Back at Camp Gruber Again

Camp Gruber, where the 42nd “Rainbow” Division trained © Erin Faith Allen

I have been to Camp Gruber more times than I can count at this point. It has become something like a home away from home, which is a strange thing to say about a former WWII training ground in the boondocks of eastern Oklahoma. But that is what it is.

My research approach is something close to method acting. I cannot fully write about a place I have only read about. I have to go and I have to stand on the ground, talk to the people, breathe the air of a location until its pulse becomes legible to me. Camp Gruber requires this more than most places, because so little of the original 1942 infrastructure survives. Most of the buildings were demolished after the war, almost as hastily as they were built. What remains you have to know how to find.

On this trip I found one of the extremely rare surviving original buildings from the camp's WWII construction. Quietly tucked into a grassy corner of the region, still standing after more than eighty years. That kind of find is its own reward, one I relish.

This is also where I spent time with a local woman whose knowledge of Camp Gruber and whose personal memories of the war left me speechless. She handed me a body of material I was not expecting, including decades of correspondence between former German POWs held at Gruber and their American friends in the years after the war. Letters crossing an ocean between former enemies. Buried for decades and now in my hands.

This is why I never give up on a research thread … you never know what might be waiting at the end of it.

The history of this ground runs deep and in every direction. Before the infantry there were settlers. Before the settlers, the Cherokee Nation, whose land was among the acreage condemned when the War Department built this camp. The descendants of all of these histories are still here, and I have had the honor of spending time with some of them.

For the Rainbow Division, Camp Gruber was the beginning of everything. The men who would go on to fight through Alsace, who would stand at the gates of Dachau, who would drive into Munich as the war ended around them. they became soldiers here first. Understanding this ground is crucial to understanding them.