Catholic school founded in 1873 by the Congregation of Holy Cross for local farm boys. Master architect Nicholas J. Clayton designed this Gothic Revival Main Building in 1888 and rebuilt it after an 1903 fire. The school became a university in 1925, trained flyers as an academy during World War II, and admitted women in 1966.

Dallas, TX

Born in Dallas in 1906 and raised in Oak Cliff, Samuel David Dealey, Jr. became one of the most daring submarine commanders of World War II. Leading the USS Harder on a legendary run of Pacific war patrols, he sank many enemy vessels and earned his crew a Presidential Unit Citation before he and his men were lost off the Philippines in 1944. He was awarded the Medal of Honor, ranking among the most decorated sailors of the war.

Killeen, TX

Killeen was born in 1882 as a shipping point on the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad, taking its name from railway official Frank P. Killeen. After fire destroyed the first depot, Santa Fe crews raised this building from standard plans in 1913. That rail connection later proved decisive: it helped persuade the U.S. Army to establish Camp Hood — later Fort Hood — nearby during World War II, transforming the quiet farm town.

Kerrville, TX

Kerrville's dream of a college took shape when rancher and businessman Charles Schreiner pledged 140 acres and a major endowment to the Presbyterian Synod of Texas, a plan delayed by World War I before the school finally opened in 1923. Blending military discipline with religious and general education, the institute admitted girls as day students in 1932 and sent many students and faculty into service during World War II, when a naval flight school operated on campus and sixty-six alumni died in the war. Military training became optional in 1957 and ended in 1971, and the school grew into a four-year college by 1984.

Seagoville, TX

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government not only relocated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans but also detained thousands of German, Italian, Japanese, and Latin American "enemy aliens" through the Justice Department and State Department. Originally built in 1941 as a women's reformatory, the Seagoville site was transferred to the immigration service in 1942 and held German and Italian couples and single women, plus Japanese Latin Americans housed in a "colony" of 50 Victory Huts. By 1943 its population peaked at 650 internees before it closed in May 1945 and reverted to a federal prison.

Chicago, IL

James Humbert served as a Seaman First Class in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was killed in action in the Philippines on January 10, 1945—as American forces fought to retake the islands in the war's final year. Chicago honors such fallen sons with neighborhood memorials that keep an individual name attached to the vast sacrifice of the war.

Killeen, TX

Organized at Fort Benning in July 1940 as German panzers overran France, the 2nd Armored Division earned the name 'Hell on Wheels' from General George S. Patton Jr. in 1941. As the first U.S. armored force in combat, it fought from the 1942 North Africa landings through Sicily, Normandy, and the Battle of the Bulge, and provided the honor guard for President Truman at Potsdam. Fort Hood has been its permanent home since 1945.

Smyrna, TN

During World War II the airfield outside Smyrna became one of the many training bases that transformed sleepy Southern towns into hubs of the American war effort. This memorial honors Major Allan J. Sewart, Jr., a Tennessee airman lost in the Pacific theater in 1942, whose name the installation later carried in tribute. It is a reminder that behind every base name stood a real person and a real loss.

Goldsboro, NC

This Goldsboro airfield was first used from 1942 to 1946 for flight training by the Army Air Forces during World War II, then reopened in 1956 as a permanent Air Force base during the Cold War. It was named for Seymour Johnson, a Goldsboro native and naval aviator. The base remains an active military installation today.

Franklin, PA · est. 1986

Born in Czechoslovakia and raised in the coal-country borough of Franklin, Michael Strank became a Marine sergeant in the Pacific war. On February 23, 1945, he was the oldest and senior man among the six who raised the flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima — the moment Joe Rosenthal's camera froze into one of the most famous images in American history. Strank was killed in action days later and now rests at Arlington, his likeness cast into the Marine Corps War Memorial.

