POW's

[Orv Reichert]

True Story:


In the fall of 1944, I was 15 years old and attending High School in Pocatello Idaho. During the war, they had a harvest vacation each year when the spuds were ready to harvest [as most of the young males were gone!] All us kids went to work in the fields [picking spuds] in school buses every day to alleviate the problem. Some of us did very little work...others worked well!


The farm where I worked had a contingent of German POW's working there...about 25. They had one guard armed with a carbine. They were housed at the Pocatello Air Base.


One day, during the lunch break, I noted the Germans all clustered around a blanket on the ground. They had the guards carbine all apart and were examining it. A few minutes later, they set up some spuds on a ditch bank and started firing at them. I asked the guard about it, and he said: Hell, they ain't going no where...all the Sieg Heil boys are in a camp in Arizona!


For lunch they had dry bread, sliced cheese and cold coffee.


They had to 'roll their own' cigarettes, too. They bought tobacco at their PX with the few cents they made for each hour worked. My dad gave me some Camels to take to them. [dad had been in Germany from 1922 to 1925]


One guy, I remember, said he was on a sub that was shot up by a plane they had not seen. He commented that Germany is Kaput!...probably an accurate statement in late '44


Orv Reichert

Somebody told me in the last week or so that they have a reunion regularly in the midwest for the POWS. A really big deal. There is also a German military cemetery at Ft McClellan Al where POWs are buried.


Roadkill

I've seen and helped clean up the McClellan cemetary.


Very cool Story Orv!


I enjoy hearing those kind of stories.


I've heard that many German POWs didn't want to go back to Germany after the war.


Ed

[Johnny Peppers]

My dad worked at the A-Bomb plant in Oak Ridge Tennessee during WWII, and it was amazing to see German POW's held that close to a top secret facility. I started to school while we were in Oak Ridge, and as a 6 year old had to wear a badge to ride the school bus.

Hey Johnny, what were the rumors as a kid duringt hat time? Dads and Moms working at the plant?


What about having Germans so close to home?


Ed

[Lonnie Zimmerman]

Roadkill; the reunion was in Alabama, and I saw it on TV a few weeks ago.


Lonnie

[Luke]

Orv,

In a similar story, German POWs were brought to our farm in South Georgia to help with the peanut harvest that year. My father had died a year earlier; and my mother, having no adult male at home, was deathly afraid of them at first. However, they turned out to be just young kids who were a happy lot, laughing and joking as they worked. No problems at all, and a very memorable experience for all of us.

[Luke]

[Hugh]

I grew up on a farm in northeast Louisiana. There was a POW camp about 7 miles from our farm. From 1943 to 1945, we had a group of about a dozen of them that came out to "chop cotton" and 32 that came out to pick cotton. They were guarded by one guard with a carbine. There was a mixture of Germans and Dutch. The Dutch had been conscripted into the army and were "anti-Nazi". There was one guy in the bunch that the others shunned; saying that he was a diehard Nazi.


I was eight at the time, and my sister was five. One day she was riding her horse in the fields and he was scared by something and ran away, jumping over a ditch. My sister was thrown off and knocked out. The "Nazi", ran over and picked her up and carried her in his arms about 1/4 mile to our house.


When they were shipped back overseas in May of 1945, some of them made up the "folder" below and gave it to my dad. Regretfully, when our house burned at a later date, although it was saved, it got water stained.


One of the Dutchmen was a banker in Amsterdam and corresponded with my dad for several years after returning home. He spoke and wrote perfect English.




http://boards.rennlist.com/upload/POW::s.jpg

[Jim Van Eldik]

Fort Leavenworth has a very large national cemetery - facing east - but if you take a black-top into the hills from there you come to another very old cemetery facing west. This one is for prisoners who were executed over the years. It dates back to like 1842. In the back is a row of relatively new markers, all German servicemen. These are men who were executed at the end of WWII. I believe they were submariners and were executed for murdering one of their shipmates while in captivity. History Channel had a show on it but I missed it. Their graves are regularly decorated and tended by I believe by a former German lady who lives close by.

Very good stories. Ed, we need to talk off line sometimes. Chances are that with you being MP and me with Chemical we were at McClellan at the same time. It would make you cry to see the place now. Completely shut down, boarded up, grown up, and run down. I won't hold it against you, but an MP ran over me in the Humvee. (Well, maybe I do, or I wouldn't have mentioned it)


Roadkill

Sounds good, send me a message, I travel to Omaha today. Yeah! Well, not really thrilled, but it'll be fine, cold just like here in Washington.


I'm sure that the MP ran you over for a good reason, and that it was all in fun.


Ed

[Luke]

[Steve Lempitski]

They used to get weekend passes to spend with Italian families in the north end of the city. The Italians used to be such good cooks, that the camp commander, his family, and many of the guards would dine with the prisoners instead of on their own rations. Pasta was supplied by the U.S. government, and the prisoners would grow their own tomatoes for sauce, vegetables for salad, and others would spend the day either fishing for striped bass in the warm months, or digging for clams, mussels, and quahogs in the winter. All they missed was a good glass of vino rosso!

Yeah, he had a reason. He was asleep in the Humvee and fired it up and drove off. I just happened to be down range and too old and slow to get out of the way. Makes a good story though. I can send a picture to you off line if interested of the tire tracks on my chest. Or Hugh or Orv might be gracious enough to forward it. Just keep it off the forum, isn't relevant and definitely not pretty.


Roadkill

I bet there isn't a lot of socializing going on between the US and those idiots at Guantanamo.


Roadkill

Grady,

I feel for you ! Really !

I just had a kidney removed to get rid of cancer !

I hope that you came out as good as I !

The clamps made my scar look like a train track map symbol !

Cancers gone and I feel fine .

ViggoG

It hurt like hell but I got over it. Hpoe you do the same. I believe yours is much more serious than mine.


Roadkill

Grady,

Thanks for the thought, I have just last week been discharged by the Doctors, No Kidney, No Cancer, Nothing to worry about they can't find any trace of cancer except the small skin type which are removed by freezing with cryo-nitrogen.

Im told that I have nothing to fear, I'm clean ! Whee eeeee !

Nothing left but that train track scar.

Operation was last fall and I'm back to work on my house.

Hope you are doing as well!

ViggoG

[Thor]

Good deal Viggo! God bless you! ~Thor~