Fort Bragg

U.S. ARMY FORT BRAGG
Home of the Airborne and Special Operations Forces

Fort Bragg, NC History

Fort Bragg was originally established as Camp Bragg, named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg, as an artillery training site in 1918; the area has an excellent climate for daily training, good rail and road connections, and a varied terrain. The camp was used for infantry and “aeroplane” and balloon spotting training in the last year of World War I. The aviation field was later named Pope Field, named after a lieutenant who died when his airplane crashed in a nearby river. 

Camp Bragg was briefly in danger of being closed in due to budget cuts after World War I, but post commander General Albert Bowley campaigned for the site, and the camp’s status was confirmed in 1922 and renamed Fort Bragg.

Fort Bragg expanded in the 1920s, and continued as a field artillery training location and field experiment site, with Bragg artillerists developing expertise with each field gun in every kind of condition. 

With World War II clearly becoming a problem the US would be involved in, Fort Bragg expanded quickly, and began training troops who would later deploy quickly to North Africa and later the European front. A large number of infantry troops trained at Bragg, but the most famous units include all five airborne divisions (11th, 13th, 17th, 82nd, and 101st Airborne Divisions) and other parachute-deployed units, including the all-black 555th Parachute Infantry Brigade. Bragg also trained and deployed many ground-pounding infantry with substantial artillery force, including the 9th Infantry, 2nd Armored, and 100th Infantry Divisions.

After the war, in 1946, the fort became the permanent home of the 82nd Airborne Division. In 1952, the U.S Army Special Operations Command was established at Fort Bragg, further establishing Bragg as a primary power projection base. 

From the 1950’s to the 2000’s Fort Bragg has participated in a series of deployments and philanthropic missions: Operation Power Pack (Dominican Republic 1965), Operation Urgent Fury (Grenada 1983), Operation Hawkeye (U.S Virgin Islands, 1989), Vigilant Warrior (Kuwait 1994), Operation Joint Endeavor (1995). Bragg units also led the way in the Korean and Vietnam Wars and in the War on Terror. Today Fort Bragg is one of the largest military installations in the world, and continues train and field the US Army’s best. 

ANOTHER NAME CHANGE CONTROVERSY, CALIFORNIA Fort Bragg by Colonel Herbert M. Hart, USMC (Retired) 

A young lieutenant’s respect for his first company commander provided the name for Fort Bragg. The respect of others for the same officer caused that name to be retained throughout the Civil War.

Second Lieutenant Horatio G. Gibson was fresh from West Point when he joined the 3d Artillery in time for the Battle of Chapultepec, Mexico, in 1847. A lasting impression was made on him by his captain, Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Braxton Bragg, three times breveted in 15 months.

Ten years later when First Lieutenant Gibson established an Army post on the Mendocino Indian Reservation in northern California, he had no hesitation regarding a name. Colonel Bragg had left the Army in favor of the life of a Louisiana planter, confining his government service by 1856 to serving as his state’s Commissioner of Public Works. By naming the new camp after this hero of Buena Vista, Gibson felt that at least the Bragg name was back in the service of the Army.

For an artilleryman, the early days of Fort Bragg were especially trying. Men who had been recruited and trained as cannoneers of the 3d Artillery found themselves performing the age-old Army chores of artisans, masons, and hewers of wood.

“It is slow work, owing to the scarcity of proper tools,” reported Gibson on June 18, 1857, a week after officially establishing the post. I do not expect to have all necessary buildings completed before the beginning of the rainy season.”

Three months later Gibson could report some progress and the hope of having his command under cover before winter. “I have to report the erection and occupation of three buildings, all of which however are unfinished,” he wrote. “The men are now at work on the officers’ quarters, which ought to be completed within a month. A stable, guardhouse and storehouse have yet to be built.”

The artilleryman came through in this report with a request that the post be provided with its allowance of howitzers.

Fort Bragg was a year old when almost the entire garrison was suddenly rushed to eastern Washington for the Coeur d’Alene War. Gibson was sick when the call came. He ordered 15 of his men to respond to the call. Ten days later he followed them, placing a noncommissioned officer in temporary charge of the post.

Gibson returned to Bragg for a short time after the end of the Coeur d’Alene War, then moved on to be the quartermaster of his regiment. After Civil War duties as a colonel and brevet brigadier general of the 2d Ohio Artillery Volunteers and a hero at Antietam, Gibson returned to the 3d Artillery. He was its regimental commander for the last eight years before his retirement in 1891.

