The Davis Shore Army Camp 1941-1945

This story is of another time and another place.

Ed Pond, Davis, NC

I was born in a house on Croaker Street at Davis, NC. Even though I was only four years old in 1941, I remember, probably from the imprinting looks of fear or shock on the faces of my parents and grandmother, the very evening of Dec. 7, 1941 when my Dad came home and, told to my mother and grandmother that the “Japs” had bombed Pearl Harbor, and that America was under assault and threat of Jap invasion. We did not have either electricity nor battery radio at that Croaker Street house, and so they had not heard until my Dad got home.

A couple of years later, in April of 1943, my Grandmother, Rosemond Willis Davis, died and my Dad moved our family “up the road” to his family’s house and property on Core Sound’s Shore. ( We moved into the large 2 storey house that had been built in the 1890’s by my Dad’s father, Capt’n Sylvester E. Pond, a Connecticut sea captain who had married, my Dad’s mother, Virginia Wallace Davis.)

By that time when we moved “up the road” there was visible just across the road from our 1st. Pond House the beginnings almost to completion of an “Army Camp”. I can recall, in my mind’s eye, seeing a few large tents and soldiers and dogs, YES DOGS- Army Guard Dogs pulling the dog handler soldiers everywhere as the dogs strained on their constraining leashes. But most vividly and troublesome to me, a small 6 year old boy, was, that in spite of having in this 1st Pond House, with its electricity, a real radio, there was something else that was very troublesome. It was that only about 200 yards north up the shore there was this Army Camp and a tall steel tower that had a box car size metal framework at its top which slowly rotated around and around.

The Army Camp Tower: No Davis Shoremen knew then what it was. Just knew that it was that “Army Camp tower”. But if you were listening to our radio whenever the framework in its rotation was slowly turning towards our house then a large piercing squeal would develop on the radio and the squealing would drown out all audible radio reception. As a young boy I was always in a perpetual fear that during those Christmas Time years that Santa Claus reading children’s “letters to Santa” over the radio would read my letter to Santa and that the squeal from The Army Camp Tower would blot my letter out. I was very satisfied for on one Christmas, my complete letter to Santa was read in the clear while the tower was turning away from the house.

Most Davis Shoremen of that time suspected that the “Army Camp Tower” was looking for German submarines, and that was for two reasons. First of all, many people on this section of the NC Coast had seen torpedo-ed ships burning just beyond Core Banks, and some of the Army soldiers, from Texas and Kentucky, stationed at the Davis Shore Army Camp would whisper from time to time that some of their fellow soldiers at the Army Camp had on a night earlier spotted a “German Sub” in the Sound.

The Army Camp soldiers, lacking local knowledge, didn’t realize that Core Sound in its maximum depth was only about eight feet deep and any sub in the Sound would have required wheels to get into Core Sound. So while our locals smiled and dismissed the prospects of a German Sub in the Sound they could guess that the Army Camp had something to do with submarines, or because with the guard dogs and lots of Military Police that the MP’s were trying to catch German spies.

Later after a year or so the first tower was replaced with a second tower which was about 150’ high and had a smaller faster rotating steel framework. It wasn’t even until after WWII’s end that we came to understand that Davis Shore had probably been a WWII RADAR base. (The 1st tower’s footings are still existing today and are only about two hundreds north of my present 2nd Pond House. And you, and all younger present day folk must remember that during WWII even the word “RADAR” was then classified and could not then be spoken nor written even if then known.)

Nevertheless the Army efforts toward improving security at the Army Camp continued. At each corner and at one other intermediate point on the Sound’s perimeter of the Army Camp large sandbagged machine gun nests were built, equipped with one or more large water cooled machine guns. (You could tell because the barrel diameter configurations were so large). Those machine gun nests had ammunition transporter tunnels through their sandbagged walls, ( I personally know that because as a boy we played war games in those machine gun nests after the soldiers had abandoned the Army Camp at War’s end.) Thick impenetrable barbed wire entanglements completely surrounded, out in the Sound, the perimeter of the Army Camp and there were even some diagonal pieces of steel jutting up from the Sound’s shore line intended probably to prevent any approaching boats from overriding the barbed wire entanglements. It was late in the 1950’s before the last of those steel diagonals and barbed wire strings had rusted away and disappeared so that you could safely go with a boat into that area.)

Now about the DOGS. At several times each day, and at rigidly followed routines at night, military policeman, MP’s, would patrol Core Sound both southward and northward along the shore, rifle on shoulder, walking with a pair of unmuzzled guard dogs on long leashes. Toward the end of the War and afterward in WWII movies about German spies in Norway etc. we saw for the first time in movies what we had actually witnessed daily across our shore side yard as the MP’s walked their patrol duties. We were still under some wartime blackout restrictions, and so at night we would sit in the house with all the electric lights turned off. Our family would sit in the dark and listen to the radio with such family favorites as “Fibber McGee and Molly” and “Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd”. One night while in the dark listening to the radio, we heard a knock on the window sill –not on the door- and a soldier in a respectful voice, from outside the window, identified himself as a soldier from the Army Camp who was patrolling our shore. I still recall that we could hear the hassling of his dogs. He politely told us that we would have to cover the back of the radio or turn it off because the red glow from the radio tubes could still be seen from down on the shore, and those faint red lights violated the blackout restrictions.

