Once in a while, in or near the Badlands, a hiker will chance upon a gleaming, fully exposed, big caliber shell casing on the white hardpan ground. Sometimes the discoverer guesses it to be a remnant of the frontier wars, maybe from a great Gatling gun.
In fact, it’s a remnant of 20th century military exercises. More than 300,000 acres in southwestern South Dakota were designated by the federal government as a gunnery and bombing range, active from the 1940s into the 1970s.”The Badlands were littered with .30 caliber and .50 caliber shell casings,” says historian Phil Hall, author of Reflections of the Badlands.”And I’ve found some unexploded shells.”
He’s also come across scattered pieces of tin that, brought together, form the shape of World War II era bombs, a couple feet long with fins.
“Dummy bombs,” Hall says.”They looked and flew like real bombs, and they were filled with sand so they had the weight of real bombs.” It was possible, he adds, for dummy bombs to incur real damage, like one that slammed through a church roof in Interior.
Much of this debris was cleared away in recent years, but not all. What remains is easier to find than first-hand accounts of gunnery and bombing action during World War II. The range was cleared of people and livestock in 1942, although some ranchers didn’t hesitate to briefly sneak cattle back when grass conditions were good. There were no reports of civilian ground deaths, and only rumors of animal fatalities.
With a world war looking likely in the late 1930s, South Dakota’s congressional delegation pushed for developing an Army air base within the state. Preliminary plans took form in 1941, and moved into implementation phase after Japanese bombers hit Hawaii that December. By the fall of 1942, Army Air Corps pilots were flying B-17 bombers out of spanking new Rapid City Army Air Base — today’s Ellsworth Air Force Base. Much touted empty land immediately to the southeast helped South Dakota win the base and bomber mission, because airmen-in-training could pelt the rugged terrain with bombs and smaller ammunition.
Only the land wasn’t empty. The Rapid City Daily Journal in 1942 assured readers the range sat south of Badlands National Monument so that tourist travel wouldn’t be impacted. A curious reader could glance at a map and see south of the national monument meant the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. More than 100 families across the reservation’s north side lost homes and ag land when the federal government declared eminent domain.
“My grandfather had an allotment from the time the reservation was started, and in 1942 he and my grandmother had six kids and had just built a new house,” says Clifford Whiting of Kyle.”He had about 400 acres and was given 15 days to get out, and got very little money for the land.”
Unless they were able to enlist, many of those forced out had great difficulty finding work. In the case of Whiting’s grandparents, who had created a sophisticated irrigation system and spring cellar, the reservation lost a key dairy supplier.
None of which, of course, diminished the courage and commitment airmen demonstrated in the skies over the Badlands and reservation. They learned the functions of big four-motor B-17s, manned by crews of 10. Additionally pilots, typically 21 or 22 years old, were expected to develop qualities so they could effectively lead their crews into combat. Full crews included a pilot and copilot, navigator, radioman, engineer, bombardier and gunners. All jobs were tough to master; failing and”washing out” was a universal worry. What’s more, crew members learned as much as they could about one another’s jobs so they could step in when in-flight emergencies struck. Crews who demonstrated top proficiency departed Rapid City for eventual combat stations around the world, including England to become part of the Eighth Air Force as it destroyed the German oil industry and supported the Normandy invasion. Late in the war B-29 bomber crews also trained in Rapid City.
The public always grasped what bombardiers did but sometimes forgot that B-17s and other bombers were also armed with machine guns. Quality machine gunners were essential, and the Army was surprised by how difficult it was to train them. Even country boys who bragged they could dispatch a rabbit at 300 yards found aircraft gunnery — firing at aerial or ground targets from a moving plane — a whole different challenge. Lots of .50 caliber machine gun bullets were spent fixing the deficiency. Hall thinks flaring tracer bullets that accompanied volleys of machine gun fire largely accounted for grassfires that occasionally ignited during maneuvers. Sometimes incidents happened far off the designated range, in surrounding counties and on the Rosebud Reservation. Crews found the vast prairies a navigational challenge.
