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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 19, 1979)
Hearne woman recalls German Photographs courtesy of Dr. Cramer Prisoners of war shown in these four photos were held near Hearne and worked in the citrus groves, lumber regions and the camp itself. Card playing was a popular nighttime activity. By LISA A. COTROPIA A pink-gray dawn creeps across the horizon as the field hands clam ber out of the olive drab truck parked on the shoulder of the dirt road.- From a radio in a nearby farm house, the strains of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” float across the field. The song completed, a per sistent disc jockey urges everyone to buy war bonds. Crisp, gutteral commands of milit ary German suddenly break the morning’s gentleness. A German invasion? No, the scene is one any wartime American can re call. Between the closing months of 1942 and mid-1946, the American government and citizens partici pated in a unique experience. Due to an agreement between the U.S. State Department and British offi cials, the United States experienced an influx of nearly a half million enemy prisoners of war. Never be fore had the United States held that many war captives, much less housed them within the country’s borders. A year after the war began, the domestic labor market felt a severe pinch. Production demands in creased due to urgent war needs, such as airplanes and munitions. However, the armed forces were drafting every available man. In March 1943, the government finally ordered a long-overdue draft exemp tion status for “essential” farm and factory workers. The new exemption plan was ineffective because Claude R. Wickard, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, shortly described the agricultural labor situation as cri tical. Suddenly, the answer was clear. Replace the drafted farm laborers with incoming prisoners of war, a move permissible under the Geneva Convention of 1929. Most of the POWs were already located near potential work sites. On Sept. 15, 1942, the Provost Marshal General submitted a housing prog ram to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was decided that municipal auditoriums, county fairgrounds and, especially, abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camps would solve the POW housing problem. The CCC buildings were mainly in the South where labor was desper ately needed and they were far from the critical war industries of the Northeast. A network of over 500 such camps was established across the country to house the more than 10,000 POWs who worked in private industries ranging from agriculture to logging. Two-thirds of these camps were in the South and Southwest. Of those, 120 camps were located at nearly for gotten Texas installations, such as Camp Hearne. Prisoners with needed agricultu ral skills could be transferred any where at anytime. Business leaders and chambers of commerce were in vited to petition the War Depart ment for POW labor. Evidently, the Army and its POW security system won the confidence of Hearne residents. The city’s offi cials, with approval from the city council and chamber of commerce, requested that federal authorities place a camp near Hearne. As a result, the Cotropia brothers — Tony, Frank and Lawrence, were forced to sell half of their cotton farm located just west of FM 485, then known as Highway 90. The com munity was so intent on readying the camp, the Cotropias weren’t even allowed to harvest more than 350 acres of cotton within the camp’s barbed wire walls. Local contractors quickly com pleted the camp as the community awaited the POWs’ arrival. It was certain that most Hearne residents understood the POW program logic, since the community’s economy was based mainly on agriculture. There fore, merchants as well as labor- starved farmers were happy to see the first trainload of POWs pull into Hearne. The Germans, still wearing the blood-stained and torn uniforms they had on when captured weeks ago in North Africa, disembarked and marched three miles to their new home for the remainder of the war. Mary Cotropia, Tony’s wife, re calls the first group she saw mar ching into the compound across the road from her home. “It was real excitin’, especially for Hearne, to see the POWs march two by two in front of our house. Before they came, the war seemed so far away. “We were real glad to see the Ger man prisoners because a lot of the cotton farmers had fallen behind schedule and needed the help to har vest their crops.” Apparently the prisoners were astonished as well as relieved at the welcome they received. In his book, “Nazi Prisoners of War America,” Dr. Arnold Krammer, a history pro fessor at Texas A&M University, says a former POW thought he was in heaven because he received “...food which was not even to be found in our Mothers’ kitchens at home. White bread, and real coffee!” By taking such special care of the POWs, War Department officials hoped to insure similar treatment of
