Re: POWs Among Us

Date: June 15, 2004

"POW camp based nearby during WWII

By Whit Snyder Baytown Sun

Traffic roars past this little windblown patch of prairie out on Highway 146 with passengers paying little if any notice. Other than the new homes rising up out of the grass there is really nothing here to see.

But more than 60 years ago, this scrap of real estate was the site of a World War II prisoner-of-war camp.

Today, only a handful of residents even remember the small camp that was in Chambers County just off the east side of the highway about a mile south of Interstate 10. It was laid out between the now burgeoning Hunters Chase and Country Meadows subdivisions. Harry Daves, 80, is one of the few who still recalls the place.

“I just remember passing by it as I would go down the highway back then,” Daves said. “It was just a few plain little wooden buildings with some tents around them surrounded by a fence.”

No traces of the camp survive and very little was ever reported about the place when it operated here from 1943 to 1945, but that is not unusual. Until fairly recently, the story of World War II POW camps in America has been neglected.

“Precious little is known or written about the subject,” said William Webb, historian with the Pentagon’s Center for Military History in the 1980s. “Many Americans are not even aware (prison camps) were around. It’s a touchy, sensitive matter. People want to forget it ever happened.”

During the war, 425,000 enemy prisoners were interned at 511 main and branch camps scattered throughout the United States. Texas received twice as many — almost 80,000 — as most states. The Lone Star State was chosen as the destination of so many POWs because of its ample supply of isolated space and because its mild climate kept construction and housing costs low.

Interestingly, Texas also was favored because the Geneva Convention of 1929 required that prisoners of war be interned in a climate similar to that where they were captured. Apparently, Texas’ environment, bureaucrats decided, is similar to that of North Africa where the Americans and British had just defeated the Germans and Italians and from where the first round of POWs arrived.

The Germans were veterans of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Still clad in the khaki shorts and tunics they wore into battle, many arrived in Huntsville to serve out the duration of the war in late 1942.

The chronic wartime labor shortage prompted local county agriculture agents to go to Huntsville, where they requested camp officials send them some of the prisoners south where they could help get the crops in as part of a work program.

“Rice, already mature, is falling over on some farms for lack of adequate labor to cut and shuck it when it is needed,” The Baytown Sun reported in October 1943.

Very soon the dusty and vacant Trinity Valley Exposition Grounds in Liberty became a bustling hive of activity after it was converted into a prison camp for about 800 German captives brought there. Soon after the Liberty facility was established, a site near Mont Belvieu was constructed as a satellite of the Liberty camp. Branch camps in Anahuac and Stowell were also established by 1944.

The local facility held 75 to 125 POWs. Local farmers paid the government $2.15 a day for each POW they employed. From that, prisoners were paid the equivalent of 70 cents each in canteen coupons. The difference went to the federal treasury to pay for the labor program.

The daily routine for POWs basically was the same in almost every camp across the country. “Reveille” was at 5:45 a.m. with lights-out at 10 p.m. When not sampling local offerings, the prisoners ate the same field rations that American troops received but were allowed to prepare their own food as well.

Many recreational activities were open to the POWs. They participated in organized sports, painted murals, sculpted and maintained flower and vegetable gardens. They formed theater groups and produced camp newspapers as well.

Many of the camps had choirs and orchestras that performed on special occasions for prisoners and citizens. Residents of Liberty recall going to concerts at the camp and being served refreshments by the prisoners. Some still speak fondly of the beautiful singing they could hear occasionally drifting from the camp.

Every encampment had an impressive selection of courses, which were taught by the prisoners themselves. Courses ranged from English, engineering and American government. Some prisoners even took correspondence courses through local colleges and universities and had the academic credits they earned accepted by the German institutions after the war. According to Texas A&M University Arnold Krammer, a chronicler of German prisoners in Texas, the majority of them would speak of their POW experience as one of the greatest adventures of their lives.

Sometimes, the Germans rigged homemade stills constructed from scrap metal and copper tubing under their barracks or in attics. Sugar, potatoes, oranges and apples taken from the mess halls were used to concoct the home brew. Most stills were not discovered until after the prisoners already had consumed the goods.

Because the labor shortage was so acute, the prisoners were put to work on tasks that kept them busy year-round. POWs from the Mont Belvieu and Liberty Camps were used around the area.

“Every one of those boys had a trade,” recounted Gordon L. Hart, who was Liberty County’s agricultural agent during the war. “If one wasn’t a carpenter then he was an electrician or plumber or something.”

“They built a lot of the houses in Morrell Park known as government houses,” recalled Baytown resident Emma Hutchinson. “They were small houses, with rock roofs and covered with asbestos siding. The prisoners would come out every day on a big truck and there would always be a guard with them. My mother wanted to feed them, but what they wanted most was cigarettes, American cigarettes. My dad wasn’t so generous with his cigarettes, but my brother, who was about four or five at the time, would sometimes take cigarettes to them, unbeknownst to my dad.”

Baytonian Sam Bartlett was a first-grader at Ashbel Smith Elementary School when German POWs came to his street to build houses and more.

“During World War II lived on Lafayette,” he said. “I remember German POWs coming there every day to build driveways and sidewalks. They put in the first sidewalks around Lafayette and Highway Boulevard. They also laid the foundation for our garage. Many of the little houses they built are still there.”

The prisoners also cleared a 15-acre tract of land at the intersection of North Main and Morrell for the construction of homes.

Many more worked for Elmer Gray at his sawmill, which was located near the intersection of Tri-City Beach Road and Evergreen Road.

