POW camps in American, insider story

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Bera

What about the Guantanamo POW ("war"?) camp? How do the americans treat those prisioners?
Before anyone here shots me, I´m just asking this question because there´s a lot of talking about the horrible conditions and ill-treatment dispensed to those prisioners, altough USA is well-known for the extreme care and respect that they treated the german and the japanese during WWII...

The reason no one is bringing that up is because it's pretty off topic for this thread.

[scalelokt]

My grandfather told me a lot of stories from the war. He was in Europe and was part of the Normandy invasion on D-Day. He's not alive anymore but I remember most of the stories. Some crazy stuff to be sure.

[IceGrog]

My dad was in the USN in ww2, on destroyer escorts fighting the Japanese, but he didn’t talk much about it when I was growing Most of the stories I head from him were the ones I overhead when him and buddies got together. I remember that right after Pearl Harbor his ship spent many weeks chasing phantom Japanese subs around the islands there. And his ship one time picked up some sailors that had suffered at the hands of the Japanese. But I remember him saying that bravest thing he did was crossing the ocean in a destroyer escort, as small as it is.
I just remember as a kid he would take my brother and I to fish off the beach, we would be there until the wee hours of morning. He didn’t catch a whole lot but he would just sit there drinking his beer and looking out over the surf. Hummmm wonder what he was thinking of?
Sorry a little bit of rattling on.

[bigboywooly]

Not rattling on at all Ice
Treasure those memories mate
Thanx for sharing
All of you

[mookiemookie]

As I'm too young to have stories of my own, I'm just relating ones that I liked from the various books I read. Here's another I liked:

"One day a group of prisoners [from the Galveston POW camp], dressed in their faded denim pants and jackets with a big white "P" on the back, were mowing and cleaning the grounds of the Army airfield. Across the road at the municipal golf course Dr. Edward Randall and friends were having a game of golf, and the doctor lobbed a ball over the fence into the airfield. "Das ball, das ball, bitte," he yelled at the prisoners, trying to remember a few German words. They looked at him, and one ran to pick up the errant ball. As he threw it back over the fence, the prisoner called, "Here it is, sir."

:rotfl:

[Ducimus]

Bera,

That's the type of question you should ask on the General forum. Not here.

[Zinmar]

One of the gentlemen I delivered heating oil to was a seabee. He was stationed to Pearl Harbor one before the attack. The stories he told me about what happened just before the attack, and our island hopping across the Pacific were just incredible!!! I have been talking to him and he has given me the ok to record our conversations. Now I am not a writer but I am sure that there are some guys out there that can do that.

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Zinmar

I have been talking to him and he has given me the ok to record our conversations. Now I am not a writer but I am sure that there are some guys out there that can do that.

That's one of the best things you can do.

There's this bar I go to for happy hour with my buddies sometimes, and there was this little old man named Jack who would come in every afternoon, have a couple gin and tonics and leave, like clockwork. I got talking to him one day and we got on the topic of war. I asked if he served in WW2. He said he was stationed on an escort carrier in the Pacific and was a pilot. I bought him a drink and he told me about flying patrols. I asked him if he saw any action and he told me that he shot down a couple Zeros. I asked if they were really as fast as their reputation makes them out to be and he told me they were, but its like they were made of paper...a few well placed shots and they went down. I made sure to thank him for what he did for us, and in typical vet fashion he told me "Oh hell, that was 60 years ago." and I said "Yes, but think about how things would be if you DIDN'T go and do what you did 60 years ago."

He told me a story about a young Mormon kid from Utah, only 17 or 18 years old. He went up for his first patrol and when he returned to the ship, the deck crew was helping him out of his plane and Jack said his eyes were as big as saucers and he had messed his flight suit. The deck crew asked him what the hell happened up there, and the kid said "I...I saw my first Zero!" They asked if he got him, and the kid told them he did, and they all laughed and told him good job and sent him to go get himself cleaned up. It was a great story, the way Jack told it.

