The Great Plains during World War II

10. Prisoner-of-War Camps

On July 26, 1943, Jimmie Don Morris, a boy in McLean, Texas, watched with excitement and anticipation as a troop train backed onto a siding at this Panhandle station. Other town residents had gathered as well, exhibiting uncommon interest and some anxiety as the crew unhooked the cars and the engine pulled away. No friends waited to greet the passengers. Instead, armed military guards stationed themselves along the cars as an officer gave the order to disembark. The Afrika Korps had come to West Texas, not as the invincible members of Rommel’s army, but as prisoners of war (pows). Morris remembered, “They still had on their brown uniforms and most were carrying packs, canteens, and empty gun holsters. It was a strange, disturbing sight.” Laura Patty Goodman remembered, “Most of McLean turned out to see the prisoners get off the train and load up in trucks. Many citizens felt an uneasiness at having these foreigners so close to their homes.” But another girl recalled, “The German prisoners seemed very young and were well behaved.”1 In Mexia, Texas, on the eastern fringe of the Great Plains, residents lined along Railroad Street to watch 3,250 German prisoners step down from the train. One resident recalled, “The line of prisoners stretched the full three miles out to the camp.” The site was impressive and shocking. “Remember,” he said, “that we were a town of only 6,000 people, and we had just seen our population increase by 50 percent—and they were foreigners on top of it.” In 1944, after the Normandy invasion, Camp McLean received more German ten | Prisoner-of-War Camps prisoner-of-war camps 313 prisoners by train. Goodman also recalled their arrival: “They were unloaded and marched around by the cemetery, a distance of three miles or more. I had an uncanny feeling as the men marched by our house. Some of the prisoners dropped out by the side of the road to be picked up by trucks. Seems many had been sick on the train.” To the north a resident near Camp Atlanta, Nebraska, recalled the arrival of Italian pows. She remembered their walk from the train station to the camp as a “pitiful sight,” with the men wearing “ragged, dingy shorts” and looking “thin and hungry.”2 The arrival of Italian prisoners also brought fear and apprehension to the residents of Hereford in Deaf Smith County, Texas. When they arrived by train in April 1943, a nurse employed at the camp recalled, “I expected each Italian to have devil’s horns and tail. I was surprised that they were just a bunch of boys the same age as my self.” Later, they told her, “We’re terrible fighters. We’re not fighters at all, we’re lovers!” She continued, “After awhile they didn’t seem like prisoners.” Another resident recalled, “We had a little fury in the back of our minds. We kinda hated them at first. But when you stopped to think that they were somebody’s son, somebody’s father, you realize they were human beings just like we were. Several of us had fought in foreign countries ourselves. That helped us to give in to the fact that they were caught up in a situation they had no control over, and they were just doing the best they could.” A guard also recalled that, while he helped escort the Italian prisoners on the eight-mile hike from Summerfield to Camp Hereford, his detail was thankful that the pows sang and seemed in good spirits as they walked along, rather than attempting to escape, because the guards did not have bullets for their guns owing to an army error when ordering supplies.3 Superficial observations, however, can be deceptive because the War Department designated Camp Hereford as the facility to house the most hardened, that is, ideologically committed, Fascists. Soon, Camp Hereford became the largest Italian pow installation and the only camp reserved exclusively for Italians. pow camps near Amarillo , Big Spring, Dalhart, Dumas, and Lubbock held considerably fewer Italian pows than Camp Hereford, which accommodated prisoner-of-war camps 314 3,860, or Camp McLean, which confined 2,580. The War Department also held Italian pows at Camp Carson, Colorado, Camp Phillips , Kansas, and Camp Douglas, Wyoming, among other sites. One German pow at Camp Trinidad, Colorado, also saw his new world through an ideological...