Have you ever heard the saying “Damn the torpedoes, full
speed ahead”?
I always thought it was just a line from a movie.
This summer we are volunteering at Farragut State Park in
northern Idaho.
The park is named after the first full Admiral of the
U.S. Navy, Civil War hero Admiral David G. Farragut (1801-1870). It was Admiral Farragut who said during the
raid of Mobile Bay, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7,
1941, aerial military reconnaissance flights were looking for a large piece of
land situated near an ample body of water to build a Naval training station.
The Farragut Naval Training Station, located near Coeur
d' Alene, Idaho, was only operational between 1942 and 1946, but during that
time it was the largest city in Idaho, the largest business in Idaho, and the
second-largest U.S. naval training station.
After its decommissioning, it served as the Farragut College and
Technical Institute. Today it is the site of Farragut State Park and a small
U.S. Navy acoustic research detachment.
By September 15, 1942, after five months of construction,
the first of six recruit camps opened for training. Almost 300,000 sailors were trained in 15
months.
With World War II over and the United States in the
process of recovering from the war effort, the federal government ordered the
removal of the remains of the Farragut Naval Training Station in total. Sold as surplus, you could buy a building for
as little as 50 cents...but, you had to move it! About 680 buildings were removed.
There are some very interesting displays throughout the building.
One of the jail cells with information about “Navel
Justice”, which was basically busting big rocks into small rocks:
Life in the barracks:
Bootcamp:
My favorite - a huge display of knots:
This area is not open to the public:
Solitary confinement
There is a lot more interesting history of the training
station that I will save for other blogs.
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