Sadly, that was the last time I ever talked to Jack. I didn't see him for a couple weeks, and I asked the bar owner (who I'm friends with) where he was. She told me he passed away a few days before. So I raised my glass to him. Here's to you Jack!

[Lannes]

Hi all...Long time member and lurker...well, unlurking from GWX long enough to relate the following-

I interviewed my uncle about 15 years ago. I've got about 3 hours of him on tape. I set out to "interview" him, but ended up probably only asking about 4 or 5 questions in the 3 hours over several glasses of sweet tea.

He was a member of the 101st Airborne. Dropped in Normandy, Holland, fought at Bastonge, etc...If you've seen Band of Brothers, you've pretty much seen alot of his story. A few interesting tidbits from that afternoon-

He said the worst thing he ever smelled was the uniforms that were impregnated with an anti-chemical gas substance. Said it stunk so bad once you had sweated in them that no one could stand wearing them and they were soon thrown away.

On the way over to England, his ship conducted constant anti-submarine drills and at one point he heard the escorts in the distance depth charging something...

As he told it, he left the plane on D-Day as a Sergeant and landed as a Platoon Sergeant, which he was until V-E Day.

German prisoners my uncle came in contact with were incredibly disciplined and well behaved. In fact, he said they were better disciplined and mannered than his own troops.

He said that, to this day, if he had to go on a drug raid or get invloved with any other type of shooting, he would stand by his .45 Thompson submachinegun over any modern weapon. He said the Thompson was just unbelievably devastating at short range.

He said the saddest thing he saw in the entire war was a group of children playing and one of them accidently set off a live round, killing them all. He said you could have put what was left in a bushel basket.

He had a girlfriend in Germany during the occupation that he keeps in contact with even now...and I'm the only family member that knows that...Not even my aunt...

In the end, he had earned a Silver Star and 2 Bronze Stars, one for Valor and was on a ship bound for the Pacific to jump on Japan with the 11th Airborne. He said they announced V-J day and turned the ship around for San Francisco...

[nedwreck]

I got this story from the late,great William Ward EaselyII who was a Navy pilot in WWII.
We had a POW camp in Clinton, MS not far from here. The prisoners helped build the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station. Basically, a giant scale model of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. It was built to experiment with ways to control flooding on the Mississippi. You can still go look at it, it's very impressive.
A POW was trying very hard not to get noticed taking pictures of it with a homebuilt camera. (How he planned to get them back to Germany is anyones guess)
He was spotted by one of the engineers who told him he could take all the pictures he wanted because it wasn't a secret project. He stopped taking them after that.

Bob

[Heibges]

My mom's brother, Robert Davis, was a gunner in a bomber during WWII. He was shot down over Europe and spend several years in a German POW camp. The War really messed him up, and he was kind of ostracized by the family because of it. A very sad story actually.

My dad was in the Army National Guard in the 172nd Infantry Regiment. He joined in 1938 because he figured a war was going to start soon, and he wanted to make sure he was surrounded by the best soldiers possible, in this case Vermonters, who made up a large part of the Regiment. (Put the Vermonters Ahead! is a saying that goes back to Civil War). Also he wanted to get away from his old man, who was a real prig by all accounts.

My dad had great respect for the Japanese. He had very little for US Army Officers.

On the way do Guadalcanal, on the Presidential Liner Calvin Coolidge (the President from Vermont), they hit a mine, and the boat sunk, and the regiment was stranded, without any equipment, on an island.

They eventually made it to Guadalcanal, and fought with Big Mac across the Pacific all the way to the Phillipines. He won a Bronze Star, and his unit received a Presidential Unit Citation for the Battle of Ipo Dam in the Phillipines.

My dad never talked about his experiences in combat. He was very relieved when I didn't have to go to the First Gulf War, but I can't help but thinking he may have talked to me about combat if I had gone.

