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Re: Two Questions



"Richard G. King Jr." wrote:

> Charles et al,
> German POW camps also in Arizona.  In one escape attempt POWs used gasoline
> company road map to plan escape.  Road map showed the blue trace of the Gila
> River running near the camp and to the Colorado River which flows into
> northern end of the Gulf of California near north end of the Mexican state
> of Sonora.  The POWs built a boat for the trip, managed their escape, fled
> with the boat to the river and... Unfortunately for them the Gila River only
> has water during floods, otherwise its quite dry.  They then tried to walk
> from Phoenix to Mexico through the desert.  This proved to be far worse than
> being in the camp; they all pleaded to be returned.  Dick King, University
> of Arizona
>
> Charles Schultz wrote:
>
> > I am not aware of any Germans being placed in Camps in Texas as the
> > Japanese were in some other western states.  There were, however, a
> > number of German POW camps in Texas and undoubtedly other states.

Some 300k German POWs (usually taken in North Africa or Italy) were
imprisoned in camps in about a dozen southern and southwestern states.
In and around Memphis, there were several thousand, who were utilized
as agricultural and forestry laborers and warehousemen at, inter alia, the
US Army Depot here.  A (possibly apocryphal) story in my family is that one
escaped and wandered around downtown Memphis for most of an
afternoon, never attracting attention since there were so many US and
foreign servicemen about in unfamiliar uniforms.  He too turned himself
in.  (A different man was so fond of the place that he returned several
times in the 1970s and 80s, receiving official recognition and the keys
to the city.)

The author to look for on German POWs in this country is Arnold
Krammer.

Ed Frank

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