California State Military
Department
- The California
State Military Museum
- Preserving California's
Military Heritage
- Historic California
Posts
- Camp Goffs
- (Goffs Army Ammuntion
Depot, Goffs Rifle Range, Goffs Army Air Field)
-
- 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)."
-
- Apparently, the Goffs airfield was expanded
at some later date, as the 1975 USGS topo map depicts the airfield
as having two 4,700' runways, along with what appears to be depicted
as an unusually large ramp area which covers most of the area
in between the two runways. 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.
-
- The Camp Goffs Airfield site is located
on the north side of an unnamed road, two miles northeast of
the town of Goffs.
-
- Source: Abandoned
and Little Known Airfields
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