Dugway Proving Ground, German-Japanese Village, South of Stark Road, in WWII Incendiary Test Area, Dugway, Tooele County, UT

Significance: The Dugway German-Japanese Village was the primary American site for testing incendiary bombs prior to large-scale attacks near the end of World War II against civilian targets such as Dresden, Germany, and Tokyo, Japan. The function of the extant structure (the German Village) paralleled that of an adjacent, but no longer extant, Japanese Village, used to test incendiaries for the Pacific theater. The buildings in the German-Japanese Village were constructed of materials and designs that replicated contemporary residential buildings in German and Japanese urban industrial districts. In order to build a facility that was an authentic reproduction, studies were conducted to determine which materials and furnishings available in the U.S. would closely match those in use in Germany and Japan. A group of German-American architects affiliated with the "Gropius group at Harvard," including prominent Jewish architects Eric Mendelsohn and Konrad Wachsmann, were employed to design the facility. Both men had been associated with the prominent architectural group, der Berliner Zehner-Ring [the Berlin Circle of 10, or the Ring] while living in Europe. The Ring included among its members Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. The AN-M50 model of incendiary bomb, extensively tested at the German Village, accounted for more than 97 percent (by number) of the incendiary bombs dropped on Germany by American forces. The AN-M69 tested in the German-Japanese Village was used extensively during the 1945 firebombing of Japan, the results of which surpassed, in terms of immediate loss of life and destruction of property, the use of the atomic bombs.
Survey number: HAER UT-92
Building/structure dates: 1943 Initial Construction