During WW II, Company A of the 771st Military Police, Zone of the Interior, was stationed at Camp Mott, a now abandoned Forest Service campground located between Mott Airport Rd. and the interstate. Their job and that of other camps up and down the state, was to guard railroad bridges and tunnels against sabotage as trainloads of military supplies such as the one pictured at right, passed through our area.
I took the photo as Bob Marshall of McCloud held up his book, The Time-Life Pictorial History of WW II published just after the war, and it shows a train passing milepost 329 (the tiny white sign to the left of the train) which is just below Camp Mott. Thank you for sharing it with me, Bob. Note the guard riding on the flatcar. Bob, retired now 25 years and bearing down on his 90th birthday, has not lost a bit of his memory, either. He recalled for instance that the camp's water supply came from a spring just down from the tracks, about 150 yards south of where the old SP section crew quarters were (now where the road crosses near the old Diamond Lumber yard). He thinks the original hydraulic pump__a device to lift water uphill using the weight of the water as it runs downhill into a pipe__ is still located at the spring and that a trail may still be there leading to it. I'm going to try hiking in one weekend soon and will report what I find. Bob will probably out-hike me if I can talk him into coming along.
Dan Sebby from the California State Military Museum in Sacramento (916-442-2883), the man who provided the tail number for my lost B-24 on an aviation archaeology website, knew about the ZI (Zone of the Interior) MP's and suspected their function so Camp Mott and this photo corroborates his guess. He is interested too in our B-24 story so I'll forward this article to him as it was a group from this camp that secured the aircraft wreck site in the early hours of 11 June 1943. He would love to hear from any reader who might contribute to his military collection, too. You can email him at daniel.sebby@us.army.mil.
Finally, I learned that Ralph Brooks who owed our famous Windsor's Drug Store here in Mt. Shasta for years (remember their soda fountain?) with his wife Donna, was a Tunnel Guard during the war. If I can find him I'd love to get an interview. Maybe he was here!
That's all for now although photos of the B-24 are due this week and I'm getting closer to a site-sweep with metal detectors if anyone wants to come along.
Bruce Batchelder, Editor
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