Historic Camp Mackall The secret in the Sandhills By Bob Curtin Photographs from the Moore County Historical Association
t’s possible to jump on your Harley or crawl into your Subaru and drive from Southern Pines to Laurinburg on U.S. 15-501 as if you’re heading to Myrtle Beach for a game of skee ball and some Calabash seafood and never know you’ve just passed one of the U.S. Army’s more secretive military training installations. Camp Mackall, built almost overnight during World War II to train paratroopers and glider units to invade France, is today a primary training facility for elite Special Forces, the Green Berets. What’s secretive isn’t so much that they train, it’s how they train, turning seasoned, professional soldiers into highly skilled, well-conditioned and formidable Special Forces soldiers. The modern Camp Mackall encompasses about 8,000 acres of land, composed of eight major training sites, and every Special Forces soldier who earned the right to wear the Green Beret has left his sweat and blood in those forests and fields. During World War II Camp Mackall trained and tested divisionsize airborne forces in combat operations. In 1943 it was home to three newly formed units of the 11th, 13th and 17th Airborne divisions. The 82nd and 101st remained garrisoned on Fort Bragg but trained at Mackall. Today, our Green Berets are often referred to as the proverbial “tip of the spear” and operate in the dark of night and well behind enemy lines to perform almost superhero-like missions. During WWII, our newly formed airborne paratroopers would have been considered card-carrying members of the tip of the spear club. Originally named Hoffman Air Borne Camp, on Feb. 8, 1943, the installation was renamed in honor of Pvt. John Thomas (Tommy) Mackall. During the Allied invasion of North Africa, in the airborne maneuver named Operation Torch, Mackall was mortally wounded during an attack on his aircraft as it landed. Seven paratroopers died at the scene and several more were wounded, including Mackall. He was evacuated to a British hospital, where he died of his wounds on
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Nov. 12, 1942. Mackall was listed as the first American airborne fatality of WWII. Training the five airborne divisions in the newly formed United States Army Airborne Command was going to require space, and lots of it, for both parachute and glider operations. The United States Department of War began planning construction of Camp Mackall as early as 1942. The land south of Southern Pines was ideal because the federal government already owned a large parcel of it. Construction plans called for an installation that could house and train up to 35,000 soldiers. By comparison the entire population of Moore County in 1940 was slightly over 30,000. In just over three months, more than 62,000 acres of game land and leased farmland were transformed into a bustling military city. The camp included 65 miles of paved roads and several hundred miles of hard-packed trails capable of moving both civilian and military vehicles to the 1,750 buildings within the garrison’s north and south cantonment centers. The camp garrison provided housing for camp cadre, airborne trainees, as well as the paratroopers assigned to the airborne divisions. There were barracks, unit headquarter buildings, three libraries, six beer gardens, 10 barracks-style chapels, entertainment, fitness and sports facilities, and a triangular-shaped airfield with three 5,000-foot runways. Built with wood and tarpaper, the buildings were hot in the summer and cold in the winter. In the worst of the heat, the soldiers propped opened the doors at both ends of their barracks, either praying for the mildest of breezes or requisitioning (legally or by any means necessary) large floor fans. The biting cold of the winter months was more dangerous. The buildings were equipped with potbellied, coal-burning stoves, and soldiers had to take special precautions — even attend courses and post a 24/7 guard force — to avoid burning down the wood and tarpaper boxes. Besides the tarpaper-covered barracks that dotted the landscape, The Art & Soul of the Sandhills
