(Editor’s Note: This is the second of three parts of a historical essay recently written by longtime Sale Creek historian and author Curtis Coulter about the long-forgotten story of how World War II prisoners of war housed at area military bases and camps were used in the once-thriving peach industry in Sale Creek. Part 2 takes up after POWs were secured and arrived in the area from Fort Oglethorpe and Camp Forrest near Tullahoma).
The first group arrived early in the spring and began the process of pruning trees, clearing brush, and spraying the trees and young fruit. An Eldridge family member told the Chattanooga Times reporter, “The forty who had been here all along seemed just heartbroken when they were detailed to another place. They had worked on the peaches for months spraying, dusting, and thinning. They had shown such interest in their work, and they wanted to see how the peaches turned out. We’ve never had better workers.”
Neither the book nor the article explained where this group of forty prisoners camped while in Sale Creek, but it is possible that they were housed at Grover’s farm on North Lee Pike near Brown’s Bridge because the large encampment had not been constructed at that time.
When I asked several elderly members of the community in 1990 about the number of prisoners in Sale Creek, I tended to get two types of answers. Some said that there were only 25-30 in all. This must have been a reference to the advance party of forty that arrived early and stayed through the spring and early summer. Others replied that there were at least eighteen eight-man tents located in the prison compound. Actually, the number of tents required for this group would have been a minimum of thirty-one plus other tents for cooking and other uses. This second reference had to have been a reference to the main body of 247 prisoners that arrived in mid-July of 1945. Plus, the actual compound was not erected until the middle of July.
Prisoners of war were expected to work on tasks that were assigned to them by the War Manpower Commission, which certified the need for labor and decided the number of prisoners that were needed for a particular project. In the case of the Sale Creek camp, the commission decided on 200-250 prisoners that would be needed to save the Sale Creek peach crop of Grover Eldridge. Editor’s note: No prisoners worked for the Ell-Dee Orchard Company.
The prisoners were secured under private contracts by which the farm owners or operators paid the Treasury of the United States the standard area rate for certain types of farm labor on an hourly basis. The prisoner of war got the standard rate of eighty cents per day, which was also approximately the same as the pay for a private in the United States Army. The wage was not paid directly to the prisoner but was given in credit to the prisoner’s account in the camp to which he was assigned, in this case, Camp Forrest. The prisoner could draw on that account at the camp commissary in order to get personal toiletry items, cigarettes, or soft drinks.
A discrepancy was noted concerning the pay allocated for the prisoners. One source said the contract called for $0.30 per hour, which amounted to almost $50.00 per month, which was the same as an Army private. Another source said that the prisoner was paid $0.80 per day which would amount to approximately $16.00 - $20.00 per month based on a five-day week. The most authoritative source appears to be $0.80 per day.
At this point, everything was set to go. Several days before the group of 247 prisoners arrived, Army troops in large trucks began arriving in Sale Creek and proceeded to the campsite. That site was located about 200 yards south of the Leggett Road railroad crossing and on the west side of the tracks. In my younger years, that large ten or twelve-acre field was known as Carl Reavley’s pasture, which stretched a couple of hundred yards south from Pat Hoffman’s sawmill to the lower Sale Creek railroad crossing at Reavley Road. Then it went west along Reavley Road to Back Valley Road, then northwest several hundred yards, and then turned east again following Pat Hoffman’s sawmill property back to the main gate on Wall Street. The prison compound did not cover the whole field but was about seventy-five yards deep from the railroad and stretched from Hoffman’s Mill to Reavley Road.
All of the following conversations included in this story were either taped or noted verbatim by this author and then transcribed into "A Sentimental Journey Down Country Roads." None has been altered with the exception of some spellings of words or corrections in grammar. All the recorded conversations took place in the winter and spring of 1990.
In a 1990 interview, George W. (Billy) Ray talked about the construction of the camp. He was thirteen years old at the time, but he had a vivid recollection of some of the sights and sounds. At that time, he was working for Grover Eldridge in the Hamilton Orchards shed across the railroad tracks from the Ell-Dee’s packing house. He related that one day in July a group of soldiers came into town and began stringing barbed wire in the field across the railroad from Grover’s facility.
“We used to go down there along the railroad and play on the old planer sawdust pile. That thing was bigger than a house. We’d get boards that Pat Hoffman had discarded and get up on that pile and slide down just like you would if it had been snow,” he recalled.
“Well, we kept seeing them build a big old fence right down beside the planer mill. I guess it was right over there where they were going to put that coal crusher one time, somewhere around there close. Well, we kept wondering what was going on. Being kids, we were curious and too afraid to go and ask. Then along about peach season, they started putting up tents. They didn’t have any permanent structures or portable structures, just tents, you know.”
Another fifteen-year-old boy who remembered the camp quite vividly was Alvin Ray Davis, who recollected vivid details. When asked about the size of the camp, he said that it was a large, barbed-wire enclosed compound that extended from Pat Hoffman’s sawdust pile at the end of Wall Street all the way to its southern boundary at Reavley Road.
