The area between the MOORE COUNTY airport and Southern Pines was known as Knollwood. Below is a bit of the Airport history. If you ever fly into SOP you may notice one hanger with KNOLLWOOD on it.
[size=1.95552em]How a small NC airport saved the airborne[/size]The dirt runway, wrote Staff Sgt. Frank Clonan in his journal, "wasn't much to look at." As for the mission, even the Army chief of staff had his doubts. The Army's fledgling airborne divisions were in jeopardy, and the invasion into Normandy was a short six months away.The Knollwood Maneuver would be their final chance to convince critics.It was 1943, just three years after the first parachute test platoon was formed, and wartime was proving tough. In North Africa, paratroopers who missed their landing zone marched 35 miles to capture an airfield already in the hands of friendly land-sea ground forces.Sicily had its own share of problems. Once more, paratroopers landed far and wide from their intended targets. But the real tragedy came when friendly fire brought down 23 aircraft and damaged 37 more; 318 paratroopers and airmen were killed or wounded."I do not believe in the airborne division," Lt. Gen. (and future president) Dwight Eisenhower wrote in 1943. "I believe that airborne troops should be reorganized into self-contained units, comprising infantry, artillery and special services, all of about the strength of a regimental combat team."George C. Marshall did believe in the airborne division. The Army chief of staff called on Maj. Gen. Joseph Swing to lead a group that would determine the fate of the airborne divisions.For two weeks, the so-called "Swing Board" met around the clock, drafting a set of recommendations that would improve communication and coordination between paratroopers and their air support.Marshall and Swing's boss, Lt. Gen. Leslie J. McNair, were unconvinced. And a demonstration at Camp Mackall, dubbed the "Pea Patch Show" for the former farm field where the "show" took place, wasn't enough.They would wait for Knollwood.Knollwood Airport was built by the Tufts family of Pinehurst in 1929 for pleasure, not war. Harold Bachman offered kids rides for a $1 in his 1932 Waco QDC. Yankee golfers flew in for a round at No. 2. Famed pilot Amelia Earhart even landed there with her husband to visit friends.World War II changed everything. Moore County, no stranger to celebrity, now played host to the Army chief of staff and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, British Field Marshal Sir John Dill and Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten.American soldiers were not an uncommon sight here, but suddenly, "They filled the streets," said former Southern Pines Mayor Norris Hodgkins, who was in high school at the time. "They patronized the local restaurants, movies and night clubs."In the weeks and days leading up to the maneuver at Knollwood, soldiers bedded down at the nearby Pine Needles and Mid Pines resorts - Mid Pines became a training center. Glenn Miller and his swing band entertained the troops at Pine Needles. When it was time for them to leave on a European tour, they flew out of Knollwood. It was a year later that Miller, flying in a single-engine military plane bound for Paris, went down over the Channel, lost.Knollwood Airport was now Knollwood Army Auxiliary Airfield, a supplement to Pope Field, due to its proximity to Fort Bragg and Camp Mackall, responsible for validating airborne doctrine and equipment.But on Dec. 7, 1943, the second anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Knollwood was no bit player, no side act. It was a test to see if thousands of men, traveling over sea and land, could land at precisely selected drop zones without excessive casualties and wage sustained combat.Around midnight, an armada of C-47 aircraft from Army airfields at Pope, Mackall, Lumberton, Laurinburg and Florence, S.C., met over the Atlantic, many with gliders double-towed. All told, there were 200 C-47 airplanes and 234 gliders with 10,282 men, 1,830 tons of supplies and equipment, 295 Jeeps and 48 quarter-ton trailers on board.Waiting in North Carolina, townspeople from Raeford to Rockingham kept a curfew, lights off. Traffic signals and street lights were extinguished. Roads were closed. Electricity was cut in case stray paratroopers got tangled in power lines. Bitter simulated warfare was waged over the Sandhills in a cold driving rain, Maj. Edward M. Flanagan Jr. would later write in his book, "The Angels," a history of the 11th Airborne Divison.As the armada approached the golf courses and open fields of Moore County, men and equipment were dropped over 13 designated zones to "capture" Knollwood. The 11th Airborne was the "Blue Army" assaulting the airport, while the defending "Red Army" was made up of elements of the 11th, 13th, 17th, 82nd and 101st divisions.Rifles and machine guns rattled off a constant chatter. Flight nurses in a state-of-the-art field hospital cared for simulated patients and men who really were injured and couldn't continue with the maneuver. Cracked gliders sat in fields.For townspeople, it must have seemed as if World War II had come to them. David Woodruff was a 12-year-old boy that cold night. "My friend Gene's grandparents lived on Pee Dee Road about a mile from the airport," he recalls in a book he is writing about his Southern Pines childhood. "He tells of them awaking to find the woods around their house filled with parachutes in trees. The troopers landing there had cut themselves free of their harnesses and moved on, leaving the collection of their chutes for later."Doc Deibler was a soldier in the middle of it all. He would later land in Normandy on D-Day where he saw bloodshed he would never forget."I was 21 going on 45," he said about the end of the war. He came home and married his fiancee, Mary Smith, just a few days after his discharge from the military. Deibler donated her wedding dress made from his silk parachute to the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum on Fort Bragg.But none of that had happened yet. On Dec. 7, 1943, he just had turned 19. When people read the accounts of D-Day, Staff Sgt. Clonan would write in his journal, they probably did not realize that North Carolinians experienced a small taste of that breathtaking sky train."It was a sight well worth seeing to have had the opportunity to witness formations of from 15 to 50 ships practicing here in this area in the pine hills of North Carolina for the day they would become part of that tremendous formation, approximately 500 miles long, which passed over observers from England to the Rhine. Doubtless, many of the pilots, co-pilots, glider pilots and paratroopers in that great armanda ... prepared for that event right here."The Knollwood Maneuver, between Dec. 7 and Dec. 12, covered 2,500 square miles in Moore, Richmond, Hoke and Scotland counties. Two people were killed, 48 were injured. A farmhouse came away scathed when a glider hit it - no one was hurt. It was determined that 85 percent of the landings were in the correct drop zone."The successful performance of your division has convinced me that we were wrong," Lt. Gen. McNair later wrote to Maj. Gen. Swing. "I shall now recommend that we continue our present schedule of activating, training and committing airborne divisions."By the fall of 1945, military operations closed at Knollwood. Camp Mackall was undergoing a similar process.David Woodruff recalled that his father, a sheet metal worker, and other civilian employees at Mackall held a picnic there with their families to celebrate the end of the war. "My uncle was in the war and he had come back, bought a new Lincoln convertible and he took us boys for a ride down the runways at Camp Mackall."With the top down, Woodruff's uncle drove on the deserted runway, hitting 100 on the speedometer, narrating the trip over the rush of the wind as if he were a pilot preparing for takeoff.Knollwood is now the Moore County Airport. Pine Needles, Mid Pines and Pinehurst resorts operate under private ownership as they did in the early 20th century. Today, they are preparing for the 2014 U.S. Open.The only evidence of the 1943 maneuver is the old Knollwood Hangar 6 at the Moore County Airport. Steve Borden, a retired Air Force pilot, is executive director."The training conducted here and ultimate proof of concept paved the way for numerous military victories in key battles throughout our nation's history."Special thanks goes to Tom MacCallum, author of "Camp Mackall, North Carolina," and to the Tufts Archives.[size=1.95552em][/color][/size]