Iron Mountain Desert Training Camp

The empty desert around you once held one of the largest military training grounds in American history. In the spring of nineteen forty-two, the Army established Iron Mountain Divisional Camp at this site, one of eleven desert camps stretching across the California and Arizona desert.

The man behind them was General George Patton. After the British suffered embarrassing defeats against Rommel's Afrika Korps in North Africa, American commanders concluded that United States troops needed to learn desert warfare before they faced it in combat. Patton's California-Arizona Maneuver Area eventually covered many thousands of square miles and trained more than one million soldiers. They lived rough, marched in extreme heat, and learned to fight in terrain as punishing as anything they would find in Tunisia or Sicily. Most of the camps disappeared after the war. The desert, as deserts do, swallowed them quietly.