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Re: Andersonville

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: May 07, 2003

"The stories that surround Andersonville

By John Woestendiek Sun Staff

ANDERSONVILLE, Ga. - The Georgia preacher flailed his arms - not out of zeal, but self-defense.

It was Easter. The just-risen sun was burning through the morning mist. Birds chirped. And the mosquitoes, sensing easy prey, converged on the sparse crowd attending sunrise services at this former Civil War prison camp.

"We're going to 'a cappella' this one," the Rev. John P. Drake said, waving bugs away as congregants, who had been quietly passing around a can of bug repellent, stood to sing.

Up from the grave He a-rose

With a mighty triumph o'er His foes;

He a-rose a victor from the dark do-main,

And he lives for-ever with His saints to reign.

He a-rose! He a-rose!

Hal-le-lu-jah! Christ a-rose!

Back in their folding chairs, seats wet with dew, the congregants listened as Drake, pastor of Andersonville Methodist Church, spoke about Easter - the pain, suffering and torture of the crucifixion, followed by joyful rebirth. It was a message of faith and hope, particularly fitting on this, the first day home for the seven American ex-prisoners of war in Iraq.

But Drake made no mention of them. More surprising yet - though he read from Ezekiel about the valley of dry bones, though he referred to Auschwitz - he said nothing about the significance of the ground on which he stood. For lined up not far from the folding chairs - and squeezed together even more closely - were the tombstones of thousands of Union soldiers who, during the Civil War, died in Andersonville, a Confederate-run prison camp in which disease was rampant, cruelty was customary and escape was rare.

Death and brutality were common at all Civil War prison camps, Union-run camps included, but Andersonville, now home to the National Prisoner of War Museum, was, and remains, the most notorious.

The camp's commander, Capt. Henry Wirz, was the only Civil War soldier convicted of war crimes. He was hanged in Washington on Nov. 10, 1865. In 1908, in an attempt to clear his reputation, a monument proclaiming him a hero and a martyr was erected in the center of Andersonville.

Wars, final as they are, rarely come to tidy ends. After the "war criminals" (generally those on the losing side) are sentenced, after the history (generally written by the winning side) is put down on paper, sorting the facts from the myths, the heroes from the villains, the right from the wrong, can go on for centuries.

Even removing Wirz from the equation, though, Andersonville, as with prisoner-of-war camps from Bataan to Baghdad, remains a shameful saga - one that, fully confronted, reflects a side of humanity most humans would prefer not to admit exists.

Too depressing, perhaps, for an Easter Sunday sermon in a Civil War cemetery, or maybe too contrary to the theme; none of these bones came back to life. The sunrise service concluded with no mention of Andersonville, with the congregation smelling of insect repellent and, as it began, with song.

Death can-not keep its prey, Jesus my savior

He tore the bars away, Jesus my Lord!

*

There are only so many things you can do with an indelible stain on your nation's history.

You can scrub, in hopes of removing the worst of it, or whitewash, in hopes of covering up most of it. You can pretend it doesn't exist, or divert attention by pointing to almost-as-tarnished spots elsewhere. You can explain it away as unavoidable, attempt to find some good in it, even invite the world to pack a picnic lunch and come see it.

Underneath it all, though, it's still a stain - distinctive as the red clay of southern Georgia, persistent as mosquitoes on a muggy morning. And of all the non-battlefield stains left on American soil, by Americans, this one is probably the worst.

Nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died here, not in battle, but as prisoners of war, all within the confines of a 26 1/2 -acre Confederate gulag, all in a span of 14 months.

Today, thousands of tourists a year come to visit, some by the busload.

In the National Prisoner of War Museum, they can see shackles, cages and lonely letters written home; view the flight suit, boots and arm cast worn by Army Maj. Rhonda Cornum, taken prisoner in the Persian Gulf war; and watch an introductory film, Echoes of Captivity, narrated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

They can stroll the undulating green hills that - once surrounded by a 15-foot-high stockade made from hewed pine logs - served as a muddy and overcrowded home to 45,000 Union soldiers during the Civil War.

And, in the cemetery, they can walk among the tiny white gravestones of Civil War prisoners, many of which are less than a finger's width apart, because, with scores of prisoners dying each day, coffins weren't used and prisoners were buried on their sides to save space.