Wichita Falls, TX

Named in 1941 for U.S. Senator Morris Sheppard days after his death, Sheppard Field opened as an Army Air Forces aviation mechanics school and basic training center just as America entered World War II. Training classes swelled to accommodate thousands of mechanics, glider crews, and pilots, and by October 1945 the base peaked at 46,000 personnel. Reactivated for the Cold War, it became a permanent Air Force base and a leading center for ballistic-missile and international jet-pilot training that continues today.

Shiner, TX

Emigrants from Bohemia and Moravia settled the Vlastenec area south of Shiner in the mid-1880s, carrying with them the Brethren faith of the old Czech lands. After years worshiping in a schoolhouse, they organized formally and in 1905 consecrated a wooden church, which soon hosted a convention that founded a mutual-aid society. Services and records stayed in Czech into the mid-20th century, and during World War II the congregation hung a service flag with a star for each of sixteen young men who served.

Victoria, TX

Sidney Roper Weisiger grew up in a pioneer Victoria County family, steeped in the region's early history. After serving as county sheriff and in the Navy during World War II, he spent his final years preserving local heritage, writing "Vignettes of Old Victoria" and "Sidney's Journal" for The Victoria Advocate from 1971 until his death in 1975. His widow Hilda later gave his research collection to Victoria College.

Pompano Beach, FL

During World War II, the ground around Colony Club Road served as the corrals and paddocks for the U.S. Coast Guard's Silver Thatch Mounted Beach Patrol. From here, riders swept the shoreline on horseback, watching for the German U-boats and would-be saboteurs that prowled dangerously close to Florida's Atlantic coast. The mounted patrols were part of a nationwide home-front effort to secure thousands of miles of vulnerable beach.

Denton, TX

Built in 1915 by civic leader James W. Simmons and his wife Susan—granddaughter of Denton County founder Darius Gregg—this Arts and Crafts Mission-style home reflects the era's taste for open plans, stucco walls, and leaded glass. In 1948 it passed to Colonel F.W. Maxwell, a decorated veteran of both World Wars who was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge, and his wife Louise, honored by the American Red Cross for four decades of volunteer service.

Gainesville, TX

In the anxious months after Pearl Harbor, the little North Texas town of Gainesville transformed almost overnight into a training ground for war. Activated in August 1942 and named for Texas-born General Robert Lee Howze, Camp Howze drilled infantry for the fight in Europe while also holding German prisoners of war and supporting air operations. Camp exchanges, libraries, chapels, theaters, and a base newspaper — the Camp Howze Howitzer — sustained the soldiers, and the installation reshaped Gainesville's economy and growth.

Palacios, TX

Begun in 1925 as a summer training ground for the Texas National Guard on land donated by Palacios citizens, this bayside camp grew into one of the U.S. military's largest field-training sites after it was renamed for Major John A. Hulen in 1930. During World War II the War Department expanded it for anti-aircraft training and quarters for 12,000 personnel, and from 1943 to 1945 it held German prisoners of war. Returned to the Guard in 1946, it was gradually dismantled and the land sold off by the mid-1960s.

Imperial County, CA

This marks the site of Camp Pilot Knob, one of the sprawling camps of the Desert Training Center that General George S. Patton Jr. established across the Southwest in 1942. Covering thousands of square miles of Mojave and Sonoran desert, it was the largest military training ground ever created, hardening American troops for combat in North Africa and beyond during World War II. Soldiers endured brutal heat here to prepare for the realities of desert warfare.

Longview, TX

When the U.S. Army needed hospital beds for a nation at war, it threw up 220 buildings on 156 acres here and activated Harmon General Hospital in November 1942, naming it for career medical officer Colonel Daniel W. Harmon. Nearly a self-contained town, it had a chapel, theater, bank, and post office, and by 1945 was drawing on German prisoners of war held at nearby Camp Fannin for labor. It closed in December 1945 after treating some 25,000 wartime patients; LeTourneau College now occupies the grounds.

