YUMA Proving Ground, Arizona - U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground is most renowned for testing virtually every piece of equipment in the ground combat arsenal.
To ensure continuity in this vital mission, the proving ground's civilian workforce of engineers, data collectors and others have usually exceeded the number of Soldiers throughout it's more than 70 year history. Army testing in the desert near modern YPG occurred during World War II, but back then training Soldiers was the prime activity. And what Soldiers they were.
They were in the first wave that assaulted the beaches at Normandy in June 1944, and helped repel Hitler's massive, but unsuccessful, last gasp offensive in the Ardennes Forest that bitterly cold winter. As German resistance melted away with the spring thaw, they liberated Nazi death camps inside Germany.
The men who engaged in these heroics were made, not born. The destinies of 20 divisions, more than 200,000 men, were forged in the massive Desert Maneuver Area that spanned Arizona, California, and Nevada. They trained in the blazing hot desert to prepare for combat in North Africa, but the Allies defeated the Nazis there before their training was finished. Nonetheless, it served them well in their deployment to Europe: more than one veteran of Desert Maneuver Area training said that the intense hardships of combat in Belgium's raw winter were less grueling than a summer in southwestern Arizona subsisting on two quarts of water per day.
YPG is the last active Army installation in the Desert Maneuver Area, and within its boundaries lies what once was Camp Laguna. Today, the camp's legacy lives on in a free Europe, not in architectural remains: all that is left on the desert floor are concrete pads, rock-lined pathways that were once flanked by hundreds of tents, and scattered detritus of camp life: badly rusted tin ration cans and cups, and the occasional glass Coke bottle. But the greatest generation's successors in uniform nonetheless look upon the site as reverently as if it were home to a great cathedral, or a massive ancient ruin, reflecting on the hardships the raw recruits faced in training so many decades ago.
"As I look at this today, I know I am going back to an office in an air conditioned building when we finish," said Col. Randy Murray, YPG commander. "But the Soldiers back then, many of whom had just entered the Army, had nothing but desert."
YPG's uniformed personnel recently spent nearly an hour on an interpretive tour of the camp's remains as part of the Army's Officer Professional Development and Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) Development programs. Each Army unit is tasked with establishing a program for their own use, and due to it's relatively small compliment of uniformed personnel, YPG's program combines both officer and enlisted Soldiers for efficiency. In upcoming months, the program will discuss the Army's new operating concept and engineering ethics, among other topics, but for January focused on YPG's connection to the Desert Maneuver Area, victory in World War II, and the proving ground's role in the creation of the modern Army.
"I think this is one of the biggest things an Army museum should be doing in support of a command, especially in the study of leadership," said Bill Heidner, Heritage Center curator, who led the tour. "You can't look at an Army leadership manual without finding a historical vignette about every two pages. We try to tie in those kinds of historical vignettes here as well."
During the tour, the Soldiers walked the remarkably preserved stone-lined pathways, paused at a unit insignia constructed from rocks more than 70 years earlier, and tried to picture the sights and sounds of that long ago time.
"This is my first time out here," said Master Sgt. Brian Davis, NCO in charge of YPG's Airborne Test Force, who is serving the second stint at YPG. "I had heard of it and knew where it was, but never visited. History is always interesting, especially when you can actually see the debris."
As they heard about the primitive conditions at Camp Laguna, the Soldiers found contrasts and parallels with hardships they faced in training and when deployed to combat theaters in the country's recent wars.
"I've heard World War II veterans say that they have great respect for our guys in theater who serve not knowing who the enemy is," said Davis. "But we have the utmost respect for them: look at Normandy. They knew exactly who the enemy was and what they were going into, and they still pushed forward. That's pretty impressive."
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