Camp Colt: The World War I Tank Training Camp on the Gettysburg Battlefield

In March 1918, a military camp rose on the fields of Gettysburg National Military Park — across the very ground of Pickett's Charge. Its purpose was to train soldiers for a weapon that had not existed when the Civil War was fought there: the tank. Its commander was a young captain named Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Camp Colt in 1918, stretching over two miles of the Gettysburg battlefield. National Park Service photo.

A nation training for war

By early 1918 the United States had been in the First World War for almost a year, and the country had reorganized itself to fight. Young men were entering the armed forces in record numbers, most with no military training, and they had to be made ready to go overseas. Training camps opened across the country, several of them on Civil War battlefields.

Gettysburg had hosted one already. In 1917 an unnamed infantry camp was set up on the battlefield, but it was mostly canvas tents, and it closed before winter.

A camp for tank crews

In the spring of 1918 the Army decided to build a new training facility at Gettysburg and named it Camp Colt. It was to train men to work with and drive tanks, one of the new inventions of the war, as the Army was eager to build a tank corps around them.

The camp ran along the Emmitsburg Road, south through the fields where Pickett's Charge took place on July 3, 1863, and in the end stretched two miles south of the town. There, recruits learned both the basics of infantry life and what it meant to be a tanker.

Captain Eisenhower

To command it, the Army chose a recent West Point graduate. Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in mid-March with orders to turn Camp Colt into an efficient training center. His men drilled across the historic fields before moving on, either to other camps or overseas to the front lines in France.

In June the camp received its first and only tank, a Renault FT-17. The townspeople were puzzled by the strange machine; the men set about learning it.

Gone by 1919

Camp Colt dominated the battlefield from March until the war ended in November 1918. It had already begun to wind down before the armistice to prepare for winter, and the end of the war sped that up. By spring 1919 almost every sign of the camp had been removed.

A living memorial

Today the camp is marked by a National Park Service wayside panel and by a white pine near the Emmitsburg Road on the southern edge of Gettysburg. Camp Colt veterans planted the tree in 1954 to remember their time there and their former commander, by then President of the United States. On a battlefield of stone monuments, they chose a living one, and it still stands.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Camp Colt: Gettysburg's Tank Training Camp" (Gettysburg National Military Park and Eisenhower National Historic Site): https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/camp-colt.htm