Marfa, TX

During World War II, the Army Air Forces blanketed Texas with training fields, and in 1942 chose Marfa for an advanced multi-engine flying school. Despite early shortages, the field grew to four hangars and five runways, training pilots—including Chinese allied cadets from 1944—and hosting a Women's Army Corps unit and African American support troops. Deactivated in September 1945, the base's closure dealt a heavy blow to the town, leaving only foundations and runways behind.

Midland, TX

Built in 1931 as Sloan Field, this West Texas airfield became the Midland Army Flying School in 1942 and grew into what was called the largest bombardier training center in the world. One of more than 25 World War II airfields in Texas, its cadets logged over 861,000 flying hours in Beech AT-11 trainers and released more than 1.2 million practice bombs. The last class graduated in January 1945, and after the war the site transitioned to commercial aviation.

Palestine, TX

During World War II the railroad town of Palestine sat more than a hundred miles from any base, yet trainloads of soldiers rolled through daily. In June 1942 local residents — led by Zula Hanks and staffed by scores of women — opened a service club in the O'Neil Hotel offering refreshments, music, dancing, and letter-writing, and carried sandwiches out to troops who could not leave the trains. The group also helped fund a separate Negro Service Club for the African American soldiers who often rode farther down the line.

Pampa, TX

In the early 1940s Pampa's mayor and chamber of commerce lobbied Washington to bring a military base to the Panhandle, and the Army—drawn by the flat terrain and clear skies—broke ground in June 1942. The Pampa Army Air Force Base trained thousands of pilots and mechanics for World War II, boasting one of the best safety records in the Training Command. It closed in 1945 after just three years, having trained 6,292 cadets and 3,500 mechanics.

Greenville, TX

Opened in 1929 with a gift from Eula Lasater Phillips in memory of her husband, this field hosted Greenville's football triumphs—including a 1933 state championship—before being remade for baseball. Rechristened for Truett Majors, the first local man killed in World War II, the minor-league Majors drew huge crowds and once beat a barnstorming New York Yankees team fielding Casey Stengel and Joe DiMaggio. Hometown pitcher Monty Stratton also took the mound here before the stadium's demolition in the 1960s.

Vidor, TX

In 1908, Kichimatsu Kishi—a Japanese native and veteran of the Russo-Japanese War—founded an agricultural colony here, bringing Japanese tenant farmers who found the wet Orange County soil ideal for rice. The settlers became American citizens and adopted Western ways while keeping their homeland's traditions, and Kishi gave land for a church, a school, and a cemetery as Mexican and French Louisiana workers joined them. Falling prices and the Depression broke the colony in the 1930s, though many families stayed and their descendants remain in Southeast Texas.

Sweetwater, TX

At dawn on April 20, 1945, a C-47 transport carrying 25 Army Air Corps officers and enlisted men left Midland Army Air Field bound for Nashville, Tennessee. Sweetwater cab drivers spotted the plane afire in mid-air, and it disintegrated and crashed 0.6 miles east of this spot, scattering wreckage along a two-mile line and killing all aboard — men aged 20 to 37 from across the nation. Investigators concluded the aircraft, worn from 4,000 hours of glider-towing duty, had broken apart in a thunderstorm's severe turbulence while flying on a single engine.

Brownwood, TX

During World War II, Camp Bowie near Brownwood was a sprawling training base capable of holding 45,000 soldiers and home to the Texas 36th Division along with armored, cavalry, and headquarters units. Operating from 1940 to 1946, it helped prepare countless troops for the fighting overseas. The camp took its name from Alamo hero James Bowie.

Orange, TX

During World War II more than 50,000 German prisoners of war were held in over 70 camps across Texas, and in 1944 about 140 of them were housed in an Army tent camp near this site, branching off the base camp at Huntsville. Trucked out each day to the rice fields, the prisoners helped bring in harvests for farmers whose own workers had gone to war, often forming good relations with their employers. Their labor proved crucial to wartime food production, and prisoners returned to work Orange County farms again in 1945.

