Fort Rob plays key role during WWII

Fort Robinson has a rich and extensive history. Starting in 1874 as a temporary encampment, being the death place of Crazy Horse, and being the country club of the army are different things that the Fort is known for, but it was a highly used location during World War II.

“There’s this flat area, that was the landing field for the gliders,” Sandra Reddish, historical sites coordinator said. “The gliders had a training base at Alliance. And they would come out here and they would use it as an air strip for the gliders, and the gliders a lot of them were used for the dropping of soldiers on D-Day.”

The gliders being something that is commonly overlooked, K-9 Corps is another thing that isn’t normally associated with the war effort in the 1940s. 

In Fall 1942, Fort Robinson was turned into a reception and training center for the military K-9 Unit. There were about 14,000 dogs shipped out of Fort Robinson and many of them were pets that people dropped off to help with the war effort. 

The dogs were treated much like soldiers. They were weighed, measured, given necessary shots and vaccines, and they were tattooed with serial numbers. If the dog had any defects, they would be rejected, and the owners would have 10 days to pick them back up. 

“Mainly for defense,” Reddish said, when asked what the dogs were trained to do, “A lot of them were like bomb patrol. I don’t think that many saw, or were in with the combat troops, it was more of defense.”

The K-9 Unit was an area that soldiers didn’t enjoy or want to work in. According to a video shown at Fort Robinson, there was a poem written by an unknown soldier. This poem says, “A shame it is that a man of my knowledge, / Should ever end up in a dog training college / I think of our furloughs and rejected pleas / As I pull out the ticks and stomp on the fleas. / There are thousands of ways of fighting a war, / But don’t let them talk you into the K-9 Corps.”

Despite the fact that they were only fed once, the dogs were fed 2 ½ pounds of food, consisting of a mix of cooked meat, raw meat, dog food, oatmeal, and corn meal. 

The camp also held German Prisoners of War to their own camp and they worked at the camp while imprisoned.

The POW camp received their 600 first arrivals Nov. 1943 but the camp could hold up to 3,000 prisoners. The number of prisoners stayed between 500 and 1,500 but it reached capacity in winter of 1944. The camp only held Germans and they were mainly from the African Corps. The camp didn’t keep any hardcore Nazis.

“They had meals, they had entertainment.” Reddish said. “They had their cooks, they had their own little theater, they even had their own band. The story is ‘did some of them want to stay?’ Yes, but after the war they had to go back and then after some of them did come back to the United States.”