The prison camp opened in February 1864, originally to hold 10,000 prisoners. Arriving at a rate of 400 a day, Union prisoners numbered 26,000 by the end of June, and would eventually reach 32,000. Because of a deteriorating Southern economy, poor transportation, failed efforts to exchange prisoners and the need to concentrate dwindling resources on its failing army, the Confederacy was unable to provide adequate housing, food, clothing or medical care for prisoners.

Deaths, at their peak, reached 127 a day, many of them from dysentery contracted from a branch of Sweetwater Creek that flowed through the middle of the tent-filled prison yard. It served as the only source of water, but also as a latrine.

Prisoners were sometimes shot by guards when they crossed a wooden beam known as the "dead line" that ran inside the stockade wall; and they were preyed upon by a group of fellow prisoners, known as the Raiders, who beat, murdered and stole from weaker inmates - until six Raiders were finally tried, convicted and hanged by fellow inmates.

Only when Gen. William T. Sherman's forces occupied Atlanta and were within striking distance of Andersonville did the Confederacy, fearing attack, reduce the population, sending most prisoners to other camps.

By the time the war ended and the camp closed, 12,912 Union soldiers had died.

They were among about 30,000 Union soldiers - out of 195,000 imprisoned - who died in Confederate prison camps. About 26,000 of the 220,000 Confederate soldiers held in Union prison camps died.


Like Auschwitz, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, like the pit that was once the World Trade Center, Andersonville is one of those places you don't so much want to go as you feel you should.

Originally maintained by the Army, which focused on operating the cemetery, the former prison camp saw a surge in visitors in the early 1960s, partly due to MacKinlay Kantor's historical novel of the same name, partly due to the Civil War centennial.

Attempts to make the cemetery and prison camp a National Park - like earlier attempts by Clara Barton to establish it as a shrine immediately after the war - were opposed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other groups who worried such status would reopen old wounds and detract from the suffering of Southerners held in northern prison camps.

The federal government designated the camp and cemetery a National Historic Site in 1970, but only after an agreement that the site would commemorate prisoners of war from all American wars. Its museum, which opened in 1998, also honors all POWs.

As a result - rightly or wrongly, intentionally or not - the horrors of Andersonville end up being, if not diminished, at least overshadowed. Alongside the torture inflicted by Viet Cong and Japanese on American prisoners, the Confederates don't look so bad. Grainy Civil War-era black-and-white photos don't stir the emotions quite as much as moving pictures and interactive videos about the atrocities of later wars.

"It's OK to come out crying," said Alan Marsh, cultural resources program manager for the National Park Service at Andersonville. Many do.

"When you look at POWs, you definitely see the worst of man's inhumanity to man, but you also sometimes see the best."

Among the exhibits are the cement cross built by Bataan Death March POWs, captured by the Japanese after the fall of Bataan in 1942; bamboo "tiger cages" like those the Viet Cong used to hold prisoners; the contents of Red Cross parcels sent to prisoners, but often intercepted, including Spam, Postum, tea and Prince Albert tobacco in a can.

Through interactive video exhibits, one can hear Rhonda Cornum recount how she paced triangles in her room in Baghdad and sang a lot - because talking was not allowed. Another gulf war POW, Michael Berryman, a Marine, tells of an interrogation in which he was told "I'm going to ask you five questions; for every question you don't answer, you're going to lose a finger." The threat wasn't carried out. Others talk about what it takes to get through such an experience - humor, faith, comradeship, communication, an occupied mind and thoughts of home.

"Nothing compares with hearing a former of prisoner of war tell the story," said Marsh. "I still get chill bumps when I think of one who came in to give tours. He was standing here, and someone asked him if he had to wear iron cuffs like these. He didn't say a word. He just unbuttoned his shirt cuff and rolled up his sleeves and you could see the scars.

"He said so much without saying a word.

"I wish everyone in the country could come here," Marsh added. "It would make them more aware of the sacrifices that are made for freedom."

That sacrifice can continue - both physically and mentally - after a POW has been freed. Many ex-prisoners of war, Marsh said, continue not just to be haunted by the experience, but to feel guilty about it.

"It's something I notice among the older ex-POWs," said Marsh, who has taken oral histories from scores of ex-POWs. "There is almost a sense of shame they'd been captured, like they failed."

But that began to change with the Vietnam War, he says, when POWs - unlike many of that war's returning vets - came home as heroes. And judging from the reaction to the return of Jessica Lynch from Iraq, the view of the POW as hero is as strong as ever.

"I think it's because they finally started getting some attention and recognition," Marsh said.


