WW2 POWs at Fort Campbell; Their Local Labor & Cemetery

Clarksvillian Underground ^ | July 19, 2020 | Dave McGuire

[dmam2011]

Clarksville, TN (CU) - The story of prisoners of war being held at Fort Campbell isn’t discussed very often. Like anything else with history, it can be a complicated discussion.

During World War 2, the United States operated 142 internment camps for German prisoner’s of war. One of which was located at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The military constructed 3 separate POW camps on the base that included housing up to 1,000 prisoners per facility.

How did they end up here?

[VeniVidiVici]

Pretty cool’

[Bringbackthedraft]

Mostly Afrika Korps, they weren’t the really bad guys, some hit Africa and never saw battle. They arrived by boat and found that the general had surrendered. For them the war was over, and southern fried chicken would soon be on their chow hall menus. Lots of videos about then on Youtube. The Brits made a deal with the US to take them because they had on room for them.

[forgotten man]

Lucky Germans. Think of all the Germans captured at Stalingrad and their outcome.

[Grampa Dave]

dmam2011, Thanks for posting this great article and introducing me to this great site:

Clarksvillian Underground

Please ping me when you post articles from this site.

Thanks
Dave

[yarddog]

I worked with a Federal Agent whose Father-in-Law owned a large farm in South Alabama. Herb told me that he would give them a coke and a pack of cigarettes, I think every day.

He became friends with many of them and exchanged Christmas cards until he died.

He mentioned that they would receive Red Cross packages from Germany. One thing they contained was German cigarettes which they immediately threw away.

[Verginius Rufus]

Antonio Thompson has published a couple of books on German POWs in the US during WWII. One of them is called German Jackboots on Kentucky Bluegrass.

[Gamecock]

Legend has it there was one on Fort Jackson. The neighborhood I grew up in was once on Relaxin’ Jackson and there were several building foundations in the surrounding woods. We were told as kids those foundations were part of the POW camp.

When we were stationed in Bremerhaven, Germany the owner of a local gasthaus was a POW in Texas. He went to Texas every year on vacation. When we were drawing down in the early 90s I asked “Joe” what he was going to do when we all left. His answer ws “When the American’s go, Joe goes. I am moving to Texas!”

More than once Joe told me that he had a good time in Texas. I guess in retrospect anything is better than the Russian front.

[rlmorel]

I have read a good deal on the subject, and our treatment of the POWs we took during the war was universally good.

Granted, we were better equipped to afford to be humane, but we were nonetheless.

But the treatment of allied POW's by other powers was reprehensible, and the Japanese stand out in that regard.

I lived in Japan for several years as a young kid, and them lived in the Philippines for a few more.

The Filipinos remembered the brutality of the Japanese quite well, and the Bataan Death March route had white markers along its route which our Boy Scout Troop hiked each year.

I read some years later about the famous journey the USS Astoria made to Japan in 1939 carrying the ashes of the highly respected Japanese ambassador Hirosi Saito who had died while in the USA. (You can read about it here: The Saito Cruise 1939

US-Japanese relations were quite difficult at that time, but this was a special case.

IIRC, even though this was a diplomatic mission, there was a lot of military tension on both sides.

When they prepared to go ashore, Captain Turner selected the biggest, brawniest sailors he could find to serve as the armed honor guard for the delivery of the ashes, and even (to the chagrin and irritation of the Marine Corps detachment aboard) took the biggest Marines and made them wear sailors uniforms (you can see below, wearing the flat hats!)

Anyway, it was a big to-do, the crew was treated on liberty by the Japanese quite well, but in the formal dinner party of all the ships officers held with prominent Japanese Naval officers, there was real tension and barely disguised (sometimes not disguised) hostility by the Imperial Japanese Navy representatives towards their American counterparts. But to the point of our discussion of Japanese women...one US Navy officer later said (I have to paraphrase, I don't have it exactly) "I could never understand how the Japanese women could be so beautiful and sweet, and the Japanese men could be such sons-of-bitches!"

Well, on August 9, 1942, Japanese sent the USS Astoria to the bottom of Ironbottom Sound during the Battle of Savo Island. Quite an ironic turnaround there.

