Journey of The White Bear #6: Collecting WWII practice bombs in New Mexico in 1980

Gotta love You Tube, I wasn't sure if anyone else went looking for these things.  Here's a guy named Chase in Arizona scouring the desert for World War II practice bombs, and talking to an old timer who watched the bombers doing their practice runs there.

Life Lesson: You can find all kinds of crazy things out in the desert.

As I  mentioned in the last post, being an Ohio kid who moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico, was an incredible culture shock.  I took two years of Spanish classes in Ohio, but when I moved to New Mexico, I had no idea of what the local kids were calling me.  Our family spent a couple of weeks in a hotel while my parents looked for a house to rent.  It was insanely hot in New Mexico, which sucks when you're not used to the heat, and even more so for a chubby kid like I was.

Instead of a lake to swim in, we lived a block from the Pecos River, which I'd heard of in western movies and novels.  The water was even dirtier than Holiday Lakes in Ohio.  The local joke about the Pecos was it was "too thick to drink and too thin to plow," which was close to the truth.  Somehow, both rainbow trout and gar lived in that river, which is a really weird combo.

I soon met some desert rats, most of which my dad worked with.  Nearly everyone went out in the desert to do something on the weekends.  Many went out to go 4-wheeling in Jeeps and trucks, or to ride motorcycles.  In addition, southeastern New Mexico is riddled with caves, the most famous being Carlsbad Caverns.  It's a huge cave where average people can hike over 750 feet underground through cathedral-like rooms with huge and amazing rock formations.  Spelunking, or caving, was another popular activity there.  Another friend of my dad's used to find old Indian ruins and paint pictures of the walls and remains.

My dad an I loved hiking around outdoors, and we were soon riding with various people out into the desert on the weekends.  A trick of the locals then, in 1980, was to go to an obscure government office and buy a thick book called the county Soil Conservation Survey for $4.  Why?  Because that book had aerial photos of the whole county, which was amazing back in those days long before the internet and Google Earth.  People at my dad's work would scan the photos at lunch, looking for all kinds of things.  It wasn't long before they found something they couldn't explain.

A coworker of my dad's found a huge set of concentric circles out in the middle of nowhere.  The outside circle was about a quarter mile in diameter, the next one about 200 yards, and the smallest one about 100 yards diameter.  There appeared to be a small building right in the middle of the circles.  There were no mines or oil wells nearby.  There were no farms with circular irrigation pipes there.  There was nothing, except huge circles.

Like most every 70's kid, I was a huge fan of Scooby-Doo, and I love a weird mystery.  So did my dad and his friends.  So we headed out early Saturday morning in his friend's Chevy Blazer to see what the circles were.  Now, in 1980, we didn't have smart phones, we didn't have GPS, and we used maps and compasses to find things.  We wandered the Jeep trails and got within a couple miles of the circles, and then found a gate.  Cattle wander all over the desert, and there are barbed wire fences all over to keep them in or out of certain areas.  The desert rule is, if you cross through a gate, you leave it the way you found it.  It it's open, leave it open, if it's closed, close it behind you.  Most gates were just three strands of barbed wire with a post tied on one end.  To close those gates, you just hook the post into loops on the opposite side.  Now and then, there were wooden gates.

On our first expedition to find the circles, we ran into a very narrow wooden gate with tall side posts and a top beam, which was unusual.  The big, wide, Chevy Blazer was too wide to squeeze through.  We walked through a ways, but saw no sign of the circles.  So we headed back to town.

The next weekend, another friend of my dad's headed out there alone in his smaller Chevy Luv pick-up.  He came to work Monday morning with a photo of him standing next to the shack in the center of the circles.  The circles turned out to be man made piles of rocks, each about a foot tall.  What he found around the circles blew everyone's minds.  He found old, rusty, broken bombs.  Most were broken into pieces, and he wasn't sure if they had exploded, or just broken on impact.  Some were metal shells (like in the video above) and some were made out of concrete with metal tail fins.  The huge group of circles was a bomb target used many years before.

Again, this was more than a decade before the beginning of the internet as we know it.  No old timers knew about the bombs.  The local historians didn't know anything about the bombs.  No one knew anything about them.  Like an episode of Scooby-Doo, we had a mystery on our hands.  All the guys in my dad's office, even his boss, started searching through the soil survey books and looking for other circles.  And we all started finding them, all over Eddy county.  All in all, we found over 40 bomb targets.  Suddenly, we were sort of amateur archeologists, and nearly every weekend we went out to one or more of the targets to wander around.

Before long, we started finding bigger chunks of the concrete bombs, half buried in the ground.  When we pulled them loose, we found the buried sides were painted light blue, and there was stenciled writing on them.  From the writing, we learned they were practice bombs and that they were from the World War II era, in the early 1940's.  The more we searched the targets, the more we realized that none of the bombs had explosives, they were for practice.  My dad started bringing home pieces of the bombs, and his analytical, engineer mind used them as puzzle pieces.  He identified 12 or 15 distinct styles of bombs.

A month or so into this search, we had an idea of why the targets were out there, but still didn't know the history.  So we turned our search towards the local library.  I happened to find the first magazine article about the bomb targets.  We kept digging, and got a basic history of it all.  In World War II, the Air Force, as its own force, didn't exist yet.  It was part of the Army, called the Army Air Force.  The bombardier and navigator training school was located in Carlsbad, where we lived.  The Army spent thousands of man-hours building the targets in the desert.  We also learned the the bombs were light blue, which designated that they were practice bombs.  They were all 100 pound bombs, the same size as the bomb Chase digs up in the video above.  The fuses on the back of the bombs were orange, and some bombs had smoke canisters built in, so the airplanes could see where the bombs landed from the air.  My dad actually put together a complete tail section, and painted it the correct colors, and it sat on a shelf for years.

But here's the craziest part.  There was one bomb target, a few miles west of the city of Artesia, as I recall, that was different from all the rest.  The Army engineers had actually built a huge swastika in the dirt as a bullseye, to remind the aviators who they would be fighting.  How big?  It was made of mounds about eight feet high, and was about 100 yards square.  Out in the middle of the freakin' desert.

As it turned out, the company my dad worked for had financial issues, and we moved to Boise, Idaho a year after moving to New Mexico.  It was a tough year for me in many ways.  I was scared of getting beat up every day at school.  But I loved wandering the desert on the weekends, especially in the winter when it was cool.  I've loved to wander the desert ever since.

Learn more about the 38th flyer training wing here.

Here are three of the main planes the Carlsbad trainees learned to fly, the B-25 Mitchell, the B-24 Liberator, and the B-17 Flying Fortress.  In addition, here's a look at the often forgotten gliders used in WWII.

Here you can see the arm patch for the Carlsbad base, Bugs Bunny dropping a bomb

Here's a WWII Army Air Corp recruiting film, narrated by Spencer Tracy, no less.  

What are those old, abandoned airplanes good for now?  Here's one thing.