Re: The German POWs of Camp Shelby

Date: May 22, 2004

"POW
By KAT BERGERON

Prisoner of War.

The German POWs are a little-known story of how the enemy helped Mississippi, California, Louisiana and other agricultural states survive the war years. The Germans filled in for Americans who'd exchanged gardens for guns, peanuts for platoons, timber for trenches.

With the absence of a workforce, cotton and so much more would have rotted in the fields if not for the captured Germans. They sweated, their backs ached, they picked their fingers raw, but at the end of the day, they were fed well, housed, allowed entertainment, played soccer, formed an orchestra and, according to Geneva Convention rules, were paid 80 cents a day.

"To our fortune, we have here quite nice establishment," a POW wrote anonymously in a diary later confiscated at Camp Shelby, the administrative hub in South Mississippi for the state's 20,000 German POWs. His words on life at Shelby and nearby Alabama, where he briefly picked peanuts, are one of the few known POW accounts.

"We receive clothes, that is a blue suit with big yellow PW marks on all sides, blue hat, brown shoes, white shirts, white socks and handkerchiefs," wrote the German enlisted officer, an "unteroffizier" captured in May 1943 when Erwin Rommel's forces fell in North Africa.

"I can hardly manage to eat all the food... I believe I might almost state that many a man has not eaten so well at home. Outside of that, we have twice-a-week cakes and pastry; more you really can't expect."

A wooded section of the popular Tuxachanie Trail near the Harrison-Stone County line hides from hikers the evidence - a few building foundations - of POW presence and is one of the rare reminders that Mississippi had four major POW camps and numerous branch camps, of which Tuxachanie was one.

The major camps were Shelby, still a U.S. Army training center near Hattiesburg, and camps Como, Clinton and McCain. An estimated 5,000 Germans lived and worked out of Shelby and its branches from 1943 to 1946. The Tuxachanie site in DeSoto National Forest began as a Navy Seabee firing range but was later converted by Shelby for POWs, along with branch camps in Gulfport and Picayune.

For its humane treatment, Shelby received some of the highest marks from the International Red Cross. This is, in many ways, a story in reverse of "Hogan's Heroes," a 1960s sitcom, popular in reruns, about American POWs in a German camp.

Also, Mississippi POW camps little resembled the horror tales that returning U.S. POWs told about camps run by Japanese and Nazis.

"World War II here was a pretty stark contrast of what we're hearing about now in Iraq," Camp Shelby museum director Chad Daniels said. "The POW camp was a good experience of both sides. When the Germans went home, their opinions were high of America and during the Cold War that was invaluable because they said, 'Hey, we need to be more like America than the Soviet Union.'

"Some of those men have come back here to visit and remember, and a few became U.S. citizens."

Background for the POW story is found in a 1979 issue of the Journal of Mississippi History written by two Arkansas professors who observed, "Sad to say, only memories, photographs and a few mementos remain from the days when the enemy was in Mississippi."

One of the earliest memories of Charles L. Sullivan, author and college history teacher from Perkinston, is of the POWs marching in front of his house.

"My dad was a guard at Camp McCain, south of Grenada, and he transported the POWs to cotton fields. One day I was digging with a little shovel and they took a break and sat around me, talking to me in a language I didn't understand. The sergeant had a fit and made me go across the street. I was 3 years old."

Later, Sullivan would move to South Mississippi and teach eight miles from the Tuxachanie POW site, which he occasionally visits in his passion for military history.

"Most of the POWs came from Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps, captured when the Desert Fox's army fell in 1943. Most of them were just boys; they weren't bad people. They were not the Nazis, except the officers, and they kept them segregated."

The Tuxachanie site, according to Bill Mauldin, who worked for the Biloxi forest ranger district before and after the war, began as a military firing range, which explains the still-visible ammo magazines.

Mauldin was there when it was built and after he returned from war service he learned the POWs were put to work in the forest industry. He later married a local woman who brings the story full circle, from a different angle.

His wife, Delores, was married to Boyce McWhortar, a bombardier shot down over Germany and killed by an angry German farmer after he survived a parachute jump.

"I didn't know the German POWs were out there when I returned home," said Mrs. Mauldin, a McHenry native. "At the time, I'd probably have gotten me a shotgun and gone out there if I'd known it.""