Camp Holcomb was a US military base in Chinwangtao (

Qinhuangdao Qinhuangdao (; ) is a port city on the coast of China in northern Hebei. It is administratively a prefecture-level city, about east of Beijing, on the Bohai Sea, the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea. Its population during the 2020 national ...

) China. Established in 1912 in response to the Boxer Rebellion, it was garrisoned by the 15th Infantry Regiment, US Army as part of their larger presence in nearby Tientsin (

Tianjin Tianjin (; ; Mandarin: ), alternately romanized as Tientsin (), is a municipality and a coastal metropolis in Northern China on the shore of the Bohai Sea. It is one of the nine national central cities in Mainland China, with a total popu ...

). Chinwangtao is a strategic deep water port near where the

Great Wall of China The Great Wall of China (, literally "ten thousand ''li'' wall") is a series of fortifications that were built across the historical northern borders of ancient Chinese states and Imperial China as protection against various nomadic gro ...

meets the sea. Called Camp Burrowes by the Army, on February 28, 1938, the base was transferred to the US Marine Corps and renamed Camp Holcomb after the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Thomas Holcomb The base was surrendered to the Japanese on December 8, 1941. After World War II, the base was again used by the Marines until 1947, when it was caught up in the Chinese Civil War and evacuated. There is a possibility that Camp Holcomb is the location of the missing

Peking Man Peking Man (''Homo erectus pekinensis'') is a subspecies of '' H. erectus'' which inhabited the Zhoukoudian Cave of northern China during the Middle Pleistocene. The first fossil, a tooth, was discovered in 1921, and the Zhoukoudian Cave has s ...

fossils. The fossils were being shipped to Tientsin in November 1941, and the ship that was tasked with transporting them, the ''President Harrison'', could not have docked at Tientsin itself. The ship never arrived, and the bones were lost. In a story relayed many years later to his son, a US Marine digging foxholes during 1947 when the base was under attack by Chinese Communists found a box full of bones but reburied it.

References

{{reflist Installations of the United States Army United States Marine Corps installations Military installations closed in 1947 Military installations established in 1912 1912 establishments in China 1947 disestablishments in China