Northeast of Andersonville, about 35 miles up a road that winds through red clay and pine trees, Ed Gaines sits in his home in Byron and watches news of the former POWs' return from Iraq.

He is glad to see it, and a little bit jealous.

There was little fanfare when Gaines came home after 14 months as a prisoner of war in Korea; no ribbons, no TV cameras, no parades.

"When I got off the airplane, there was no one there to meet me," said Gaines, who dropped from 165 to 85 pounds during captivity.

Some wars are talked about with reverence in this country, like World War II. Some, like Vietnam, are not. And some - like Gaines' war - are hardly talked about at all.

"The forgotten war, that's what they call it," said Gaines, 71, who between breaths on his oxygen tank - "They say my old heart's just wore out" - manages an ironic chuckle.

He, for one, has not forgotten it - not the five times his plane was shot down, not the 14 months he lived on two bowls of rice and two cups of water a day, not the beatings, the six months of solitary confinement, the three firing squads he was lined up in front of, or the 12 fellow prisoners he was forced to bury.

The forgotten war still wakes him up in the middle of the night.

"My heart goes out to them," he says of the seven returning hostages. "I really feel for those people. I know they were treated rough. I'm proud that the government is going all out for them. As far as us, they didn't do nothing."

Gaines joined the Air Force when he was 18. He was shot down in North Korea when he was 20 and spent his 21st and 22nd birthdays at a Chinese-operated prison camp.

"Solitary confinement was the worst part. I had a spider and a fly that I played with. One day, my spider ate the fly. I got mad at the spider and killed him. I had things like that to entertain myself."

Gaines, a gunner and radio operator, said his punishments - being whipped and left tied out at night in the cold, being forced to kneel in piles of ice and sharp rocks - usually came after he refused to sign statements.

"They kept trying to get me to sign a statement saying we dropped germ bombs. But we didn't, so I wouldn't sign it." He was freed in 1953 after a cease-fire was declared and an agreement was reached to exchange prisoners.

"We got off the truck and crossed the line back into South Korea. It was one of the best sights I'd ever seen in my life."

After 30 days on a ship and a short hospital stay, Gaines went home. "I wanted to see my mamma," he said.

Though he refused to speak about his POW experience for a long time, Gaines now gives talks at schools and has conducted tours at the POW museum. With medication, he said, he is able to control his temper. "Most everybody who came out of there had [post-traumatic stress disorder], though back then we called it shell-shock."

But 50 years later, Gaines still dreams about the experience: "I'm trying to run and get away, and I can't run. I'll be hollering and screaming, and my wife will wake me up."


Southwest of Andersonville, 20 miles deeper into rural Georgia, sits Maranatha Baptist Church, home to a small congregation in Plains whose members take turns mowing the grass. On the Saturday before Easter, it was Jimmy Carter's turn.

The former president and winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize did his lawn duty. A woodworker, he also made the wooden bowls used to collect the offering every week. And when he's in town - as was the case Easter Sunday - he often shows up to teach Sunday school.

While President Bush attended Easter services with two of the seven returned POWs at Fort Hood in central Texas, Carter, who was opposed to attacking Iraq, led the Baptist congregation in Bible study in his typically low-key, almost Mr. Rogersish style.

"We've become inured. Do you know what that word means? Inured? It means to get used to something. Well, we have become inured to the suffering that takes place in war."

It's only human to try and block out that which is painful and ugly. In this war, though, Carter said, it's as if the television networks are doing it for us.

The nation, on this day, was focused on the returning POWs, and rightfully so, but at the same time it - and the American networks - seemed to be "completely ignoring the fact that 1,900 civilians in Iraq, all innocent victims, died in the war," Carter said.

Carter lost his bid for re-election in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, a loss some attribute to his handling of the prolonged Iran hostage crisis - patient, in the view of some; wimpy, in the view of others.

An aging dove in an increasingly hawkish world, Carter lives in the sleepy town of Plains, where both his boyhood home and his high school are now part of the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site. He continues to work with the Carter Center in Atlanta and Habitat for Humanity, and he travels abroad frequently on humanitarian missions and to promote world peace.

On Easter, six Secret Service agents shadowed the ex-president, double the normal contingent. Since the start of the war with Iraq, ex-presidents have been requested not to leave the country, causing Carter to cancel his plans to monitor the recent elections in Nicaragua.

