Camp Colt: Eisenhower's Tank School on the Gettysburg Battlefield, 1918

Infantry train with a Renault FT-17 tank at Camp Colt. NPS.

A battlefield classroom

Run by the War Department, Gettysburg National Military Park had long been a training ground. In summer 1913, Chief of Staff Leonard Wood held the East Coast's first student camp there: 159 students from sixty-three colleges spent two weeks studying Lee's and Meade's tactics — the same summer as the 50th anniversary reunion of Union and Confederate veterans.

World War I

When the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, the Army had to grow from 200,000 to nearly 3 million men by spring 1918, far beyond its forts' capacity. Within weeks, tent cities and warehouses rose on the battlefield, part of them on the field of Pickett's Charge. By fall 1917, four new infantry regiments — the 58th, 59th, 60th and 61st — had trained and gone.

Camp Colt and Captain Eisenhower

Gettysburg then became Camp Colt, home of the Army's new Tank Corps and its only tank school in the United States. Its commander, Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower, had served with the Army's first heavy tank battalion, the 301st, at Camp Meade. He longed to go to France like his West Point classmates — among them George S. Patton Jr., who ran the American light tank school there — but was ordered to Gettysburg.

The French-built Renault FT-17. NPS.

Tanks, first used in 1916, were so new that no American model existed yet; the Army used British heavy tanks and French Renault FT-17s — two-man tanks with a machine gun or a light 37mm gun. For Camp Colt's first three months there were no tanks at all: the men trained on car chassis dressed up as tanks by two resourceful Brooklyn soldiers. When the first of two real FT-17s clanked through town in June, Gettysburg turned out to watch, and Eisenhower parked it by the gate for visitors.

Camp Colt in 1918: barracks, shops, mess halls and offices. NPS.

Influenza

Training brought accidents — a machine-gun malfunction killed one soldier and wounded two in July. But nothing prepared the camp for the influenza epidemic of September 1918. Nearly a third of the men fell ill, housed in tents on the parade ground, the worst cases in an isolation ward at Xavier Hall. More than 150 Camp Colt soldiers died.

Camp Colt soldiers pose on a battlefield gun. NPS.

Afterward

After the Armistice of November 11, men were sent overseas for occupation duty; Eisenhower left for Fort Benning, Georgia, and Camp Colt closed in March 1919, leaving only some training trenches and pits. In 1954 Tank Corps veterans planted an evergreen and set a bronze tablet at the site honoring their commander; the tree, saved from vandals by the Park Service and townspeople, still stands. Eisenhower never forgot Gettysburg: he bought a farm there two years before retiring from the Army and winning the presidency in 1952 — today Eisenhower National Historic Site.

Sources

Based on "The Army's First Tank School: Camp Colt at Gettysburg," Gettysburg National Military Park and Eisenhower National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.