26 August 2007

Fort Hunt

Battery Sheridan, Fort Hunt Park

It is a fine highway that rolls down along the Potomac from the old colonial city of Alexandria to Mount Vernon. It is the road to George Washington's estate, and for that reason it is an attractive, well-manicured four-lane Parkway, administered not by the Federal Highway Administration, but by the National Park Service.

On the weekends, the trail on the river side of the Parkway is thronged with joggers and rollerblading fitness enthusiasts, who mingle in motion with families pushing strollers and high-speed bicyclists.

The first nesting pair of bald eagles seen in years in these parts made their home high in a tree in the marsh next to the path.

About two miles north of the iconic mansion on the Potomac, just before the big southwest twist in the river, there is an exit for Fort Hunt Road. If you choose to get off the Parkway, you can drive through a sprawling regional park. There are the remains of some old coastal artillery batteries, thrown up in the urgency over the coming conflict with Spain.

There are no guard towers, nor barracks, or lines of barbed wire fences, though there once were.

Indulge me, gentle reader. We are going to take a stroll down the path by the Parkway and visit some hidden history. It will include terror rockets, and well-respected American scientists who held rank in the Nazi SS. It has submarines, and secrets derived from chambers of unspeakable horrors that make your world safer today.

The delicacy of the matter is unquestioned. That is only one of the issues; we have built a mountain of secrets in the American Century, and they had to go someplace. Some have been declassified and placed into the public domain. Others remain secret today, though there is no apparent reason for it, and others are so sensitive that their disclosure is years in the future.

A friend wrote a history of one project that will remain under seal for another quarter century, if indeed it survives that long in the back of some secure container. He felt it was important to collect the information while memories were fresh. People age and die; some secrets are deliberately bull-dozed, the better to pretend that they never happened at all.

Some of them were just off the Parkway, and you would never have known they were there at all.

Fort Hunt was originally a part of Washington's Mount Vernon estate, and stayed in service as farmland until the Army purchased the land for the ambitious nationwide plan to modernize coastal defenses. Across the Potomac is Fort Washington, which has a more remarkable history, having been constructed to defend the capital against the British threat in 1809, and burned by its own garrison in 1814.

Eventually, the eight concrete batteries at Fort Washington and the four at Fort Hunt made up the Potomac Defense Command in the years before the Great War overseas.

I don't know if my Grandfather would have known either of the installations. Fort Washington was used as a staging area for railroad personnel destined for France in 1917, and he could have passed through there.

Fort Hunt's guns were stripped to go elsewhere in the war, and when it was over the little post became home to the Army Finance School in 1921.

America was uneasy with its new position on the world stage, and the isolationist sentiment in Congress manifested itself in the refusal of the Senate to ratify President Wilson's League of Nations. In 1922, Congress directed the Army to radically reduce manpower and consolidate activities. The Finance School was transferred back to offices in the District, and Fort Hunt was abandoned, except for a brief tenancy by the Spooks of the Signal Corps.

Several local jurisdictions vied for the property, but it was not until the year after the Great Depression began that the Secretary of War was authorized to transfer the land to the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital for development as a recreational site girdled by the newly-established George Washington Memorial Parkway.

That is when Grandpa might have seen the place again. In 1932, he and thousands of other veterans hitched rides and rode trains to Washington to demand the Bonus that had been promised for their service in the Great War. The House passed legislation authorizing immediate payment, but President Roosevelt viewed the expenditure as irresponsible, and campaigned to kill the bill in the Seante.

As the legislative process continued, the vets set up camps on the National Mall and on the flats along the Anacostia Rivers to dramatize their presence. Their shacks were the dark reflection of the depression, the mirror image of the glorious encampments of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Civil War veteran's organization that was passing into history.

Concerned about the health of the 20,000 veterans and their families, the War placed Fort Hunt under temporary authority of the Veteran's Administration. A hospital was established to care for the indigent, and though the Bonus Bill died in mid-June, many of the vets remained in their camps. They had no money to pay for the fare home, and no jobs waiting there even if they did. The hospital at Fort Hunt continued to operate through the summer of 1932, finally closing in August after a special appropriation was passed to pay for tickets home to those who would accept them.

The Army forced the rest of the demonstrators out of their encampments in a remarkable blue-on-blue engagement led by General Douglas MacArthur and supported by the cavalry and cold steel of the Old Guard, 3rd US Infantry.

When the hospital was closed, Fort Hunt was returned to the Public Parks Office. A Civilian Conservation Corps camp was established on the grounds to support landscaping on the scenic Parkway, and it became a showcase for New Deal social policies.

George VI, King of England even popped by with the Queen for a visit, escorted by FDR and Eleanor.

The CCC worked out of the Fort for the rest of the decade, until the growing emergency overseas caused the War Department to begin a desperate search for land and facilities. The landscapers decamped to Fort Belvoir, at the southern end of the Parkway, and the isolated Fort was transferred back to the Army for the “duration, plus one year.”

One hundred and fifty new buildings were constructed, and if you look at overhead imagery of the Fort today on Google Map, you can see the faint scars on the grass that reveal where some of them were. They were surrounded by guard towers and ringed with electric fence.

The Fort grew a cover story; it was officially known as the “Officer's School,” and the activity that was conducted there assigned the codeword “PO Box 1142.” People who lived near the Fort said they never knew anything unusual was happening there, though that was a popular opinion in many places during the war.

According to documents declassified beginning in 2000, nearly 3,500 Nazi prisoners were cycled through the camp to be exploited for intelligence value. In addition to formal interrogations, the Americans bugged the cells to listen in on what the prisoners were saying, just as their British colleagues did across the Pond. A lot of valuable material was found that way, particularly in helping to strategically target the next day's formal questions.

Most of the prisoners spent three months at the Fort, which was not identified to the Red Cross for inspection under the terms of the Geneva Convention. They were questioned several times each day, by native German speakers assigned to PO Box 1142.

In 1946, in accordance with the temporary lease, the War Department had the facility bull-dozed back into pastoral parkland, leaving nothing behind except the classified papers held elsewhere.

It was a very well kept secret indeed, though not as good as the Army would have liked. Listening to a conversation in one of the cells, they were surprised to hear this assessment from an officer who had been assigned to the German Embassy before the war. Looking out the window, he recognized the landmarks, since he was accustomed to taking his American girlfriends down to the Fort for nature activities:

(Translation from PO Box 1142 records in German.)

R: The funny thing was to hear the (American) Captain say: "Now I must deliver you to Fort Hunt." Then I said, "Do you know where Fort Hunt is?" "I don't know," he said. "I can show you the way."

S: Is that the name of this place?

R: Yes. It used to be a CCC camp...I know exactly because I laid a girl out there once. A fine highway goes by there to Mount Vernon.

S: What's CCC?

R: It's something like the German Arbeitsdienst.

S: If you used to make the best of your time petting around here, you must know the region pretty well, eh?

R: Out front here, a wonderful highway goes to Mount Vernon where George Washington used to live. It's only about two miles from here.

S: That beautiful, isn't it?

R: Yes, Mount Vernon.

S: Is it near here?

R: You could probably see it, if it weren't for the woods.

S: You'll have to show it to me some day.

R: And then there is...the Potomac, Magnificent, and across the Potomac you can see Washington and here there is a delightful little town, Alexandria, Virginia.

S: We went through there. It must be an old town.

Tomorrow: Peroxide Submarines
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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