Fort Indiantown Gap: Stevedores, Segregation, and D-Day

At Fort Indiantown Gap in Lebanon County, an unusual training program took shape during the Second World War. The Army needed stevedores, soldiers trained to load and unload cargo ships at speed under wartime conditions. To teach them, engineers built three full-scale replica ship structures, dry-land vessels, right here on the base.

Many of the recruits were African American soldiers assigned to port battalion units. During their training at the Gap, they were segregated from white soldiers in their parent battalions. But on the beaches and in the ports of the war, including at Normandy and in Italy, those racial lines blurred or dissolved under the pressure of operations. The cargo-handling skills developed here contributed directly to the logistical machinery that sustained Allied forces in Europe. It is a corner of the Second World War that few remember.