Wharton, TX

This Wharton County land began as part of an 1824 grant to Martin Allen, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists, and later belonged to Albert Clinton Horton, Texas's first lieutenant governor. During World War II, when more than 50,000 German prisoners of war were interned across Texas, Camp Wharton was established here in 1943 as a branch of Camp Swift. Converted from old county-fair buildings, it housed prisoners who worked as farm laborers throughout the surrounding counties.

Princeton, TX

Dedicated in 1941 with House Speaker Sam Rayburn in attendance, this began as a camp for migratory farm laborers. Once World War II arrived, federal officials converted it to hold German prisoners of war, who worked the surrounding Princeton-area farms and helped fill a wartime labor shortage. After the prisoners were released in 1946, the grounds returned to their original purpose, sheltering migrant workers for years afterward.

China, TX

As World War II drained America's labor force, the government put prisoners of war to work on the home front. This site held a branch of the huge Huntsville base camp, opened in September 1944 on land leased from an oil company and coordinated through the Texas A&M extension service. German soldiers—many first captured from Rommel's Afrika Korps—were picked up each morning by local farmers to harvest rice, log, and do general farm labor for a few cents an hour; at its August 1945 peak the camp held 403 prisoners before closing that December.

Breckenridge, CO

This life-size statue of a ski trooper honors the 10th Mountain Division, the U.S. Army's specialized mountain-warfare unit of World War II. Its soldiers trained in the high country at Camp Hale near Leadville, learning to fight and survive on skis and steep terrain, before joining Allied forces in the mountains of Italy. Many of these mountaineers later helped found America's postwar ski industry.

Lubbock, TX

During World War II, the Army leased and expanded Lubbock's municipal airport into the South Plains Army Air Field, a leading center for training combat glider pilots. Here men learned to fly the engineless Waco CG-4A, the workhorse glider that carried troops silently behind enemy lines. Remarkably, the field trained nearly 80% of America's combat glider pilots, who went on to fly in the D-Day landings, Operation Market Garden, and the crossing of the Rhine. Its story is now told at the Silent Wings Museum on this site.

Port Arthur, TX

Built as Jefferson County Airport in the early 1940s, this field opened just as World War II reshaped southeast Texas. Eastern Airlines flew the first scheduled service in 1944, but the airport also hosted Marine dive-bomber squadron training, with pilots practicing gunnery on floating targets in the Gulf off Sabine Pass. Through the jet age it grew with new runways, lighting, and a terminal, and in 1999 was renamed the Southeast Texas Regional Airport. In 2005 it staged one of the largest civilian airlifts in U.S. history, evacuating thousands of medically fragile residents ahead of Hurricane Rita.

Southington, CT

This monument honors the residents of Southington, Connecticut who served in the nation's three great mid-twentieth-century conflicts: World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam Conflict. Together these wars swept up a generation of small-town Americans, sending men and women from a modest Connecticut manufacturing community to Europe, the Pacific, the Korean peninsula, and Southeast Asia. Memorials like this one became a fixture of New England town greens in the postwar decades, a communal way to keep the names and sacrifices of neighbors present in daily civic life.

Dallas, TX

Founded in 1943 amid the pressures of World War II, Southwestern Medical College set out to give Dallas and North Texas a medical school that met the rigorous national standards born of the Flexner Report. Classes for its first 200 students met in prefabricated military buildings beside Parkland Hospital, and during the war the school doubled as an Army specialized training unit whose students served as military medical officers. Affiliation with the University of Texas in 1949 and a growth surge beginning in 1968 built it into today's UT Southwestern Medical Center, home to multiple Nobel laureates.

Canyon, TX

German American families from around Wisner, Nebraska—the Lesebergs, Meyers, and Albers brothers—settled this stretch of the Texas Panhandle in the early 1900s, soon joined by immigrants from the Bremen region of Germany. By 1909 the growing ethnic enclave had a school and Lutheran worship services that became St. Paul Lutheran Church. The cemetery began in 1916 when Gustav Leseberg donated land to bury Anna Marie Kuhlman, who died in childbirth; her German-language gravestone is the only one of its kind here, and more than a dozen veterans, including a World War II Silver Star recipient, also rest on the grounds.

