On Maneuvers

I had hoped that I could get a date range on the uniforms and old style campaign hats, but no luck.  The clothing is too generic, and in fact isn't all that different than that which is used today.  The truck, however, at least from what little I can see of it, looks like it's from the late thirties through mid forties.  In other words, it looks like the two Sargents  in these photos are training men for World War 2.  Even if the United States was still a year or two from the fighting when these photos were taken, it didn't take a lot of insight to know that we were going to get pulled in to the conflict.

Camp Blanding 4

I know it looks like I've got a duplicate from the last post, but not really.  The hospital area card is in the folder twice.  Was that supposed to make the folks back home feel good that there was a large hospital area, or was it a reminder that in war, people are going to get hurt?  This is the last of the Camp Blanding images, but there are still more from the military memorabilia envelope to come.

Camp Blanding 3

I know, I know.  The Greetings from Camp Blanding card probably should have gone first, but it's on the back side of the one with the address from the first post in this series, and I wanted to start with that one.  The white line that goes through the hospital area card is where the flap goes to close up the folder.

Camp Blanding 2

There's actually a bit on the history of Camp Blanding in the last post.  You might have to click on the section of written text to bring it up in a bigger window, but it's there.  Some things did get left out though, or to be more precise, had yet to happen when this postcard folder was published.

For instance, during the war, the War department leased 140,00 additional acres from local land owners.  At it's peak, Camp Blanding had 1,000 buildings, 125 miles of paved roads and was the fourth largest community in Florida.  The Camp was both an induction center, and an infantry replacement center.  I've always wondered how future replacements felt while they were being trained.  They must have known that they were being prepared to take the place of the wounded and the dead.  Camp Blanding was also a POW camp for German soldiers as well as an internment camp for 343 German, Japanese and Italian civilians who had been living in the United States at the beginning of the war.  While under the jurisdiction of the War Department, more than 800,000 trainees spent some time at Camp Blanding.  And finally, after the war, it was returned to Florida for use by that state's National Guard.  The original 30,000 acres from before the war.

Camp Blanding 1

Too many parts to this long strip of linen postcards to post all at once, so I'm breaking it up in to four sections.  It's clear that the majority of these images started out as photographs, but there are a few I'm not so sure of, and all but one are  in this first section.  The flag, I suspect is pure illustration, and the cover image too.  Still, I'm sure Emma S. Brown in Slatington, PA didn't care.  It was sent to her by "Pvt. Wilton E. Christman" and he wrote her that "Everything is fine here, in good health."  Not much of a message, but at least she heard from him.

On The Bridge

On the surface, this seems like a rather ordinary image.  A man in a uniform, and there are a lot of those floating around, standing on a bridge, a stream, trees, and rock in the background.  While I don't know where this picture was taken, it reminds me of places like the Virgin River in Zion National Park or Yosemite Valley.  It's also a reminder that we could have lost the national park system in World War 2.

 I didn't take long, after Pearl Harbor, for members of Congress, the Pentagon, and big business to  argue that the parks should be opened for timbering and mining.  The military also lobbied to use parks for training and bombing ranges.   Thanks to push back from the Roosevelt administration, by and large, that didn't happen.

Of course, the parks were affected by the war.  The men of the CCC, the men who built so many of the trails, campgrounds , and roads that we're still using today, went off to war.  And some parks did get used for training.  The 10th Mountain Division trained on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, and tank troops rolled across parts of Joshua Tree National Monument, now a national park.  Go to some of the more remote parts of Joshua Tree, and tank tracks can still be seen on the desert floor.   And, with the general public unable to travel because of gas rationing, the parks were, more often than not, a rest area for returned troops.

Slow

It says so, right on the sign.