Anyway, I remember that I really liked the Japanese people I met in Japan, as a young pre-teen, I thought they were really nice. And when I got to the Philippines, I saw them viewed quite differently, so I began reading about the Pacific war, and read a thick, green, dense book about the American POW experiences captured by Japan. I was astonished, reading about how they would force water into someone with a garden hose, then stomp on them, things like that.

And I clearly remember the conflict in my brain as a kid: "How can those be the same people?"

[Grampa Dave]

An uncle by marriage was a pharmacist and corpman for America in WWI.

He had 3 German uncles and their wives, who survived WWI, and they basically were starving like many Germans at that time.

So he brought the uncles and wives over to America to live on the farm he had inherited. They worked here for a few years.

By that time WWII had started, and he found out that the uncles were potentially violent Nazis and involved with a local bundt.

He turned them into the FBI, the men/uncle were arrested sent to a hard time prison in Kansas for the duration of the war.

Their wives were brought to Vinita,Okla and housed in a former mental institution until the war ended. One went back to Germany with her husband, the other two divorced their Nazi husbands and spent the rest of their lives on my uncle’s farm. They loved America and became citizens.

Hitler killed and ruined lives from Europe to America in many ways.

[Vehmgericht]

“our treatment of the POWs we took during the war was universally good.” You might want to do some further research. The Yalta Agreement had a provision for slave labor. Eisenhower turned surrendered soldiers over to the Soviets. We provided almost 2 million to the French. They suffered the fate described by General Patton. Many starved to death.

[VeniVidiVici]

While at Ft Campbell on maneuvers we were tasked to moving to a new location and erecting a comms antenna.

We got to the location and found a nice clear spot, though overgrown, right near a river.

Started putting up the antenna and a black guy named Rick on my team started to pull the rope to get the antenna upright.

Turned out, in the high weeds in this “clearing in the trees” was a very old cemetery.

Well Rick, tumbled over one of these headstones in the weeds while pulling that antenna rope and about lost his cookies. He went hollering and hooping off into the woods.

We just busted out laughing :)

[dmam2011]

A guy told me his grandfather said a POW told him - if he wasn’t captured, he would have been killed in war. Many of them began to realize the insanity of Germany the longer they were in the US.

[yarddog]

The Japanese were brain washed by their leaders. We are all susceptible to it but the Japanese really took to it.

[meatloaf]

My girl friend was imprisoned with her family in the Los Banos camp in the Philippines by the Japanese during WWII.

She remembers the burial trench that was dug right before they were rescued. She also remembers being required to watch three men being shot. They didn’t have it anywhere near as good as the Japanese interned during the war.

Most people have no idea civilians were imprisoned by the Japanese.

[Mark17]

When I was in Germany in the 80s, I knew a German clock maker, who was a POW in Paris, Texas. He was captured by the Army in North Africa. He said it was the best thing that could have happened. He said there were some real Nazis there too, but he stayed away from them.

[IAGeezer912]

Lots of German POWs were sent to Iowa as well. My dad fought in North Africa and traded a German soldier a candy bar for a patch on his uniform. I now have it.

[DIRTYSECRET]

There must have been a few romances as well.

[rlmorel]

That is different than the subject I was referring to. I was referring to our treatment of them in our custody.

I know all about what happened to those then helpless POWs, I understand that completely, and to me, that is one of the black marks on the soul of our nation, the same as the South Vietnamese we left to the predations of the North.

If you see my Freep Page, you can see one of my heroes is Joseph McCarthy. I have two copies of his book (likely ghostwritten) America’s Retreat From Victory. While I have been turning over his interpretation of George Marshall in my mind for many years now, the main theme of that book is the Yalta Agreement.

And McCarthy is horribly damning of that treaty and everything that went with it. And rightly so.

For me, it is a terrible stain on my national conscience to consider what we did to all of Eastern Europe and the Balkans in general, and to those German POW’s we handed over to the Soviets.

No. You get no argument from me at all on that point. But that was not the context of my discussion or commentary.

[rlmorel]

Yes. The Internees. Theirs is a terrible story. The Japanese were far more barbaric to the POW’s than the Internees, but they treated those poor old men, women, and children harshly. They were in some places very nearly as malnourished and disease afflicted as the POW’s.

Hard to imagine being a child in that situation, much less an adult having to care for children.