Desert Training Center, Camp Goffs

 Second World War 1939-1945, closed / former military, United States Army, historic ruins

 Upload a photo

At the outbreak of WW2, the town of Goffs was a small railroad station located on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe mainline, and adjacent to a 1930s alignment of US Route 66.
The Camp Goffs campsite was established in 1942. It was part of the 12 million acre Desert Training Center/California-Arizona Maneuver Area established to train the armored forces of General George Patton.

Unlike other, more substantial camps of the CAMA, Camp Goffs was a small, improvised field encampment. It consisted primarily of the Goffs Railhead, with a surrounding encampment, the Goffs Army Ammunition Depot #4, and the Goffs Rifle Range. The prewar Goffs civil airfield was apparently reused as a military field, as a 1998 Army Corps of Engineers report on Camp Goffs includes the statement that "Goffs also had a 1,500' x 150' sand/gravel landing strip about two miles to the east (Army Ground Forces 1943)."

The entire CAMA was declared surplus in 1944. The Goffs airfield was not depicted at all on the 1944 Los Angeles Sectional Chart. Like many of the other former CAMA airfields, Goffs Army Air Field is not depicted at all (even as an abandoned airfield) on 2002 aeronautical charts.

www.militarymuseum.org/CpGoffs.html
www.spl.usace.army.mil/Portals/17/docs/FUDS/Goffs_FactS...