ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. -- For the past 75 years, Arnold Engineering Development Complex has provided developmental and evaluation capabilities to bolster air supremacy in support of national defense.
But years before the first AEDC facility was constructed, the first office was established and the first test operation was conducted, the site now occupied by Arnold Air Force Base, headquarters of AEDC, served a much different purpose.
The location where Arnold AFB now stands was once Camp Forrest, one of the Army’s largest training bases during World War II and an active Army post between 1941 and 1946.
It’s this aspect of AEDC’s history that most fascinates Elizabeth Taylor, Ph.D.
Taylor’s book “Images of America: Camp Forrest and Its Legacy” was released last year. In late 2025, she visited Arnold Air Force Base to further research the topic and review some of the work completed by Michael Bradley in the mid-1990s for his book “Reveille to Taps: Camp Forrest, TN 1940-1946.”
“I’ve been researching Camp Forrest for about 16 years,” Taylor said. “It’s become a passion project, so to speak. My background is not in the military, not really history, but it’s a topic I fell in love with and haven’t been able to shake.”
Taylor’s most recent work focusing on Camp Forrest is her third book on the subject.
“Never in a million years would I have thought people would have resonated with it,” she said. “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, it’s local history.’ Honestly, for me, I want people to understand it’s global history because Camp Forrest processed over 60,000 prisoners of war. Twenty-thousand were detained there.”
Taylor presently teaches public administration and college-level history, but it was during her previous work in graduate admissions at Clayton State University in Morrow, Ga., that she was first introduced to Camp Forrest.
“I had a dear friend who was a dean of arts and sciences and a history professor. He started telling me about all the POWs that were brought to the states, and I had never heard anything like that,” Taylor said. “He said, ‘Well, check out Camp Forrest.’
“I was amazed that so massive an installation by 1946 just fell from the consciousness, and there was not one website and, besides Dr. Bradley’s book, nothing else devoted to it.”
Taylor said construction on Camp Forrest began in late spring 1940 and took approximately 18 months. Camp Forrest would come to cover more than 85,000 acres. It was a training area for infantry, artillery, engineer and signal organizations. The site also served as a hospital center and a temporary encampment area for troops during maneuvers.
“As far as training, new technologies, if you will, were developed and tested,” Taylor said. “You had the 2nd and 5th Rangers that were activated here. They developed a model German village that taught soldiers how to mop up and proceed through a village like they would encounter when they got to the front. It was the logistics hub for the Tennessee Maneuvers, which happened from 1941 to 1945.”
Along with these maneuvers, Camp Forrest was used to conduct major scaled war simulations, Taylor said.
“You had the Ghost Army activated here, the 33rd Division which also went out to the Pacific, and it also helped to boost the local economy,” she said. “We were coming off the edge of the Depression.”
Taylor added the existence of Camp Forrest had a substantial impact on the Tullahoma area and its citizenry. She said around 70,000 military personnel were trained at Camp Forrest and that the base employed approximately 20,000 civilians over the course of its operation.
“It gave them an opportunity that they wouldn’t normally have for a job, empowering women with positions,” Taylor said. “Even things we take for granted, such as sports, were a major aspect of life. You had a massive sports arena, big enough to have three separate events going on at the same time, and not one of them would be conflicting with the other. Units had sports teams. Camp Forrest itself had sports teams. They would travel throughout the Southeast, so it was morale building, not just for soldiers but also for civilians.”
Camp Forrest officially became a prisoner of war camp on May 12, 1942, housing Italian and German POWs. The prisoners became laborers both in the Camp Forrest hospitals and on farms in the local community.
By 1946, World War II was over and Camp Forrest, as Taylor put it, was “silent.” Camp Forrest and the nearby William Northern Field, an air training base, were declared surplus property. Material assets were sold at auction, torn down and hauled away. Water, sewage and electrical systems were sold as salvage.
A “hodge podge” of structural remnants stand today on the acreage Camp Forrest once occupied, Taylor said.
“The few buildings, they’re made of concrete, and I’ve had someone tell me that for a penny a brick, he and a bunch of other kids were sent out to knock the concrete mortar off,” she said. “So the concrete buildings, brick buildings, that you see now are actually made with a material that you can’t knock them down. But as you’re driving up and down the road, you see the old roads that are there. It kind of puts it in perspective how big a place it was.”
Not long after the closure of Camp Forrest, the area was chosen as the site of the new Air Engineering Development Center. On June 25, 1951, then-President Harry Truman visited the center to dedicate it as the Arnold Engineering Development Center in honor of the late General of the Air Force Henry “Hap” Arnold.
The Arnold Engineering Development Center would eventually come to be known as Arnold Engineering Development Complex and see its umbrella expand beyond Arnold AFB to include several test facilities across the country.
Taylor said some of the lessons learned from Camp Forrest are still relevant today.
“You don’t really think of those German villages as urban warfare, but it’s the start of that, learning from the mistakes on the battlefront and how to ensure that the next wave of soldiers that go over don’t meet the same fate by doing the same thing over and over,” Taylor said. “And it’s a little bit different now with our technologies, but they took what they learned and tried to train the next soldiers going over.”
Taylor added interest in Camp Forrest lingers 80 years after its closure.
“Still today, I have grandsons and sons and daughters contact me wanting to know more about what happened,” she said. “We’ve had a few come just to show them where that relative would have been, and they’ve shared the stuff that person had – diaries, drawings. The creations of the POWs are amazing.”
And Taylor said her interest in the topic will endure.
“I’m always happy to hear stories,” she said. “I think preserving the stories of civilians and soldiers that were there is important to make sure that what they did for our nation to help win a war is not lost to time. Our veterans are leaving us in rapid numbers, so I think it’s important to preserve it. As they say, ‘Repeat the past if you don’t learn from it,’ but I think there are a lot of lessons that we can learn from something like that.”