p38jl
DOn Hammmer.. where was your wife's father interned? They kept lots of POW's here in Maine during WW2
Camp Swift, Texas, September of 1943 thru January,1946... He was captured in Sicily, not long after Husky kicked-off.. Their AA guns were overun and they were captured by the 82nd on D+3, I believe he said... He got to Texas via N. Africa & England, and his troopship was almost torpedoed by a U-Boat in the Atlantic (A destroyer got Das Boot)...
He emmigrated to the States with his wife in '55 to Austin, TX, which is about 30 miles from Camp Swift, north of Bastrop, my "hometown" (as much as an AF Brat can have one, that is. I graduated HS there, and it was my Home of Record when I enlisted back in '76, so that's why I call it that).... He and Hannelore ( my M-i-L) were both naturalized in '59, same year I and my wife was born, lol...
Camp Swift is still an operational training area for the Texas National Guard. The POW camp area there still has the tent pads (Mil-speak for concrete slabs) and a lot of them have been purchased by locals to build on for cottages, since it's right at the edge of Lake Bastrop and Bastrop State Park...
I took him up there a few times before he passed away back in '97, while I was (back) at Ft .Hood... He talked a lot about the camp life, the locals who would hire them (the POWs) to work in the cotton fields and gardens, and sawmills... It was pretty good, and they even got paid.. Way better conditions, by leaps and bounds, than what our POWs had in Germany... He also said that he was sent to Texas because he was captured in a warm climate.. The US sent German and Italian POWs to camps that were comparable to the weather and climate that they were captured in, believe it or not....
He even spent a few weeks at North Ft Hood, where the German and Italian POW classification camp was located. They separated the Officersand NCOs/Enlisted men there... I took him up to North Fort too, and he said it hadn't changed much and was shocked at first, lol.. Said the same corrigated steel huts they lived in in 1943 were still there... (Not really... The Army built new steel huts on the tent-pads in the '70s for the Guard lol..) It was kinda ironic that I was stationed Ft Hood too, lol...
That's when I told him about "Ft Hood Syndrome"... See, FHS means that, if you have EVER been to Ft Hood, Texas at any time in your military career, you WILL return to Ft Hood at some later date... I'd been at Ft Hood from '76 to '79, then was back there from '85 to '88, then again from '95 to '98..He thought that was pretty funny.. It took over 50 years, but FHS got him too, lol...
EDIT: Sorry for being so "wordy", but wifey was reading over my shoulder and making me get it right, lol...
Owl,, now you leave the Don alone.. he's spoken for
More like "spoken to"... Loudly... A LOT ...