Growth of CWS Storage Activities

As soon as the country was actually at war, the Chemical Warfare Service took steps to provide itself with a major depot in the far west. The preferred location was the Salt Lake City area, and a desert valley some fifty-seven miles southwest of the city, in Tooele County, Utah, was selected in February 1942. The new facility, designated Deseret Chemical Warfare Depot, was under construction by the summer of 1942. Its principal function was to serve as another storage center for bombs, mortar shells, and toxics.  

With the activation of the new depots the CWS depot system consisted of five branch depots—Eastern (Edgewood), Gulf (Huntsville), Midwest (Pine Bluff), Indianapolis, and Deseret—and live chemical sections of Army Service Forces depots—Atlanta, Memphis, New Cumberland, San Antonio, and Utah. The missions of these installations varied considerably. The Indianapolis Depot became in effect (and eventually in name) a national control point for CWS spare parts. The other branch depots had in common a responsibility for reserve storage of CWS gen- 

For a more complete description of palletizing, see Risch, Organization, Supply, and Services, pp. 347-49. 

Jigs for simultaneous handling of up to nine 55-gallon drums of toxics were in use there during 1944, and similar methods came into use for loading the awkward incendiary bomb clusters.  

Boxed Cans of Decontaminating Solution stacked on pallets, wooden platforms built to leave clearance underneath for the forks of the fork-lift truck. 

---