Camp Bouse

The 701st Tank Battalion was activated on 3/28/43 at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, where 553 young men and officers began basic training, many seeing a tank for the first time, before relocating to Fort Knox for further training. On 12/8/43 the battalion was ordered to Camp Bouse, a secret camp, where the men trained in the canal defense light project using the Grant Tank, a World War I designed tank fitted with a 13 million candlepower light called the Gizmo mounted in the turret. The 701st left Bouse for Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, on 3/27/44, then sailed to England aboard the R.M.S. Mauretania, arrived at Liverpool on 5/1/44, and trained at Puncheston, Wales. The battalion landed on Utah Beach in Normandy, France, on 8/24/44, where most of its CDL Grant Tanks were replaced by Sherman Tanks. It moved north through France and Belgium, and on December 21st left its positions at Heerlen, Holland, crossed the Siegfried Line into Germany at Uback, crossed the Roer River, and beginning on 2/25/45 saw its heaviest combat near Tetz, Hottorf, Viersen, and Krefeld. The battalion crossed the Rhine on 3/29/45 and pushed through Munster, Bunde, and Bismark. At Gardelegen, it uncovered an atrocity where 1016 prisoners of war and political prisoners had been murdered by the enemy. As the war's end neared, orders halted its forward movement on the banks of the Elbe River, 50 miles from Berlin, ending the battalion's fighting. Forty-eight members of the battalion lost their lives in battle.

Bouse, Arizona · United States