Everett, MA

Herman Arthur Day was a young man from the Boston area who went to war and did not come home. He served in the 366th Infantry Regiment, attached to the 92nd Infantry Division — the storied "Buffalo Soldiers," one of the segregated African American units of World War II — and was killed in action in Italy on February 10, 1945, as the division fought its way up the peninsula in the war's final months. He was just 24 years old.

San Antonio, TX

As World War II strained the Allies' ability to keep American-built aircraft flying, more than a thousand civilian specialists from the San Antonio Air Depot volunteered in 1942 for a secret overseas assignment they knew only as Station "X." Crossing the U-boat-infested Atlantic in four groups, these mostly Texan mechanics reached the Burtonwood Repair Depot near Warrington, England, where they worked alongside British and American crews. By war's end the depot had overhauled thousands of engines and aircraft, including B-17s, P-47s, and P-38s, under the motto "Keep 'Em Flying!"

Nacogdoches, TX

When the United States entered World War II after Pearl Harbor, the president of Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College gathered students and faculty to meet the national emergency—and the campus emptied into the war. Enrollment fell by sixty percent, football was suspended, and a campus flag bore more than a thousand blue stars for those serving and twenty-four gold ones for those who died. In a notable distinction, the Army chose SFA in 1943 as the first college in the nation to host a Women's Army Corps training school. After the war, returning veterans on the G.I. Bill swelled the college and its recreation grounds were rededicated as Memorial Park and Memorial Stadium.

Charlevoix, MI

During World War II, the U.S. Navy's submarine force paid a terrible price for its successes against Japanese shipping: 52 boats were lost, carrying 374 officers and 3,131 enlisted men who never returned. In Navy tradition these submarines and their crews are said to be "still on patrol," eternally at their stations. This memorial keeps that vigil in their honor.

Berwick, PA · est. 2015

During World War II, more than nine thousand workers at Berwick's American Car & Foundry plant built over 15,000 Stuart tanks for American and Allied forces. Light, fast, and nimble, the Stuart was the first U.S. tank produced on a moving assembly line and saw combat on battlefronts around the globe. A.C.F. grew into the nation's largest maker of armor plate, with its own ballistics testing range.

Beckville, TX

Settlement here reaches back to Elijah Wyatt, who came to Texas in 1838 and is thought to lie in this ground, though the earliest marked grave belongs to a man who died in 1861. Set aside alongside a meeting house in the 1850s, the plot grew into a community cemetery holding scores of marked and unmarked graves. Its rows include veterans of both the Civil War and World War II, spanning a century of local life.

Chester, PA · est. 2007

Founded by the Pew family in 1916 along the Delaware River, Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company grew during World War II into the largest single shipyard on earth, employing more than 35,000 workers. Sun pioneered the all-welded ship and the T-2 oil tanker that became the standard across American yards, building over 250 wartime tankers—roughly 40 percent of the world's total—and repairing more than 1,500 damaged vessels. The yard operated on this Chester waterfront until 1982.

Emporium, PA · est. 2021

Founded in 1907 in the small mountain town of Emporium, Sylvania Electric grew into a national name in vacuum tubes and electronics. During World War II its workers—largely women—produced vacuum tubes for the proximity fuze, a device that let artillery shells detonate near their targets and dramatically improved accuracy. The reliance on a female workforce led Collier's to dub Emporium "Girls Town USA," and the Poplar Street plant ran until 1990.

Clayton, MO

This memorial honors the former students of the Taylor School who served in World War II between 1941 and 1945, framing their service as a fight 'for the cause of freedom.' Schools across America sent their young men and women into the war, and communities later dedicated honor rolls like this to the boys who left classrooms for the front. It links a neighborhood school directly to the nation's largest wartime mobilization.

