12th Armored Division at Camp Barkeley

Camp Barkeley trained medics as well as tank crews. Its Medical Replacement Training Center opened under Brig. Gen. Roy C. Heflebower on November 1, 1941, and from May 1942 an officer candidate school trained administrators so that army doctors could stay with their patients. The Handbook of Texas counts 12,500 of the 17,094 Medical Administrative Corps officers commissioned in the war as Barkeley graduates, among them 158 of the 189 Black officers, in a camp where most recreation was closed to Black soldiers and Abilene was strictly segregated.

What the plaque says

Established as a U.S. Army training camp in 1940, Camp Barkeley (whose main entrance was about seven miles south of this site) became one of the nation's largest World War II military training bases. The 12th Armored Division, activated at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, in September 1942, was assigned to Camp Barkeley in November 1943. By April 1944 the manpower of the division was at peak strength with combat commands, three battalions each of tanks, armored infantry, and armored field artillery, and numerous support units. Intensive day and night training at the camp culminated in tests that qualified the division for combat. Camp Barkeley's population was more than twice that of the city of Abilene. Soldiers' families became a part of the community and many returned here to live. The last combat division stationed at Camp Barkeley, the 12th Armored shipped out to Europe in September 1944. The division, nicknamed "Hellcats" and dubbed "The Mystery Division" in General George S. Patton, Jr.'s historic drive to the Rhine River, served with distinction, receiving more than 800 battle decorations. A dominating presence in Abilene during the war, Camp Berkeley was deactivated on April 1, 1945. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 4.8 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 10 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Abilene State Park — 15 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 16 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.

More markers nearby

• Lt. Col. William E. Dyess — 0.4 mi
• Site of Western Cattle Trail — 2.4 mi
• Company I, 7th Texas Infantry — 3.1 mi
• McMurry College — 3.5 mi