In a before daylight morning in August of 1944 sometime around 1 am another patrolling guard MP knocked on the side of the house, and this time in a very loud voice announced that a tropical hurricane was about to strike Davis Shore, and that the Army was instructing the residents of Davis that they must evacuate away to safer higher ground.

My Dad and his family had only eleven years before in the hurricane of 1933 seen a tidal flood of 2 to 3 feet inside the first floor of the house, and so in a panic departure we, all the family members, stuffed into my Dad’s car and left within the hour. (We spent the rest of the morning at the Croatan Section of Craven County at “Haywood’s Kicking Machine Place” just west of Cherry Point. But my wife’s family and many others including very elderly and handicapped at Davis Shore who did not have automobiles were physically loaded by the Army into the back of canvas covered army trucks that were customarily at that time used to transport soldiers. Those army trucks evacuated many Davis Shore families as far inland as to Goldsboro, NC. , which was more than a hundred mile trip in the back of a “military 6by truck”.)

The Army Camp dogs were large dogs. Some were German Shepards, which some of our people thought couldn’t be trusted because they obviously would be sympathetic to the Germans, and some of the dogs were Great Danes and some others nobody knew what breed they were. But all the dogs were big dogs, loud and understood to be very mean. The army handlers would exercise as many as 5 or 6 dogs at a time on long 10 foot leashes all over the village. One man told a tale of how the handler, who was walking and exercising the dogs, went through his back yard and the man’s kitten tried to scamper away from the dogs. Whereupon the man related that the handler did nothing to restrain a large mean dog which grabbed the man’s kitten and as he said, “The kittens head fell out the dog’s right jaw, and then the dog spit out the kitten’s dead body and just went on,” unconcernedly.

The Army dog handlers would feed the dogs once a day in the late afternoon and in Pavlov’s fashion that was when the dogs would start howling and barking fiercely. The dog kennels were just up the shore from our house. Once, on a late summer’s afternoon some of my boyhood friends and I were swimming in the Sound right out in front of our house, and we heard the dogs start barking and howling as a part of their afternoon pre feeding. We boys were unconcerned until we finally noticed some of the dogs loose out of the kennels, and a soldier was loudly shouting at us to get away. We did and ran dripping wet to the house and to the top of our stairs hallway where we saw in a few minutes the handlers going south trying to catch the escaped dogs.

The Davis Shore Army Camp cultural shift:

By 1942 and ’43 almost all the native young men and boys of Davis Shore had either joined up or been drafted into the war time military services, and none, even those with hometown sweethearts, were stationed close at hand.

Those early WWII years were a time when the Davis Shore families felt they could be patriotically generous and extend a helping hand in the war’s effort. And while the first solders coming to set up the Army Camp were supposed to live in their tents, the Davis Shore families would not let that happen. Especially in the spring and summer of 1942 the salt marsh mosquitoes were the worst ever recalled. Many Davis Shore families adopted a solder or even two, and invited those soldier boys to actually come and live in their houses and eat at their family tables, and the women did the laundry for their live in soldiers.

The unfinished dwelling house of Burgess, “Bill and Neville” Davis was used as a place to set up army cots in rows where some of the soldiers slept. The house of Mrs. Carthagenia Davis, on the Davis Shore corner with its large rooms and several young daughters and a piano was a favorite gathering place. Once in the early morning hours, her daughter now Jan Davis Willis of Beaufort, recalls that they were awakened by someone in the yard. A soldier standing in the yard was asking if this was the USO and when told that it wasn’t nevertheless the solder was invited in the house. He had a wife with him in a taxi that had brought them in the middle of the night from Beaufort. Mrs. Carthagenia then had her daughters, Opal and Jan, both clean and prepare the bedroom that daughter Opal had just been sleeping in, and the soldier and his wife went into the bedroom to get some rest. Some of the soldiers brought their wives and they lived as couples in the Davis Shore houses like the couple who lived with Joe and Viola Davis.

Many of those soldiers enjoyed their stays in the homes at Davis Shore, and as they were gradually transferred away would give some of their hosts gifts of complete sets of dishes, linen sets and songbooks.

Probably a dozen of more of the soldiers married local girls from Davis Shore, Marshallberg and Harkers Island.

Epilogue

For many years after I left my Davis Shore home and worked in other parts of the country, I told listeners of parts of this story. Early on, as a young man, I was perceptive enough to sense that many of the people to whom I would tell this story were extremely skeptical of my facts, and probably thought I was making up especially the parts about the RADAR tower, the guard dogs, and the billeting of soldiers in the homes of civilians, especially since there is a US constitutional question arising out of the American Revolution on such billeting of soldiers.

So on this topic not wishing to be remembered as telling lies. I quit telling about the Davis Shore “Army Camp”.

In December 1991, I was officially retiring from my job as BellSouth Gen manager, Georgia on the last day of that year, and I was still living in Atlanta. It had been decades since I had last told anyone of the Davis Shore Army Camp story,.

