{
 "provenance": "Synthetic placeholder, replaced by Government furnished content",
 "chapters": [
  {
   "id": "ch1-groundbreaking",
   "era": "1940 to 1941",
   "title": "A site survey in December, a post by summer",
   "standfirst": "Pulaski County, Missouri, chosen for terrain that would punish engineers in training.",
   "body": "The War Department surveyed this ground in December 1940 and began construction the following month. What recommended the site was not convenience. It was the terrain: steep Ozark drainage, limestone, and two rivers that made bridging and road building genuinely difficult to teach anywhere flatter. Contractors put up more than sixteen hundred buildings in a matter of months, working through a Missouri winter on a cantonment plan that the Army had standardized and could replicate. The post was named for Major General Leonard Wood. By the summer of 1941 soldiers were arriving faster than the water and sewer lines could follow them, and the installation was already doing the work it had been built for.",
   "poi_ids": [
    "site-of-the-december-1940-ground-survey",
    "first-construction-camp-marker",
    "original-cantonment-water-tower-site",
    "wartime-rail-spur-terminus"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "ch2-mobilization",
   "era": "1941 to 1945",
   "title": "Mobilization at scale",
   "standfirst": "Divisions formed, trained, and shipped from a post that had not existed two years earlier.",
   "body": "Through the war years Fort Leonard Wood trained engineer units and infantry divisions and moved them out. The Sixth Infantry Division trained here. So did engineer combat battalions who would build and blow bridges across Europe and the Pacific. The rhythm of the post was mobilization: a unit arrived, filled out, trained on the ground east of the cantonment, and left. A prisoner of war camp operated on the installation, holding German and Italian prisoners who worked on post projects. The wooden company streets that survive today, a handful of barracks, a mess hall, a chapel, a day room, are what remains of a cantonment that once housed tens of thousands of soldiers at a time.",
   "poi_ids": [
    "world-war-ii-historic-company-street",
    "restored-world-war-ii-barracks-2101",
    "sixth-infantry-division-training-ground-marker",
    "prisoner-of-war-camp-interpretive-marker",
    "forney-army-airfield"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "ch3-permanence",
   "era": "1946 to 1960",
   "title": "From temporary cantonment to permanent post",
   "standfirst": "Deactivated, reactivated, and then rebuilt in masonry.",
   "body": "The installation was placed on reduced status after the war and reactivated for Korea. That cycle settled the question of whether the post was temporary. Construction in the 1950s replaced wooden mobilization buildings with permanent masonry, laid out the street grid that the main post still uses, and built the facilities that made this a place people were stationed rather than passed through: a hospital, schools, family housing, a chapel in brick. The Engineer School's relationship with the post deepened over the same period. The post cemetery dates from this era, and it marks the point at which the Army began treating Fort Leonard Wood as a permanent institution in Missouri.",
   "poi_ids": [
    "fort-leonard-wood-post-cemetery",
    "main-post-chapel",
    "gammon-field",
    "bailey-bridge-demonstration-span"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "ch4-engineer-training",
   "era": "1960 to 1990",
   "title": "The home of engineer training",
   "standfirst": "Bridging, demolition, route clearance, and heavy equipment, taught at volume.",
   "body": "The U.S. Army Engineer School moved to Fort Leonard Wood and the installation became the branch's home. Training expanded across the eastern training areas: bridge sites on the Big Piney, demolition ranges, heavy equipment pads, and land navigation courses cut through Ozark timber. Soldiers trained here deployed to Vietnam, where combat engineers cleared routes and built the infrastructure that made operations possible, and the memorials on post record what that cost. Through the 1970s and 1980s the post carried both basic combat training and advanced individual training for the engineer specialties, which is a combination that gave it a scale and a tempo that few installations matched.",
   "poi_ids": [
    "u-s-army-engineer-school",
    "engineer-bridge-training-site",
    "combat-engineer-demolition-range-overlook",
    "vietnam-era-engineer-memorial",
    "engineer-heavy-equipment-training-pad"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "ch5-consolidation",
   "era": "1990 to 2005",
   "title": "Three regiments on one installation",
   "standfirst": "Base realignment brought the Chemical Corps and the Military Police here.",
   "body": "Base realignment decisions in the 1990s moved the U.S. Army Chemical School and the U.S. Army Military Police School to Fort Leonard Wood, joining the Engineer School. Three regiments now trained, wrote doctrine, and kept their institutional records on the same installation. That consolidation produced the John B. Mahaffey Museum Complex, where the Engineer, Chemical Corps, and Military Police Corps museums sit within a short walk of one another. It also changed what the post taught. Skills that had been developed separately, mobility, countermobility, chemical defence, and policing, were increasingly taught with an eye to how they would be used together.",
   "poi_ids": [
    "john-b-mahaffey-museum-complex",
    "u-s-army-chemical-corps-museum",
    "u-s-army-military-police-corps-museum",
    "u-s-army-chemical-biological-radiological-and-nuclear-school",
    "u-s-army-military-police-school"
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "ch6-mscoe",
   "era": "2006 to present",
   "title": "The Maneuver Support Center of Excellence",
   "standfirst": "One command for three branches, and the doctrine that ties them together.",
   "body": "In 2006 the three schools were placed under a single command, the Maneuver Support Center of Excellence. The reasoning was operational: engineers, chemical soldiers, and military police all work to protect and enable the movement of a manoeuvring force, and training them under one headquarters makes that relationship explicit. Today the installation runs basic combat training, advanced individual training for the three branches, noncommissioned officer education, and officer courses, alongside the memorial and museum functions that hold the record of what came before. Sapper Grove, where the names are, sits a few hundred metres from the headquarters that sends soldiers out to earn them.",
   "poi_ids": [
    "maneuver-support-center-of-excellence-headquarters",
    "sapper-grove",
    "sapper-grove-memorial-wall",
    "noncommissioned-officer-academy",
    "military-police-urban-training-site"
   ]
  }
 ]
}