[GT182]

Reading, PA had a POW camp during WIII at the airport, or where the airport is now. Mid Atlantic Air Museum(MAAM) has 2 of the building that are still in use today. I've been in both and it's an eerie feeling to think of the soldiers interned there and what they must have thought about being so far from their homeland. Not sure if rhey were sub crews tho. I'll have to check on that, as the museum must know.

My mom had a friend in the PTA back up north in NY who's husband was a POW in a German camp. It messed his mind up so bad he was on disability for the rest of his life from it. They owned a small gas station/grocery store and when you went in there were times you'd think he was having a flashback. From what little I heard the Germans were very rough on the ones in his camp.

[The Munster]

Here's mine from my elderly friend [81]. Bear in mind in that on these Lochs on the West coast of Scotland, there was fervent activity involving Subs and Warships in the 2nd World War.
It was at one of these Lochs, that had a Torpedo Range where my friend who was 17/18 at the time was working on a pier when a Submarine came alongside and docked. What stuck out in his mind was how quiet it was. 3 Men disembarked and walked down the pier towards offices that were there at the time. It was unusual because a Sub didn't normally dock at this particular pier and it didn't pick up any supplies. What caught his eye was the conning tower and the 'emblem' that was upon it. 3 large pieces of brass that had been deliberately made for the Submarine .. a large 2, a Tank and a person on their knees in prayer = Amen.

Later, when I got onto the Internet, I tried to do some research on this; Googling and Wikipedia.
From Wikipedia, I extracted this information..

HMS P311 was a T-class submarine of the Royal Navy, the only boat of her class never to be given a name. She was to have received the name Tutankhamen but was lost before this was formally done. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill had minuted the Admiralty on 5 November 1942, 19 December and again on 27 December, saying that all submarines should have names. In the final minute, he provided a list of suggestions and insisted that all unnamed submarines be given names within a fortnight.
P311 was a Group 3 T-class boat built by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness and commissioned on 5 March 1942 under the command of Lieutenant R.D. Cayley. She was one of only two T-class submarines completed without an Oerlikon 20 mm anti-aircraft gun, the other being HMS Trespasser.
She joined the 10th Submarine Flotilla at Malta in November 1942, and was lost with all hands between 30 December and 8 January 1942 whilst en route to La Maddalena, Sardinia where she was to attack two Italian 8-inch gun cruisers using Chariot human torpedoes carried on the casing as part of Operation Principle. It was assumed that she was mined.

Information I got from Googling ..
This Submarine met up with 2 other's off the West coast of Scotland and set off for the Med, my friend could have been one of the last human beings to see this Sub and there is a possibility that the men were dropping off the Wills of the Crew before the Patrol as they returned to the Sub with no supplies etc. German U-Boat Crews had to submit a Will before they went on Patrol so I am only presuming the Brits did the same but that is only my theory.
Another thought I have is the Crew knowing they were going to get this name and asking the Commander permission to have an emblem made and placed before it was official ?!

I know this story does not involve POW Camps and will remove or transfer if anyone is offended by it.

[zombiewolf]

All of these stories are priceless.My Uncle served on the HMS AJAX and Ramalises,my mum grew up in London during the Blitz,my neighbor was a Mossie Pathfinder pilot.
All of therestories are priceless.When I am aked by them "Have I ever told you about..."I say no and let them tell the story no matteer how many time I heard it.

Reguarding Guantanamo rest assured we do mean things like put panties on their heads.
But we NEVER EVER SAW their heads off with a blunt knife while its being video taped whistling Dixie or shouting "god loves us god loves us' nor do we keep them in rat infested cages a la "The Deer Hunter"

sorry rant over. forgive me please

[fredbass]

Back on topic:

I saw a documentary a few months ago on TV about the German POW's in the U.S.A. during WWII. It covered a lot of things, but the one thing that stood out to me was how good they were treated. In many ways, they had it better than the average american citizen. They pretty much got anything they wanted and could do or build just about anything they wanted to and had all the food they could eat, while americans were rationing their food and supplies. Many locals were rather upset about how good they had it, not that I could blame them.