From the railroad, it extended about seventy-five yards deep, forming a long rectangular shape. He also recalled a large number of eight-man tents. In addition, there were always several Army trucks parked in the compound. Those trucks were used daily to transport the prisoners to the various Eldridge orchards scattered all over Hodgetown, Lee Pike, and Bakewell. The entrance for the trucks was from Wall Street close to the Perry A. Wall house, and the gate for prisoners to exit the compound was along the railroad side of the camp, opposite the packing house.
On July 19, 1945, trucks began arriving carrying the 247 prisoners. For the first couple of days, the prisoners settled in and prepared their living quarters. They were also oriented to the task they were assigned to do.
West Tennessee native and U.S. Army 1st Lt. John B. Luders of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee commanded the 247 German prisoners which included 171 enlisted men, 29 non-commissioned officers, and one officer.
That sum totaled 201 prisoners. There is no mention of the other 46 prisoners; however, there were cooks and a doctor in the group, so those individuals as well as possibly others could have accounted for the missing forty-six.
Billy Ray continued, “One day they brought them in and said they were the peach pickers. Why, I guess there were a couple hundred prisoners in there. I know there was a bunch of them. They picked for Grover Eldridge. They didn’t pick for Ell-Dee at all. I don’t know how Grover swung the deal, and I don’t even know where they came from. I know that the guards were out of Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia.”
“There were at least twenty or twenty-five Army soldiers guarding the Germans, at least that many and maybe more. There had to be that many in order to guard that many Germans,” he continued. Editor’s note: First lieutenants usually commanded a platoon of approximately forty soldiers.
Willard Hodge also remembered the guards and the fact that he had talked with them on several occasions. He confirmed that all of the guards were sent to Sale Creek from Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Sylvia, his wife, also recalled the wire fences higher than a man’s head and topped with barbed wire. She also stated something that no other interviewee mentioned – the ground inside the compound was covered with wood shavings and sawdust from Pat Hoffman’s sawmill next door, probably to help combat dustiness in dry conditions or mud when rainy.
In the interview, Billy was asked about whether there were any escape attempts. He replied to his knowledge none of the prisoners ever tried to escape. [Author’s note: At this point, the war was over and the prisoners were waiting to be repatriated back to Germany.] “It wouldn’t have done them any good. Probably ninety-nine percent of them could not even speak English. You’d hear them talking in German when they got off the trucks at the end of the day. Of course, they probably wouldn’t have spoken English in front of anyone anyway, but I never heard any of them speak English.”
Actually, there was no possible place for the prisoners to go, even if they had escaped; therefore, there were never any known escape attempts. That fact was echoed by Al Davis, who said that there were no attempts of which he was aware, and that even if they had, there was nowhere for them to go, just the same as Billy Ray’s words.
As a young teenager at the time, Al had the presence of mind to approach a guard and ask him that question. He said the same thing as Billy Ray and Al Davis. The guard further stated that the prisoners did not want to escape at this point, probably because the war was over, Germany had lost, and they were waiting to go home.
There was a rumor, unfounded and most likely false and promulgated by a prejudiced local town person who was trying to either inflame or scare people, that one or two of the prisoners did escape and were captured near Dayton, but there was never a confirmation of that rumor. Actually, no trustworthy account ever surfaced about an escape attempt, plus, as mentioned above, the war was over, and there was no reason for the prisoners to even try at this point.
Al Davis repeated something that Billy Ray mentioned below, namely that the guards did not want people hanging around close to the fence. He said that the guards would absolutely not allow anyone to loiter around the sides or the along the back of the compound fence; however, if someone wanted to talk to a prisoner along the railroad gate, the guards allowed it if permission was requested. With that being the case, Al asked the guards on a number of occasions and was granted permission to talk with several of the Germans.
One day he struck up a conversation with an older prisoner who said that his home was in a town near Berlin and that he had been captured in the North African campaign just like most of the other prisoners. During their conversation, he vented to Al his hatred of Adolf Hitler and told the young American boy that he was disgusted with the Fuhrer. As the man spoke, he spat each time he mentioned Hitler’s name. He further stated that his entire family had been killed in an Allied bombing raid for which he blamed Hitler and the Nazis.
A distinction needs to be made here. Regular German prisoners of war were separated from hard-line Nazis. As a rule, the United States Army did not allow hardened Nazi Party members to be in camps with ordinary Wehrmacht troops. They did not get along, and the Nazis stirred up trouble for their fellow POWs as well as with the Army troops and any locals with whom they might be in contact. In addition, all German troops were not Nazis.
In another conversation, one of the prisoners said that America was a beautiful country and that he would like to live there.