My wife and I were attending a Christmas time Party and fancy reception in connection with my retirement. I was introduced to an elderly gentleman, a Colonel Hugh C. Moore of Atlanta. As I was being introduced a remark was made to Col Moore that upon retirement that I was going to move away from Atlanta and live back at my boyhood home on the coast of North Carolina.

Col. Moore inquired as to where I was going back to on the Coast of North Carolina. He and I were both floored to realize that both of us were connected with Davis Shore. I spent that afternoon talking with Col. Moore. Here is what he told me about his personal connection to Davis Shore.

I think now that at that 1991 Christmas party that Col. Moore said that he in 1941 was in the Signal Corp of the US Army and a communications officer attached to a Command in Tampa, Fl. ( He is now Col. Hugh C. Moore Sr., USAF Ret., but I think he transferred from the Army’ s signal Corp. to the Air Force.)

In the spring of 1941 the then Army Lt. Hugh C. Moore had received orders to take a small unit of communications people and a lot of Military Police and to undertake a highly secret mission. The mission was to take some highly experimental and highly secret Radar equipment and to make evaluations for potential radar site locations that could likely become important and favorable to radar locating of submarines or other naval activities on the South East Coast. He was to start a series of radar evaluations at periodic distance beginning on the East Coast of Florida and continuing up as far as the NC/ Virginia line.

By November of 1941 he had arrived at a geographic point north of Cape Lookout and south of Hatteras, and had selected the village of Davis. In early December of 1941 they had finished their evaluations at Davis, and were returning in convoy to Florida. On December 7, 1941 somewhere along HWY 301 in South Carolina his convoy was flagged down by the SC Highway Patrol and asked to identify his unit. ( I don’t recall now whether he said that when stopped at that time on that 7th Dec. 1941 that he had already heard of the Pearl Harbor attack, or whether the stopping SC police informed him) The police did tell him to contact his army headquarters immediately. Leaving his convoy he found a telephone, contacted his headquarters and was given new orders for immediate execution. Those orders were for him, to take his command convoy turn around, and proceed to his most northerly favorable evaluation site that would be beneficial to radar scans of Coastal North Carolina shipping. (I think he had earlier finished a radar suitability evaluation further south at somewhere like the Wrightsville Beach area. So it was Lt. Moore’s decision to locate the radar site at Davis Shore.)

So, Col. Moore, continued that he turned northward back to his just departed site at Davis, where he negotiated on December 8th or 9th of December 1941, the week following Pearl Harbor attack, with as he remembered “The mayor of Davis Shore, Mr. Stancy Davis”. He successfully talked with Mr. Stancy Davis about leasing some land on which to set up an Army Camp. (Davis Shore has never had a Davis Shore Mayor and Mr. Stancy would have never touted himself as such- but I’m sure the then Lt. Moore was trying to so honor Mr. Stancy, because he did at first rent land from Mr. Stancy)

Col. Moore recalled that the Davis Army Camp was a very unusual military assignment. Living in tents at first, with no good potable water, and later on having to contend with unbelievable swarms of mosquitoes, made it difficult, but that the Davis Shore villagers were incredibly hospitable, friendly, and accommodating. He advised me in response to my questions, about the MP shore patrols, and the guard dogs and the machine gun nests, that they were pure extreme security measures necessary to protect the classified nature of the RADAR equipment and its mission.

He said that he had a larger number of military police soldiers than he had numbers of communications technicians. He also said that most of the soldiers at Davis Army Camp had no idea what the mission of the Camp was, and as a result they were just guessing when they reported that they had spotted submarines in the Sound.

Lt. Moore’s hardest and most unusual problem was that after the buildings were built and even in winter that whenever he would return to Davis Army Camp to pay his men he would have to order and re-require them to move out of the villagers homes and back into the base housing, and then when he would return two week later the soldiers would be back living in the homes of the villagers.

Army Lt. Hugh C. Moore, Sr., Atlanta established and was first base commander at the time.

And another Army Officer, Lt. Walter Hughes formerly of Long Island, NY and now of Morehead City, NC, was the closing Camp commander. Lt. “Wally” Hughes was stationed at Davis Army Camp and met here and married a beautiful daughter of Davis Shore who is still his beautiful wife the Virginia Davis Hughes.

__________________ The Post Epilogue _______________________________

Included in the original list of addresses for my sending out the email story was the name of the only other soldier that I know, other than Col. Hugh C. Moore, who had been stationed at Davis Shore Army Camp during WWII.

I sent the story to former Lt. Walter “Wally” Hughes, a native of Long Island, NY, now of Morehead City, NC. Wally was the last Davis Shore Army Camp Commander and closed the base down, but until he received my message, Wally had no idea either how the Davis Shore Army Camp had come to be set up at Davis Shore.

I have the reply from Lt Walter “Wally” Hughes to me as further corroboration the story is authentic.

Wally married a Davis Shore girl, Virginia Davis, while stationed here, and the other, Lt Frank Hunt, mentioned in his email below married Virginia’s sister, Elsie Davis.