Cambridge, MA

In the last winter of World War II, Allied airmen flew punishing missions over the Balkans, striking Axis positions across a Yugoslavia ravaged by occupation and resistance. Corporal Albert Stanley Teeven, Jr., a young member of the U.S. Army Air Forces, was killed over that country in February 1945, only months before victory in Europe. His hometown of Cambridge set aside this circle in his name, turning an ordinary street corner into a lasting act of remembrance.

Santa Cruz County, AZ

Juan and Juanita Telles began building this roadside shrine in 1941, fulfilling a vow to God made in exchange for the safe return of their sons serving in the war. A living example of the folk-Catholic devotional tradition of the Pimería Alta borderlands, it was re-dedicated in 1988 by the Pimeria Alta Historical Society.

Trinity, TX

East Texas rode a river of pine, and few mills ran it better than the Texas Long Leaf Lumber Company, which bought the Thompson Brothers' Trinity mill in 1922. Under Paul Sanderson's 22-year leadership the operation became a national leader in yellow pine and hardwoods, employing as many as 450 people and pioneering selective cutting, reforestation, and fire protection. During World War II the mill cut up to 140,000 board feet a day—lumber that reached Europe and Africa and earned the coveted Army-Navy "E" Award in 1944. The mill's 1955 closure devastated Trinity's economy and closed a defining chapter in the town's life.

Corpus Christi, TX

Mexican Americans served by the hundreds of thousands in World War II, only to return home to entrenched discrimination. In Corpus Christi, decorated Army veteran and physician Dr. Hector P. Garcia gathered some 700 fellow veterans in 1948 to found the American G.I. Forum, dedicated to securing the benefits and rights they had earned. When a Three Rivers funeral home refused services for a fallen soldier, Private Felix Longoria, the Forum's response — the 'Longoria Affair' — thrust it into national prominence as a leading Latino civil rights organization.

San Marcos, TX

Built in 1873 as Hays County's first jail, this sturdy little brick lockup earned the folk name "Calaboose," from the Spanish calabozo. Its history traces the arc of segregation in Central Texas: an annex for Black prisoners, then a neighborhood recreation center, and during World War II a U.S.O. hospitality center for Black servicemen barred from whites-only facilities. In later years it returned to community use.

Austin, TX

Galveston-born Margaret Catterall married Maine native Gordon Mills in 1933, and the couple settled in Austin, where he managed her father's firm, Aus-Tex Chili, a leading maker of canned regional cuisine. During World War II, Mills secured a government contract to produce rations for Allied soldiers, while both he and Margaret threw themselves into civic life, from the Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau to the Austin Symphony and their Episcopal church.

Greenville, TX

Greenville's post office dates to 1847, when mail was reputedly dropped at a saloon, but it moved into this Neo-classic building only in 1910, later enlarged in 1930. Its most famous moment came on June 20, 1942, when a young Hunt County man named Audie Murphy joined the Army here on his 18th birthday. Murphy went on to become the most decorated American soldier of World War II, and the city acquired the building in 1973 to preserve it.

Galveston, TX

A native of France who had served in its army, Marius Etienne Chataignon came to the United States in 1907 and to Texas in 1910, entering the priesthood and serving parishes in Galveston. He was a U.S. Army chaplain in France during World War I, and in World War II — promoted to colonel and known fondly as Father Chat, Galveston's soldier priest — he served as chief chaplain of the II Corps, 5th Army in North Africa and Italy. Returning a decorated veteran, he led Sacred Heart Church and helped establish a Catholic high school for boys before retiring from the Army in 1953.

Cleburne, TX

World War II transformed the Texas home front as civilians took up new jobs in petroleum, lumber, bomber manufacturing and farming, even as enlistment drained smaller towns of labor. Johnson County answered its 1944 farm-labor crisis by establishing Camp Cleburne, one of nearly 70 Texas camps holding more than 50,000 German POWs, whose workers supplied 120 local farms. Meanwhile National Guard units like Battery B of the 36th Infantry Division trained here before shipping overseas in 1942, and by war's end nearly 1.2 million troops had trained at Texas bases.