German War Prisoners

The war really came home to me when I was nine.   We were still sharecropping, and through Roy Griffith’s connections we contracted with the government to hire German prisoners to hoe our cotton.   They were paid forty cents a day for their labor,  as I recall, which wasn’t much even by the standards of the time, but it was a whole lot more than what American POW’s were getting in Germany.  The prisoners,who came to our field, were expected to work hard but they ate well.   

They were friendly for the most part.   Many of them were quite fluent in English, and I had the opportunity to interact with them.   At first, I was afraid to go the field.  The dreaded Germans were there.  They were Huns – almost savage animals in my view.  What is one of them got loose?  What would he do to me?  In my childish way of thinking they represented the worst evil I could ever imagine.   For the first few days I stayed close to the MP's.  

I was surprised to learn they were normal people just like everyone else.   Most of them didn’t want to be in the war, and we were told that less than ten percent belonged to the Nazi party.  Once in a while we heard about a prisoner escaping, but most of the time they probably didn’t want to.

I especially remember one day when a couple of prisoners wandered away from the field and went to the house where Daddy was working on the tractor or something.  For some reason the MP’s didn’t try to interfere.    At the time I was playing in the yard and one of the soldiers asked Daddy,

“How old is your boy?” 

Daddy said, “He’s nine.”

The German prisoner said, “I’ve got a thirteen year old boy in Germany.   I hope he’s still alive.” 

At that moment we began to understand the emotional pain of warfare.   I even understood it even though I was only nine. War is a terrible way to settle differences between people.  It shatters families, destroys economies, and takes a larger part of the work force from the warring nations for an entire generation.  Several years ago, I had a friendship with a German war bride from World War I.  She married an American soldier, who was assigned to the army of occupation after the war.  She said all the eligible men in her little town were dead by the time she was of marriageable age.

We sort of hated to see the prisoners go on the last day.  The fieldwork was finished by about noon.  Roy, our landlord, took them over to his place.   Roy bought several watermelons and generously fed them to the prisoners.   They thoroughly enjoyed the melons.  After that they went swimming in Roy’s tank and we had great fun watching them laugh and play in the water.  It was nothing but old West Texas tank water tinged by red clay, but when you’re living behind barbed wire fence, a few moments in the water on a hot summer day was a welcome relief.   I would guess those prisoners never forgot that day.