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"Camp Forrest" in Tullahoma, TN. is only 10 miles from my home and where I was born, Manchester, TN.. Originally, a National Guard Camp, then an American Troop Training Camp, in the latter part of the war, it became a POW Camp. My dad worked there as a Commissaryman, both during the Amirican Troop and latter POW use of the camp. These were wild and confusing times for rural and small town America. The local population more than tripled with a few months & it took some time for the local infrastructure to catch up. After it finally did,, things were never ever the same.
New Ulm, Minnesota — like Owatonna and Ortonville, mistakenly listed under MIssissippi in the list above — had a POW camp during World War II. German soldiers worked in area fields and canneries. In the 1940s most of New Ulm's citizens, overwhelmingly of German extraction, spoke German and could interact with the prisoners in their native tongue. The buildings of the camp survive still today as a group camp in Flandrau State Park, which forms much of New Ulm's western boundary.
Dear Editor; This was an excellent article on PWs in the US in WWII. In Algona, Iowa, we had a camp that housed a total of 10,000 PWs from its beginning in April of 1944 to February 1946. There were 34 branch camps in 4 states including Iowa. For more information, your readers can go to http://www.pwcamp.algona.org. In 2004, we moved into a musuem setting and have hunderds of artifats and photos of German PWs and the American guards who were there. To our knowledge, we are one of a half a dozen museums in the US that are dedicated to featuring the story of enemy PWs in the US in WWII. I am also very impressed with the map that shows the camps throughout the US. The map in Arnold Krammer's book Nazi Prisoners in American, was created in 1944 before some of the camps existed. Thanks for freaturing this part of American history. If you want additional information of the operations of Camp Algona, please let me know.
Best Regards,
Jerry Yocum
Camp Algona POW Museum
Historian