AZ: The History of Arizona podcast · David Rookhuyzen

Episode 235: Like Dandelions on a Green Lawn

·31 min·2 clips

Barry Goldwater helped plan a 1.9 million-acre bombing and combat range south of Interstate 8.

1. AZ: The History of Arizona podcast episode 235, “Like Dandelions on a Green Lawn,” focuses on World War II’s expansion of Arizona military installations. 2. Host David Ruckhausen narrates the story and uses Marshall Trimble’s before-and-after-World-War-II framing to explain why the war matters. 3. The episode asks what Arizona’s wartime bases and training grounds produced after 1941, beyond the immediate needs of the war. 4. Dean Smith’s description in Arizona Goes to War gives the episode its image of installations sprouting “like dandelions on a green lawn.” 5. The host revisits Luke Air Force Base, Falcon Field, Williams Field, and Davis-Monthan, then contrasts them with the much larger wartime buildup that followed Pearl Harbor. 6. Ryan Field and Marana Airfield near Tucson are named as war-era additions, and Marana is described as the largest basic flight training school in the country. 7. The Arizona Maneuver Area, or CAMA, covered 18,000 square miles between Indio, Aguila, the Mexican border, and Searchlight. 8. General George S. Patton oversaw CAMA from Camp Young, which the host places about 30 miles east of Indio. 9. Camp Hyder, Camp Horn, and Camp Laguna near Yuma trained more than a million men before closing in 1944. 10. Bradford Luckingham’s figure of more than 30,000 men at Camp Hyder in 1943 shows how crowded one desert camp could become. 11. The episode gives a rattlesnake anecdote from Smith to show how harsh the desert conditions felt to soldiers in the camps. 12. Camp Bouse is presented as unusually secret, with its mission kept hidden until the 1980s. 13. The host says Camp Bouse was used by British units testing experimental equipment meant to confuse the enemy and make tanks harder to hit. 14. General Motors engineers on the Gila River Indian Reservation tested tank filters against dust and eventually found one that blocked more than 99% of particulates. 15. The Army Corps of Engineers tested bridges and other materials near the Imperial Dam or Laguna Dam and later grew rice and hemp there in 1944 for invasion planning. 16. The Yuma Test Branch became the Yuma Proving Grounds, and the episode notes that the site now exceeds 1,300 square miles. 17. The tone is explanatory and archive-driven, with the host moving from one installation to another and pausing for specific numbers, names, and dates. 18. The episode also uses personal anecdotes, including soldiers in Phoenix, toilet paper dropped over Central Avenue, and Union Station volunteers handing out coffee and donuts. 19. Listeners interested in Arizona military history, desert training, and wartime base building will get the most out of this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a short, purely battlefield-focused war narrative may skip the base-by-base survey.

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