The Making of a President
By Cheryl Sobun | Photography by Casey Martin
Dwight D. Eisenhower hated Gettysburg in 1918.
He longed to be “over there,” as the popular song of the day stated, fighting Germans in France and glorifying himself on the battlefield. Instead, he was over here, training Tank Corps recruits at Gettysburg’s Camp Colt.
“My mood was black,” Eisenhower writes in his 1967 memoir, “at ease: Stories I Tell to Friends.” Eisenhower wanted out so badly, he was willing to take a reduction in rank, but his superiors kept him right where he was. Finally, his assignment overseas came in November of 1918, but it was too late. The war was over.
As much as Eisenhower thought his 8-month command was surely the end of his military career, it was actually just the beginning. Camp Colt is where Eisenhower distinguished himself. Historians agree his impressive leadership of eventually more than 10,000 troops led to his becoming a 5-star general and supreme commander of the Allied forces in WWII and, ultimately, president of the United States.
Despite Camp Colt’s importance to Eisenhower’s career, it is just a footnote in history. In fact, WWI itself is eclipsed by the longer-lasting, more intense WWII.
“There are very few people who live in Gettysburg today who even know what Camp Colt was. It’s almost been completely forgotten,” says David Weaver, a licensed battlefield guide who’s done extensive research on the subject. In a collection of National Archive findings that Weaver donated to the Eisenhower National Historic Site, he writes, “…much of this documentation was, no doubt, hastily filed by War Department clerks who were ready to close up shop after the armistice and who probably would never have predicted that anyone would care about the day to day goings-on at a stateside training facility.”
A Soldier’s Life in Gettysburg
Most of the monuments dotting Gettysburg today existed back in 1917. However, the battlefield did not yet belong to the National Park Service but to the War Department, and, as such, it was military land. In the summer of 1917, army troops came to Gettysburg and trained on the field that was once the site of Pickett’s Charge. Simply called Camp U.S. Troops Gettysburg, the camp was not equipped to handle cold weather, so it was evacuated at winter’s onset. It reopened in March of 1918 and was renamed Camp Colt, after Samuel Colt, a weapons manufacturer; 27-year-old Capt. Dwight. D. Eisenhower was placed at the helm.
Hundreds of tents filled the 192-acre area, and more than 90 wooden structures were erected, including a hospital. “The main encampments were on both sides of the Emmitsburg Road, starting at the High Water Mark and running out to Sickles’ [Brigade] monument,” a veteran of Camp Colt, Richard Mather Marshall of Pittsburgh, says in an article published 40 years later. “The fields on both sides were used as drill grounds and our infantry training took us all over the Battlefield.”
Today, the Eisenhower Tree, planted along Emmitsburg Road in 1954 by veterans of Camp Colt with a bronze plaque beneath, and a historic sign across the street (pictured above) stand as the only testaments that Camp Colt existed. Other than that, there are small exhibits at the Eisenhower National Historic Site and the National Soldier Factory store at 11 Steinwehr Ave.
The men who made up the Tank Corps, or “Tankers,” as they called themselves, came and went by train at the Gettysburg station. When they left, they were bound for Baltimore and, ultimately, France. Ironically, there were only three tanks here. The first one didn’t arrive for three months, so the men mostly trained on trucks. According to Eisenhower, the soldiers practiced shooting machine guns at Big Round Top. There is no record as to whether they cleared visitors from the battlefield before doing so, but historians agree they probably did.
Patriotic fever and dollar signs struck the citizens of Gettysburg; they wanted the troops here, says Weaver. Thousands of soldiers meant good business, but it also meant drunkenness, rowdiness, and women of