Billy Ray continued, “The guards were armed, of course, and guarded the fence at all times. Sentries with bayonet-tipped rifles patrolled the outside of the fence and kept anyone from getting too close. They did not want you hanging around the fence. About the closest we ever got was, like I say, over there on the railroad tracks along the side except for the time the guard took me inside.”
The episode to which Billy referred took place several days after the prisoners arrived and began work. At that time most children rarely wore shoes during the summer while they worked in the orchards or around the packing houses. While turning peach baskets one day, Billy stepped on a piece of rusty barbed wire and cut his foot. He left it unattended for a couple of days until it became very painful, and he developed a limp from the injury. Mrs. Georgia Eldridge, Grover’s wife, noticed Billy limping around that morning and feared that the cut had become infected. She called one of the Army’s guards from the compound and told him to take Billy over to the camp and let the German doctor see if he could do something about the cut on his foot.
“She told the guard to take me over there, and he did. The doctor looked at my foot and said, ‘Ya, ya, no lines, no lines. No blood poisoning,’” which meant that there were no tell-tale red streaks extending up the leg which would have signaled blood poisoning. The doctor spoke broken English while talking to Billy.
He continued, “He swabbed a little Q-tip type of thing into the cut and cleaned it out.” Billy made a complete recovery from the injury and was always appreciative of the German doctor’s care that day.
As a result of the doctor visit, Billy was one of only a minute handful of local people who went inside the German compound. The other instance will be covered later in this treatise.
The Prisoners Work in the Orchards
After a couple of days of settling into their quarters, the prisoners went to work. Many were assigned to actually pick the peaches. Each morning the Army’s trucks began shuttling prisoners and their guards to the Eldridge orchards which by this time were the largest in Sale Creek because the Ell-Dee and partnership orchards were beginning to shrink in size because of the loss of the twenty-eight year old Shipley Hill Orchard (over 100 acres), and the deteriorating state of the massive Big Ridge Orchard (over 200 acres).
In addition to the pickers, some of the prisoners were detailed to work around the packing house. Al Davis related that the only jobs the prisoners were allowed to do was (1) picking the peaches, (2) loading baskets onto box cars, and (3) unloading supplies. They were never allowed in the packing houses where women, children, and old men were working.
Al remembered quite well one incident that happened as a group of prisoners unloaded basket liners one day from a train car. Basket liners were cardboard or heavy paper liners that went on the inside of the peach baskets to protect the fruit from being bruised or cut against the wooden slats. The liners were packaged inside one another much like cupcake wrappers. Then they were wrapped in brown paper packaging. These were the large bundles that the prisoners were unloading that day.
As the work progressed, one of the bosses in the packing house noticed that the prisoners were dropping a lot of the bundles off the train and onto the ground, supposedly by accident. In actuality, they were hoping that one of the bundles would break open so that they could see what was in the package. Finally, the boss in the shed told the burly sergeant what the prisoners were doing.
This sergeant was a veteran of the North African campaign and had been wounded in action there. He had been sent back to the United States to recuperate. That was the reason he was guarding prisoners in Sale Creek. Editor’s note: All or nearly all of the prisoners of war had been part of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps and had been taken prisoner in North Africa as well.
When the sergeant heard about the problem, he walked over to the prisoners and told them, “Now, I know that all of you let on like you do not understand English, and I know for a fact that you do understand English, so I’m telling you just one time. If one more bundle of liners hits the ground, then I’m going to blow your rear ends off.”
Al Ray Davis said that the remainder of the bundles were handled like they were eggshells. He continued by saying that this incident dispelled the notion that none of the German prisoners could speak English. Many of them could, they just did not speak it unless they were spoken to by an American or unless they had a good reason to do so.
In his book, Dr. Antonio Thompson quotes from an Army inspection report that “On most days, POW labor worked out great, however, on July 23, 1945, the men did not perform the job as they had before. While that was never fully explained, what it likely meant was that they did not reach their quota. Their U.S. military supervisor addressed this by requiring them to work longer the next day.”
According to 1st Lt. Luders, and in response to the inspection report, he noted on August 1, 1945, that the POWs had completed 276 man-days of work on the camp and 2,294 man-days of work in agriculture. Because of the effectiveness of the German POWs, in 1946 when the peach crop topped 90,000 bushels, orchard owners who needed help lamented the fact that the German POW labor was not available
The only other misbehavior by a prisoner of which local people were aware involved an incident in which some of the graders on the sorting line noticed several peaches come through with swastikas scratched in the skins. They collected several specimens and called one of the guards and showed him. He told them, “Just don’t worry about this, it’ll never happen again. I’ll see to that.” No one knows what happened, but the incident was never repeated.
To close their story in the orchards, the fact of the matter is that the 247 prisoners did a marvelous job of saving Grover Eldridge’s peach crop that year. Nearly all the peaches were picked and shipped. There are no figures for the final count of bushel baskets, but it was a very profitable year for Eldridge.
To be continued…