Salt Lake Tribune, June 25, 2000
'German Village' at Dugway Far From WWII Horrors
BY JACK GOODMAN
If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it,
has it made a noise? That old, unanswered schoolboy question came to mind
when I came across a photo of an unfamiliar building in recently unclassified
documents concerning Dugway Proving Ground. It appears in today's sketch.
The structure still exists in a carefully secured
section of Dugway, the sole remnant of Utah's "German Village" of the Second
World War. Nearby, its "sister," the so-called "Japanese Village," has
vanished. The remaining German building certainly has a non-American look,
which is as it should be, since its architect was the famous German refugee
Eric Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn and his aides designed the offices of the Berlin
newspaper Tageblatt, the Woga Complex on the famed Kurfurstendamm (Berlin's
major shopping street), the Sternefeld Villa in suburban Charlottenburg,
and Berlin's Columbushaus.
All this was recalled in a 1965 research paper by
Mike Davis, written 20 years after the so-called German Village and the
equally secret Japanese Village contributed to the blazing infernos that
wiped out much of the Nazi and Nipponese capitals.
The German and Japanese "suburbs," with their memories
of man's inhumanity to mankind, had their inception when Nazi bombers set
portions of London afire in 1940 and when Japanese aircraft, coming in
over Pearl Harbor in December 1941, sank or crippled most of our Pacific
fleet. Those were, of course, days that still "live in infamy," to quote
President Franklin Roosevelt.
The Royal Airforce spitfires shot German bombers
out of the skies, discouraging Hitler and Goebbels from the planned invasion
of England. Our fleet was rebuilt and immensely enlarged after Doolittle
and his fellows flew from a surviving carrier to drop the first bombs on
Tokyo. British and American bomb loads grew ever larger as the free world
sought to contain, and then defeat, the Axis and Nippon.
Soon after our entry into the war, classified maps
showed two ultra-secret enemy "suburbs" at Utah's carefully guarded Dugway
Proving Ground, some 90 miles southwest of Salt Lake City in the harshest
portion of the mountain-rimmed desert. In that land of sage and saltbrush,
our scientists, under the urging of the United States Army Airforce, sought
the most efficient ways to incinerate German and Japanese cities. A major
part of the task was given to the Standard Oil complex of companies, along
with the Army Chemical Corps. One result was the two "villages," the other
was the fiery product of napalm.
By 1943, the Chemical Warfare Corps had recruited
architect Mendelsohn and Standard's engineers. The lone still-visible result
is Building 8100, described by Mike Davis, a faculty member of the Southern
California Institute of Architecture, as "a double tenement block." There
had already been mass bomber raids setting fire to portions of Cologne
and the port of Hamburg. But a complete firestorm was wanted to deal with
Hitler's capital. Mendelsohn designed several "Ietskasernen" rent barracks
typical of Berlin slums. Three stories tall, with a variety of slate-sheathed
roofs, these were to be typical of factory cities in the Ruhr as well as
Berlin -- in an effort to make working-class districts uninhabitable.
Never mind the dictum that the United States did
not bomb civilians. The Nazis had blasted and burned much of London. The
Japanese, it was firmly believed, would do the same thing to our West Coast
if they could. Members of the Harvard Architecture School were soon at
work designing wood-frame buildings for the Nipponese "suburb." To cap
things, the interior furnishings for the German buildings were contracted
for by RKO Radio Pictures. To speed village construction, Standard Oil
and the military even "conscripted" inmates from the Utah State Prison
in Sugar House to round out a labor force whose members were proving none
too eager to work far out in the desert.
It took just 40 days to complete the German Village,
and less than that to "build a Japanese counterpart" of 12 double apartments
"furnished with hinoki and tatami" (whatever they may be).
The entire twin complexes were firebombed -- and
then reconstructed and firebombed at least three times between May and
September 1943. Overseas the British Air Force, mostly in night raids,
soon "de-housed 45 percent of German workers." Our own Liberator bombers,
in dry raids by vast flying armadas, pounded much of Berlin into rubble
and set it ablaze. Even before that period of thousand-bomber raids, wind-aided
firestorms had wiped out much of Dresden and much of Hamburg. The RAF labeled
the action "Operation Gomorrah."
News reports of the period showed Berlin's substantial
structures were more difficult to incinerate than those in other cities
in the Reich. Carpet bombing, much of it in our "Operation Thunderclap,"
using 50- and 100-pound napalm incindiaries developed by Dugway forces,
managed to torch city civilians as well as workers in Ruhr factories, munitions
plants and rail yards -- and helped end Nazi resistance.
Almost simultaneously, scientists at a Chicago athletic
field and at Los Alamos were developing atomic weapons even more deadly.
Some students of warfare tell us firebombing of flimsy Japanese cities
took a greater toll in lives than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic weapons.
Air Force flights from English bases are estimated
to have burned to death 100,000 civilians in German cities in the winter
of 1945. One million Japanese civilians became ashes during the 1945 B-29
raids.
One suspects much of the land where the German and
Japanese villages stood at Dugway has been contained in more ways than
one. As for the sole surviving building -- it is near a small section of
the old Lincoln Highway. In this military land the size of Rhode Island,
"studies" of biological and chemical weapons, binary nerve gas, botulism
and the like make development of napalm bombs seem old-fashioned.
Perhaps the only notable figure who benefited from
what went on there on the desert was the German Jewish architect Eric Mendelsohn
-- whose modernist peacetime works are forgotten, but whose Building 8100
is his monument.
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Jack Goodman has been associated with The Salt Lake
Tribune as a staff writer or free-lance writer for 54 years.