Whtie Sands Administrative History

As the Second World War moved toward resolution, the staff at White Sands could not ignore the irony of the military's presence: high visitation and an increasing number of airplane crashes. As early as October 1941, Johnwill Faris reported the crash of a plane fifteen miles west of the monument boundary. Three fliers were killed, the first of many victims of the haste of training, the inexperience of the pilots, the erratic quality of plane construction, and the forbidding terrain of the Tularosa basin. The National Parks Magazine may have billed White Sands as a "soldiers' paradise," but in March 1943 Johnwill Faris reported: "Many more plane crashes and we will need a full time man for [service] as a field guide." The following month Faris traveled to regional headquarters in Santa Fe to obtain accurate maps "on which we plan to spot plane crashes, etc., within or adjacent to our area." One particular crash in October 1944 struck just south of the monument entrance, tearing out telephone lines and requiring extensive repairs. [39]

Of all the military interaction at White Sands, none had the psychological effect of tracking crash victims in the dunes. The number of crashes brought heavy equipment across the gypsum at a rate that endangered plant and animal life. In addition, staff members were often awakened in the middle of the night to guide rescue crews onto the monument grounds. This caused wear and tear on park vehicles, and left employees tired before the start of their normal work days. Johnwill Faris, in an interview twenty years after the war, still remembered as "some of the most horrible . . . duties" the discovery of fiery crashes, including "going in and finding - it's not agreeable to mention, but shoes with feet in them or a glove with a hand in them and so on." Faris learned from Army personnel that inexperienced pilots in distress would mistake the white dunes as a flat surface for emergency landing. The custodian also impressed his military counterparts with his ability to drive stock vehicles through the desert. Ironically, this skill led Army officials to offer Faris a commission to enlist as a trainer of Army equipment operators preparing for the 1943 North African campaign. Faris declined the offer, preferring to assist the military by serving as a rescue guide at White Sands. [40]

The future of White Sands, and for that matter the nation as a whole, reached a watershed in the spring of 1945. The Allied offensive in Europe had closed within striking distance of the German capital of Berlin, with victory all but assured by April. That month also the nation lost its four-term president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose social policies had fostered the growth of White Sands, even as his wartime strategies engulfed the dunes with military training and visitation. But the most distinctive feature of the entire conflict - the detonation of the atomic bomb - touched White Sands as would no other event in park service history. The sequence of events in the Tularosa basin from April to August 1945 created the "atomic age" tensions that bedeviled the monument for the next five decades, even as the permanent presence of a major air base to the east (Holloman) and the White Sands Proving Ground to the west (later renamed the White Sands Missile Range) buffered the dunes from postwar commercial development that became the core of John Freemuth's "islands under siege" thesis.

It was ironic, therefore, that on the date of FDR's death (April 12), Johnwill Faris called Santa Fe regional headquarters to report that "the [Army] engineers had filed condemnation [papers] on all of the private and state land, not only adjacent to but within the boundaries of the monument." James Lassiter, acting Region III director, assumed that "after the war we should have a good opportunity of having this land [the private in-holdings] transferred to us and added to the monument." Such optimism spread to NPS wartime headquarters in Chicago, where former Region III director Hillory Tolson (now acting NPS director) called upon White Sands to use its water in Dog Canyon so that its permit would be renewed. Soldiers continued to pour into the monument (over 7,000 by June 1), and Johnwill Faris expressed hope that White Sands could coexist with the military despite the dunes' location "in the very heart of the new [bombing] area." [41]