Description
Few people know that the Army built a camp equipped to train 30,000 men to be sent to Europe to fight Germany in World War I. It is hard to imagine what Deming, NM, then a town of only 2,500 citizens, must have been like on a Saturday night with thousands of troops, mainly from Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, flooding the streets. Eckles provides stories and the history of the camp.
Jim Eckles worked for White Sands Missile Range for 30 years and has been a volunteer there since he retired in 2007. When he retired, he was informally called the “WSMR’s historian”. While at the range, he wrote and spoke extensively about the missile range mission and area history. He arrived early enough at WSMR to meet the pioneers who invented the idea of a missile range.