Before Carter entered the church - and amid the whine of detectors outside - Maranatha's pastor, the Rev. Daniel G. Ariail, answered questions from the crowd of about 50. Both he and Carter, he said, opposed attacking Iraq. Now, however, "We are one nation, and we stick together, and we support the president."

But he added, "War is never an answer. It's always a sign of failure."


It's a novel. It's a movie. Part of it is a National Historic Site. But Andersonville is also a town, a normally quiet burg whose business district consists of a welcome center, snack bars and a handful of antique shops selling everything from Elvis paintings to minie balls, the ammunition used in Civil War muskets.

Smack in the middle of its main intersection - located in such a way that cars must circle around it - rises a monument to the "hero-martyr," Capt. Henry Wirz, executed by the federal government 138 years ago for atrocities at the prison camp.

While Wirz is most often portrayed as a cruel and wicked commander, there are those, including historians, who say that his trial was unfair and that the reputation history has given him is not entirely deserved.

You can find Wirz defenders in Andersonville, across the South, even in Bremgarten, Switzerland, home of Heinrich L. Wirz, a retired colonel in the Swiss Army and great-grandnephew of the Civil War captain.

Heinrich Wirz, 67, who has visited Andersonville, says his great-granduncle was a victim of war's hysterical aftermath - a man who did the best he could with the resources available only to be scapegoated by the Union after the war, rushed through an unfair trial and wrongly hanged for events over which he had little control.

Capt. Henry Wirz was a native of Switzerland who, after practicing medicine in Kentucky and Louisiana, served in the Confederate infantry until he was wounded in the right wrist. After his recovery - though the wound bothered him the rest of his life - he was promoted to captain and given command of Andersonville on March 27, 1864.

While northern newspapers depicted him as an ill-tempered barbarian, defenders fighting to clear his name, including the Sons of the Confederacy, say those articles were "grossly embellished."

The group says there were no witnesses to many of the crimes of which Wirz was accused: fatally shooting three prisoners; ordering the shooting of four more, beating to death two prisoners, and his role in three more deaths - one who succumbed while in the stocks, one while wearing ball and chain around his neck and feet, one killed by bloodhounds.

Wirz was easily located after the war - no deck of "Most Wanted" Confederate trading cards had to be circulated by the Union - and, with public sentiment heavily against him, he was brought to trial and convicted less than five months after the war ended.

Since his hanging, the debate over whether Wirz was a villain or victim of circumstance has continued. But this much is clear: For all the carnage inflicted in the Civil War, only one man was made to answer for it in court.

"That he was given a bad deal is pretty much accepted around here," says Marsh of the National Park Service.

The monument in the town of Andersonville, erected by the Georgia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, points all that out, and more. All four sides of its base, from which rises an obelisk, are engraved.

" ... To rescue his name from the stigma attached to it by embittered prejudice," says one side.

Another quotes Ulysses S. Grant, rejecting the idea of a prisoner exchange with the Confederacy.

Another quotes Confederate President Jefferson Davis: "When time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when reason shall have stripped the mask of misrepresentation, then justice holding even her scales will require much of past censure and praise to change places."

The fourth says Wirz did his duty with "such humanity as the harsh circumstances of the times and the policy of the foe permitted." It calls him a "victim of misdirected popular clamor" and points out that, when given a chance to exonerate himself by incriminating Davis, Wirz refused to do so.

Controversial from the moment it went up, and even before, the monument was defaced with paint in 1919, apparently by three soldiers based at nearby Souther Field who disagreed with its account of history.

"You hear lots of things about Wirz," said Harry Ross, who works at an antique shop in Andersonville, across the highway from the historic site. Some of them sound evil; some he understands, like shooting prisoners who crossed the dead line. "I think, if you warned them first, that would be legit."

Ross, who spent 20 years in the Army, and whose father spent eight months as a prisoner in World War II, runs the local chapter of a national veterans aid organization from the store.

A strong supporter of invading Iraq, he rates the war a "definite success," except for the possibility that Saddam Hussein - far more a monster than Henry Wirz ever was - is still alive.

"If I had him in my sights, I would take him down," Ross said.

"People say we're just there for the oil. That's bogus. We got our own oil," he said. "We're there because we care for human life."

Across the state highway, no one disagreed. But then no one was there; just chirping birds, humming mosquitoes and dry bones, the buried remains - from a less civilized time in America, perhaps - of 12,912 Union soldiers, some of them packed in sideways.

Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun"