The Army needed a training ground that resembled the European Theater's hardest terrain. Italy's Apennines and the Alps were not the rolling Mid-Atlantic country most American soldiers knew. The Allegheny Mountains of eastern West Virginia, with their steep escarpments, narrow valleys, sandstone cliffs, and unpredictable mountain weather, were a remarkable match. In August 1943, the XIII Corps stood up the West Virginia Maneuver Area, a training ground spread across Randolph County and four adjacent counties, taking in most of the Monongahela National Forest plus tracts of private land. Headquarters was at Elkins. Support included a signal battalion, a quartermaster detachment, military police, a special services company, engineers, and ordnance specialists.

Tent cities went up across Elkins and surrounding towns as troop numbers swelled to about 16,000 by early 1944. Classes ran on eight-week rotations. Artillery training used a 60,000-acre live-fire area in the eastern part of the WVMA, including parts of Dolly Sods - what is now the federally designated wilderness - and Canaan Valley. The 105mm and 155mm howitzers fired regularly across these ridges. Local newspapers ran notices warning hunters to stay clear during maneuvers. Engineers practiced improvised river crossings on the Blackwater and Dry Fork. A pack mule school operated near Gladwin, teaching the older art of getting supplies up mountains where trucks could not go. The Seneca Rocks climbing program, run by veterans of Camp Hale, became the Army's only low-altitude assault climbing course.

Many of the units cycling through went straight to Europe. The 94th Signal Battalion, trained in part at the WVMA, would later fight in the Battle of the Bulge, where its communications work helped hold the line against the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes. The skills taught at Seneca Rocks - assault climbing, night movement, rigging - showed up in the Italian campaign, where American troops faced cliff-bound German positions in the mountains north of Rome. The training program closed in July 1944, just weeks after D-Day, as the Army's priority shifted to occupation and the final European push. By then, the WVMA had given a hundred thousand soldiers the closest thing to European mountain warfare they could get without leaving the United States.

Dolly Sods today is one of the most popular wilderness areas in the eastern United States. Its high-altitude heath barrens, rocky outcrops, and bog plant communities feel ancient and untouched. They are also still salted, in places, with unexploded ordnance. A Defense Environmental Restoration Program project authorized under the 1986 Superfund Amendments turned its attention to the WVMA's leftover shells. In 1997, an ordnance disposal crew surveyed trail locations and known campsites at Dolly Sods and found fifteen shells, some of them still live. All were exploded on site. Many more are believed to remain. Visitors are advised, in standard wilderness orientation, to leave any suspicious metal objects exactly where they find them. The Army's only low-altitude climbing school is gone. Its lessons survived. Some of its munitions did, too.