Camp Wolters: WWII Boot Camp & the Afrika Korps

Long before it was a wellness town, Mineral Wells went to war. In 1925 the National Guard set up a summer cavalry camp on the hills east of town; by World War II that ground had grown into Camp Wolters, one of the largest infantry training centers in the country, where a young Audie Murphy was among the recruits drilled before shipping out. The old cavalry barracks took on a second wartime job as a prison camp for German soldiers captured from Rommel's Afrika Korps. After the war the post became Fort Wolters, a helicopter-pilot training base, and today the National Vietnam War Museum stands on the same storied land. This driving loop strings together the markers of that military history — from the camp's origins to the brick plant whose product helped build it — across the country east and south of town.