Whether it was a bomb that wasn’t a dummy, or a tracer bullet, something from a plane triggered a fire half a mile from Sand Hill School east of Wanblee, recalls Joe Stratton. He was a student there, 12 or 13 years old, and he heard no explosion.”It was a grass fire,” he remembers,”but it was early spring or late winter and it didn’t amount to much.” Another time an entire plane dropped from the sky near Wanblee, making a safe landing after an apparent malfunction. Stratton says it was able to fly away off frozen ground after mechanics arrived to make repairs.
Airborne, the B-17 was an impressive sight.”Some of them were quite low, maybe 500 feet or lower,” Stratton says. Future U.S. Senator Jim Abourezk recalled the novelty of seeing a bomber fly over his hometown of Wood when he was a boy. In December of 1943, a B-17 crashed at Soldier Creek west of Mission, killing the crew.”I was awed by the stories of the kids from Mission who had hurried out to pick up pieces of the airplane as souvenirs,” Abourezk wrote in his autobiography. That set up a dilemma for him. He found himself hoping for a bomber crash near Wood, but couldn’t imagine how it could happen”without killing one of our service men.”
Or many more than one. A B-17 accident never rocked Wood, but planes did crash at Rapid City, Kadoka, Soldier Creek and other South Dakota locations, typically resulting in the deaths of all 10 airmen aboard.
After the war ended, the bombing land wasn’t offered to those who previously owned it. The matter of cleanup had to be considered, the federal government said. In the 1960s the South Dakota National Guard gained permission to train there. That was the era, Hall believes, when the use of live ordnance peaked, more so than during World War II. By the 1970s something else explosive played out across Pine Ridge. As more and more residents embraced the idea of tribal sovereignty, questions were raised. What were the feds thinking, repurposing reservation land after the national emergency that justified eminent domain passed? How was it the federal government’s prerogative to invite the state National Guard in, and to eventually transfer part of the bombing range to the Interior Department for creating the Badlands National Park’s south unit? Memories of the government’s assertive presence decades ago still colors discussions about land use today, with issues ranging from grazing leases to a proposed tribal national park.
Eventually some families, including Clifford Whiting’s, were able to repurchase land — at much higher prices than what their parents and grandparents received in 1942, of course.
Ansel Wooden Knife, who ran a cafe at Interior for many years, became a go-to guy for stories about the bombing range. He recalled his mother-in-law’s description of shells hitting her house along Highway 44 during World War II. Wooden Knife found artifacts, sought out abandoned installations and could guide curious people to historically significant sites. A lonely site some consider the epicenter of bombing range history sits north and west of Potato Creek. A hilltop is ringed with 80 or 100 old cars, forming a circle a couple hundred feet across. It was an aerial target.
Wooden Knife directed photographer Mike Heintz to the cars several years ago. Heintz recalls”driving and driving across probably 15 or 16 miles of raw prairie. When I got there it was windy so the grass was lying down, and the cars were creaking.”
Heintz thought of the spot as an isolated, metallic memorial to airmen who once passed overhead. It’s appropriate that there’s somewhat of a mystery to this eerie place. Some histories and press reports say the cars were hauled here for National Guard exercises in the 1960s, but most local people interviewed for this article believe the big target dates back to World War II. Car bodies from the 1930s are dominant, but Heintz photographed at least one post-war model. Is it possible an original group of cars took hits from World War II airmen, and that the site was expanded with more cars brought in years later?
Either way, Wooden Knife thinks, this place that feels like a memorial should be considered an actual one.”I think everything should be preserved,” he says.”They’re reminders that there’s a price for freedom.”
During both World War II and the Cold War, South Dakotans enlisted at high rates. That was especially true for the Lakota people. And even on the home front, their loved ones experienced the sights and sounds of warfare, literally in their back yards.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.