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Mother and Dad US Army Camp Chaffee WWII Woven Cloth

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles Start Price:100.00 USD Estimated At:150.00 - 230.00 USD
Mother and Dad US Army Camp Chaffee WWII Woven Cloth
Up for sale we have an old Mother and Dad US Army Camp Chaffee WWII Woven Cloth that is framed. The frame size is 16.75" x 16.75" and the image size is 16" x 16". Fort Chaffee, just outside of Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and Barling (Sebastian County) on Arkansas Highway 22, has served the United States as an army training camp, a prisoner of war camp, and a refugee camp. Currently, 66,000 acres are used by the Arkansas National Guard as a training facility, with the Arkansas Air National Guard using the fort s Razorback Range for target practice. Groundbreaking for what was then Camp Chaffee was held on September 20, 1941, as part of the Department of War s preparations to double the size of the U.S. Army in the face of imminent war. That month, the United States government paid $1.35 million to acquire 15,163 acres from 712 property owners, including families, farms, businesses, churches, schools, and other government agencies. The camp was named after Major General Adna R. Chaffee Jr., an artillery officer who, in Europe during World War I, determined that the cavalry was outmoded and, unlike other cavalry officers, advocated for the use of tanks. It took only sixteen months to build the entire base. The first soldiers arrived on December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The installation was activated on March 27, 1942. From 1942 to 1946, the Sixth, Fourteenth, and Sixteenth Armored Divisions trained there. During World War II, it served as both a training camp and a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp. The major purpose of the camp was to train soldiers for combat and prepare units for deployment, but from 1942 to 1946, there were also 3,000 German POWs there. The creation of the camp caused the nearby town of Barling to experience a tremendous boom in housing and businesses.