“We went over to Liberty every day and picked up those boys and brought them back over to the mill,” Gray recalled in 1986. “They were only boys of 19 and 20 years old but some of them spoke English very well and would tell us how lucky they were to be made prisoners of the Americans. On real hot days I’d go somewhere and buy three or four cold watermelons and bring them back to the sawmill. Those boys would really dive in and have a ball.”

In fact, most of those who encountered the Germans on a regular basis held them in the highest regard.

Earl Porter of Mont Belvieu remembers the local camp because it was across the highway from his uncle’s house. He also remembers how well some locals thought of the Germans.

“Jack Barber was a rice farmer here at the time and he said they were the best workers he ever had,” Porter said. “He just thought the world of them. He made sure he fed them a big breakfast, lunch and supper to keep them happy.”

Those who met them noted the Germans generally were well behaved.

“Down to the last man they were smart, polite and eager to follow orders,” Hart said. “Without the PW painted on their shirts they would have passed for the boy next door.”

Bartlett remembered being curious about the men who worked around his house speaking a strange language.

“I wasn’t afraid of them, I was more interested in them,” he said. “They used to take their break and sit on our back steps. Most couldn’t speak any English but my mother had taken enough German in school to communicate with them a little. She used to fix them sandwiches. They used to laugh watching us kids play cowboys and Indians or baseball.”

Camps provided guards to ensure the POWs did not escape. There were very few of these guards, their ranks made up of GIs who, for reasons of health, lack of training, or psychological makeup, were deemed unfit for service overseas. Nevertheless, very few POWs had the desire, as the guards quickly discovered, to make a getaway.

“The army always sent one armed soldier, but there really wasn’t any need to,” Gray said. “The POWs told me many times that if they would escape they had no place to go and besides, they were living better and eating better than they ever had in the German Army.”

To illustrate the relaxed the relationship between guards and prisoners, Baytonian Theo Wilburn, who often supervised groups of working prisoners during World War II, recounted one amusing incident.

“On this one particular day the Army guard was in the truck asleep and one of the prisoners ran over and woke him up to tell him that the inspector (from the Liberty Camp) was approaching in a jeep,” Wilburn said. “The prisoner didn’t want the guard to get in trouble.”

Though feelings between the Germans and residents were genuine, many residents hoped the encounters would lead to a better Germany.

“If prisoners of war whose homes are in the heart of the German Reich, come to Liberty County and Chambers County to help harvest rice,” The Liberty Vindicator opined in 1943, “they will unquestionably learn that most Americans do not feel bitter toward the average fighter for the Reich, no matter how incensed we may be at Hitler and his gang of thugs — If we can impress the young German prisoners with our basic friendliness and fair dealing, most of them will no doubt return home, after peace comes, with a different conception of America than has been given them by a generation of Hitlerism.”

When World War II did end, the prisoners in Texas were moved from the smaller branch camps to the base camps, and from there, on to the military installations at Forts Bliss, Sam Houston and Hood.

The former POWs were gradually returned to Europe at the rate of 50,000 a month. Most remained prisoners after departing America and were used to help rebuild war-damaged France and Britain before their ultimate return to Germany. However, each man interned in the U.S. left with $50 in his pocket. As many ex-prisoners have noted, that $50 went a long way toward feeding many POWs‚ families in the lean years after the war.

As the POWs left Texas by the trainload, the camps began to close. According to Daves and Porter, the local camp did not close until late 1945, well after the war in Europe had ended and after the close of the war in the Pacific. Little more than a year after it was shut down, the barracks disappeared and the area returned to its previous state.

A few residents tried to keep in touch with some of the Germans who were imprisoned here. Those who did noted that many of the former POWs reported returning to a broken and severely impoverished land, part of which had slipped from Nazi tyranny into brutal communist enslavement.

Gray kept a list of some of the prisoners‚ names and hometowns before losing it. Wilburn corresponded with several ex-POWs for a few years before ultimately losing touch.

“I got one letter from a boy from Cologne asking me to send him some needles and thread,” Wilburn said. “I sent them to him and a few years later I tried to find him while I was in Europe, but I never could.”

Some of the POWs interned in Texas never returned home. A small number of them died in captivity. That was the case of at least two of the prisoners at the Mont Belvieu camp. Though no one can remember just how the men died, Porter recalled two wooden crosses marked their graves.

“The crosses were on the far east side of the camp about where that wooden fence is behind (the Country Meadows Subdivision),” he said.

It is unknown whether the men’s bodies still lie in the area, but it is likely they do not. For many years after the close of World War II, families of dead Axis prisoners located the graves of their relatives and had the bodies returned to their native lands for reburial. The U.S. government accepted all such requests and paid all the transportation costs.

Daves and Porter are veterans of the war in Europe. Daves served in the Navy and participated in five major amphibious landings, including Sicily and Anzio. Porter flew 132 bombing missions over France and Germany. Both men sustained wounds in combat and both refused Purple Hearts because they had seen others suffer greater damage. Both also mused on the irony of being sent to Europe while some of their enemies were sent, literally, right to their own backyards.

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that,” Porter said with a smile. “It’s just the craziness of war.”

Also ironic is that Porter once lived in one of the homes built by the local POWs.

“I paid $5,000 for it just after I came home from the service,” he said.

President of the Chambers County Heritage Society and a long an advocate of preserving local history, Daves believes a marker should be erected on the lonely spot near Mont Belvieu to mark where the Germans were interned.

“We need to remember this,” he said as he looked out on the sun-beaten rectangle of grass. “This was a part of our history. Too often we forget what once happened here.”

© 2004 The Baytown Sun
A Southern Newspapers Publication"