Camp Colt

In 1918 the fields that Pickett's Charge crossed were covered in tents again, this time by the United States Tank Corps. Camp Colt was the army's first tank training centre, roughly a hundred and ninety two acres spread over the open ground on both sides of the Emmitsburg Road, on land already flat, already cleared and already held for the battlefield park. Its commander was a 27 year old captain named Dwight Eisenhower, and it was his first independent command. Nearly eleven thousand men passed through it, in a camp that at the start held about a thousand. It had a problem that has since become a good story: for much of its existence it had almost no tanks. Men trained on trucks with machine guns bolted to them, and the three French Renaults the camp eventually received did not begin arriving until it had been running about three months. Eisenhower was teaching a form of warfare he had never seen. Then in September 1918 influenza arrived with a troop transfer from Camp Devens in Massachusetts. Within weeks a large share of the camp was sick. He quarantined the site, isolated new arrivals and had the tents disinfected daily, and was given the Distinguished Service Medal for how the camp came through it. He never got to France. What he did get was a first look at this county, and in 1950 he and Mamie bought a farm on the far side of the battlefield, the only house either of them ever owned.