LITTLE ROCK — Stories of the home front’s role in World War II continue to arrive in the wake of recent reflections published here.
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to write or phone in an anecdote or recollection. You have piqued my interest and that of many others in the war-related activities that were taking place in Arkansas more than 50 years ago.
Following are a few tidbits.
“I was raised just outside Keiser (Mississippi County),” wrote a reader who failed to give his or her name. “There was a POW camp there and during the war POWs worked on our farm. Because he was raised in an area of Missouri where there was a heavy German population, my father spoke German. If it hadn’t been for the work of the POWs during the war, I’m not sure we’d have kept the farm.
“When my brother and cousin were struck by lightning in the field, it was the POWs who were the ones who gave first aid. My brother survived, my cousin didn’t. For years after the war, my family maintained contact with many of the POWs who stayed in the U.S.”
Johnny McLean of Little Rock, also reared in Keiser, albeit after the war, advises that one of the concrete structures is still there. As children, he and his friends played on it.
“The POW camp at Dermott actually produced a camp newspaper (produced by the inmates), which is in German,” Chris Harvey wrote. “It has several interesting articles in it. One in particular is called ‘Gibt es eine deutsche Rasse?’ or ‘Is there a German race?’ ”
Harvey, a German studies major at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is doing his senior paper on German POWs in Arkansas and advises that several of these newspapers are on file in the state archives.
“In the early ’90s, I spent much time at Fort Chaffee working with the Joint Readiness Training Command,” Ed Galucki wrote. “While I was there, I learned that the site had been a fairly large German POW camp and supposedly a number of the prisoners chose to stay in the area rather than return to post-war Germany because they had been so well treated. Word of mouth was that much of the rock work seen in the area was done by the prisoners. There also was an informal museum of POW artifacts.” Ann K. Thomas said that there was a civilian public service camp for American conscientious objectors at Magnolia during the war-they worked on conservation projects but were not very popular because COs were considered unpatriotic during “the good war”-that later was used to house Italian POWs as an adjunct to the camp at Monticello. “They were allowed to work in town, were transported to churches on Sunday, etc.,” she noted.
Guy Lancaster, editor of The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History &Culture, advised me that there is a great deal of information on this era to be found at online at encyclopediaofarkansas.net. Fortunately. I had stumbled upon the site just the night before his e-mail arrived and read some of the entries. At the bottom of each entry, I found a list of additional reading matter-books, periodicals and the like. Elsewhere on the Internet I found a treasure trove of material, including maps and photos, attributed to our correspondent, Michael Pomeroy.
“My mother, Betty Magie, and I have been interested in your columns on the Japanese American WWII internment camps,” wrote Shelly Moran. “Mother’s father, Louis E. Rice, was employed as a farm supervisor at the camp in Jerome, and her mother, Shellie Rice, worked at the camp post office and also taught school. My mother visited her parents there when she was a teen. In September 2009, we attended a wonderful program about the camps presented by Rosalie Gould, former mayor of McGehee and an authority on Japanese American relocation camps. Also on the program was a gentleman in his 90s who had been a school superintendent at one of the camps. He brought scrapbooks and yearbooks for all to view.”
I hope some of these resources are finding their way into public Arkansas repositories so that current and future generations can round out any schooling they might receive in Arkansas history.
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Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.
Editorial, Pages 83 on 03/06/2011