Huey: German WWII POWs in sunny Florida
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This Friday May 8 is V-E Day, when Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied Forces back in 1945. A battalion of US Army MPs marched their newest POWs toward the waiting train bound for Starke, Fla.. on the east coast of the panhandle. The whistle blared the iron horse’s impending departure. Steel wheels screeched against the metal tracks and off to the Sunshine State they headed, south along the coast through Virginia, the Carolinas on into Georgia and straight to Florida.
The landscape changed drastically along the way. Pine forests disappeared and were replaced by swamps, then into flatlands covered with pine trees. It got hot too, hotter than anything the German POWs had ever felt. Before they reached Camp Blanding, they KNEW they were in the subtropical state of Florida where this German NCO named Klaus would remain for the duration of the war.
Sergeant Klaus Brauner and fellow prisoners were processed through the compound on the western edge of the base, photographed, then issued clean uniforms, olive drab American undershirts with PW plastered on the back between the shoulders, along with a pair of boots and a blanket. They were assigned to wooden barracks that were also olive drab. Those barracks had tin roofs and windows with screens.
Each man was assigned a cot and a footlocker. Klaus had expected concrete cells and guard towers with searchlights before he arrived, but found something that looked more like a summer camp. The barracks were in good repair and even had running water. On his first night at Camp Blanding, Klaus and his comrades ate beef stew, buttered rolls, pound cake and coffee, more food than they’d seen at any time in the last year.
Klaus sat at a long cedar-planked table trying his best to understand what kind of prison fed its inmates beef stew and rolls. A German private named Müller who had been at Blanding for several months, explained the situation. America had signed the 1929 Geneva Convention pact that required prisoners of war to receive the same food, along with similar housing and medical care, that the capturing nation’s own troops were getting.
Their American captors were following those defined rules. The German soldiers were right about having to work though, but they would be paid a dollar a day in script that could be spent at the prison commissary. That’s about 16 dollars in today’s money.
Their work began on the morning of May 7, 1945, when Klaus and his comrades were trucked 20 miles west of the camp where they saw orange groves stretching to the horizon, rows of trees so heavy with fruit that some of the limbs swept the ground. Each prisoner would be assigned 25 boxes, work hours were 0800 to 1700 hours with a break at 1000 for 10 minutes, one hour for lunch, then another break at 1400.
After a prisoner filled 25 boxes, that was it. If he finished early, he could rest in the shade and do whatever he wanted. Working fast was good for the prisoners AND for the growers. Klaus started picking at about 0815 and by 0930 he was very tired, but it felt good to be outside and even though it was hard work, they would get a break soon.
Klaus’s shoulders throbbed, but he was determined to quit early, and noting that the faster he worked the sooner he could stop, he trudged on. The lunch break came and he was hungry but still felt pretty good. No beatings, no interrogations, no starvation AND Florida oranges! If Klaus had known it was going to be like this, he would’ve surrendered sooner.
The guards distributed sandwiches for lunch, bread with cheese, mustard, and some sort of meat that Klaus didn’t recognize, but it was tasty, nice and tender too so he didn’t care what it was. Then the guards distributed oranges to each prisoner while Klaus propped up against a palm tree and dreamed of home, not knowing that tomorrow at this time, he would be on his way.
If you still think that WE are such a terrible and wicked country, think about this: Our POWs in Germany were taken down the road to a cow pasture just outside Kaiserslautern and mowed down with machine guns like they did in “The Great Escape” while their POWs here in America lay in the shade and ate Florida oranges.
