Calhoun and Ouachita Counties, Arkansas, in World War II

Calhoun and Ouachita Counties in Arkansas held important military training and research sites during World War II. Camden Army Airfield in Calhoun County and Shumaker Naval Ammunition Depot in Ouachita County contributed to the country's military preparedness and gave jobs to thousands of local residents.

Camden Army Airfield

Camden Army Airfield, also called Harrell Field, trained pilots for the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF). It was one of three contract primary flying schools in Arkansas.

The contract schools existed because the USAAF's main training site, Kelly Field in Texas, could graduate only 500 pilots a year, and the service needed more pilots. It contracted with private flying schools to set up 22 Contract Primary Flying Schools, dividing the work this way:

Camden Airfield opened in August 1942. A cadet's path to becoming a pilot ran like this:

1. Five months of college classes in academic and military subjects at one of several Arkansas colleges.
2. At Camden, nine weeks of pre-flight courses and nine weeks of in-flight training, with the rest of the time in ground school.
3. Basic flying school, then advanced flying school.
4. On finishing every phase, the cadet earned their wings as a USAAF pilot.

Between 1941 and its closure in August 1944, Camden Airfield graduated more than 6,000 cadets.

Shumaker Naval Ammunition Depot

The war also drove government spending on new technology and on research and development. By 1944 the U.S. Navy was firing rockets from ships at targets on land, and it needed a new site to design, test and build new types of rockets. It chose land in Ouachita County, east of Camden Airfield, for the Shumaker Naval Ammunition Depot.

Shumaker was an inland naval munitions depot as well as a testing and production plant:

• The National Fireworks Company ran it under contract, and the first rockets came off the assembly line on April 24, 1945.
• In the last stages of the war, the depot played a key part in developing and testing new rocket technology for the Navy.
• National Fireworks ran the site until December 31, 1945, when the Navy took it back.
• After the war the depot was maintained, but nothing was manufactured there again until the Korean War began in 1950.

How the counties remember

Calhoun and Ouachita counties mark the war with historic markers, a memorial in Camden and a yearly banquet for local veterans. Several of the depot's original buildings are on historic registers:

• National Register of Historic Places: the Shumaker Naval Ammunition Depot 500-Man Barracks and the Administration Building.
• Arkansas Register of Historic Places: the Laundry Building.

Sources

• National Park Service: "Calhoun and Ouachita Counties, Arkansas."
• The source spells Ouachita County once as "Ouchita"; this page uses Ouachita throughout. It also gives the airfield's opening as August 1942 while counting its graduates from 1941; both are reported here as the source gives them.