History of Medical Care at Fort Stewart, Georgia

In November 1940, Colonel Thomas Morris Chaney, a native of the State of Maryland, and a regular Army officer, was ordered to Camp Stewart where he organized and opened the first hospital. His mission was to support the troop at Camp Stewart which had been designated that same month (9 November 1940) as a Camp, having been activated in June 1940 as an Antiaircraft Artillery Center. The mission of the hospital was to medical support the troops which were being trained to deploy to Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific theaters for participation in World War II.

In the middle of September a detachment of the 70th Coast Artillery Regiment (AA), a Regular Army unit, arrived before the camp’s facilities had been much more than started. In October and November, personnel of the 214th Coast Artillery Regiment, a National Guard unit from Georgia, arrived.

Colonel Chaney arrived on 15 November 1940 with a cadre of medics from Fort Benning, GA. They were assigned for quarters (tents were used) to battery “H:, 70th Artillery, under the command of a Captain Lazar.

According to Locklear, Sergeant Major under Colonel Chaney, they had a hospital staff before there was a hospital. Before completion of construction of the hospital, patients requiring hospitalization were transferred to the Marine hospital in Savannah or to the Army hospital at Fort Screven, Georgia, on Tybee Island. Sergeant Major Locklear, who retired from the military service after serving 22 years and worked as a civil service retirement, remembers that the hospital “went up overnight; it seemed like they had added to it every day”.

Shortly after the construction of the hospital, equipment began to arrive and the hospital was fully opened and the first patient admitted on 3 December 1940.