The infantry took over Fort Bragg in early 1859 with a 20-man detachment from Company D, 6th Infantry. The entire company arrived in September. This permitted the garrison to seriously pursue the problems of keeping the Indians peaceful and the settlers at a distance. A small detachment was outposted in Round Valley, 40 miles to the northeast, when it became obvious that the rugged terrain and seasonal floods prevented any rapid movement from Fort Bragg.

Complaints were received at various forts in March 1861, that the Indians were plotting to exterminate the whites. The Fort Bragg garrison was ordered to take to the field. “Keep actively engaged moving over the country requiring protection,” the 60-man expedition was told. The detachment in Round Valley was moved to a halfway point, lessening the resupply problems and putting it closer to supposed threats.

The company was supplied with several members of a newly recruited 30-man company of Volunteers who signed up for three months. Acquainted with the area, they were employed as guides. “They proved to be of invaluable aid to the regular forces, which, indeed, would have been worthless without them,” according to a contemporary and probably exaggerated account.

Soon countercharges were leveled against some of the settlers who were clamoring for Army protection.

“There are several parties of citizens now engaged in stealing or taking by force Indian children from the district in which I have been ordered to operate against the Indians,” reported Lieutenant Edward Dillon, commander of the Fort Bragg field detachment. “As many as 40 or 50 Indian children have been taken . . . This brutal trade is calculated to produce retaliatory depredations on the part of the Indians . . . These men keep the Indians constantly on the alert, attacking and chasing them before us and following in our wake for the purpose of obtaining children.”

After three months of operations, it appeared that the settler complaints had been satisfied. They were willing to admit that the Army’s conduct of the campaign “inspired a hopeful confidence in their good judgment and soldierly qualities,” said a contemporary account. When this resulted in the discharge of the 90-day guides, the writer was quick to announce that the Army had “seized the first opportunity to make a serious mistake . . . The regular soldiers could not fight without the aid and encouragement of the Volunteers, and the Indians knew it. They feared the Volunteers only.” The regulars had similar feelings about the Volunteers, usually suggesting that the Indians feared the undisciplined Volunteers because of the brutal punishments they rendered on any unfortunate captive.

Ironically the longtime Volunteers who took over the post from the regulars in November 1861, had the same opinion of the short-time volunteers. “The mingling of the Humboldt volunteers with the men of my regiment at the same post would be demoralizing and dangerous to the discipline that they have been 18 months acquiring,” stated the commander of the 2d Infantry Regiment, California Volunteers.

One of the final actions of the regular Army before the arrival of the Volunteers was a visit by the Acting Inspector General of the Pacific, Lieutenant Colonel Don Carlos Buell. Noting that outposts were still being sent to Round Valley and the intermediate point, be commented, “Their services are of no value whatever where they are, and I recommend that they be immediately returned to their company.”

Buell passed to the Bragg commander “to make no more attacks on Indians except for depredations actually committed.” Noting that the Indians at Shelter Cove, 40 miles up the coast, had yet to be punished for a recent murder, be ordered Bragg’s garrison “to take measures for the effectual punishment of that band.”

Buell confined the mission to a Fort Bragg detachment on the theory that even if it were defeated, “the Indians will slacken their vigilance” and other forces could attack them successfully. The expedition did not fail, however, nor did several others that returned to the Shelter Cove trouble spot for the next two years.

The garrison was usually suspicious of where the guilt really lay when Indians were charged. On one Shelter Cove campaign, Captain J. B. Moore relayed the report that a settler “took a child from a squaw who happened to be a little to the rear of the party, tied it to a tree, and shot it.” The same man was accused of shooting a defenseless woman to death on a previous trip. The Army was powerless to discipline the citizens, however, and insisted that certain white men were committing depredations “in order to get employment as guides, packers, and business for the horses, mules etc.”

Buell went on to other actions in the Civil War, coincidentally reaching his peak as a major general of Volunteers in command of Federal troops that defeated the Confederate Army of the Tennessee, General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A., commanding.

Bragg’s acceptance of a Confederate commission prompted the commander of the 2d Infantry California Volunteers to recommend a new name for Fort Bragg, “which has long enough borne the name of a traitor.” Nothing came of the suggestion, perhaps because Bragg was out of the Army when be joined the Confederacy, or because his Mexican War comrade-in-arms, Brigadier General George Wright, could still remember the heroism at Buena Vista.

Until the post was abandoned in October 1884, the Fort Bragg name was retained, one of the few named after Confederates that did so.

Today, only the Commissary and a state historic marker, both pictured below, are all that remains of this post.