DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's what the official marker at Camp Fannin has to say, and I'll do my best to tell it right. Now, most folks who know the name Camp Fannin think of it as a training ground, a place where American soldiers got ready for the fight. And that's true.
But there is another chapter to this story, one that unfolded right there in Smith County, Texas, and it deserves to be told slow and steady. In October of 1943, the first prisoners of war arrived at Camp Fannin. These weren't just any prisoners.
These were men from Germany's Afrika Korps, soldiers who had fought in the desert campaigns across North Africa and found themselves, by the turning of the war, far from home and a long way from the Sahara, now looking out at the piney woods of East Texas. By early 1944, the military designated the site a POW base camp. That's a formal thing, a distinction with real weight behind it.
It meant Camp Fannin wasn't just holding prisoners on the side. It was the hub, administering a number of smaller branch camps spread across East Texas. This place had become a kind of quiet machinery in the middle of the war effort.
And here's where the story takes a turn that surprises people. Back home in Texas, there was a shortage of working hands. The war had pulled men away from the fields and the forests, and the work still needed doing.
So local representatives went to the War Department, hat in hand, and made a request. The answer was yes. POW labor was authorized for use in forestry and agriculture across East Texas.
Think on that for a moment. Men who had been fighting for the other side were now out working the land, cutting timber, tending crops, filling a gap that the war itself had created. The camp processed many thousands of prisoners over its existence, and at this one location, it held more than a thousand at a time.
The war ended. The world began the long, complicated work of putting itself back together. The prisoners were repatriated, sent back to wherever home still meant something, and on May 10, 1946, the Camp Fannin internment camp closed its gates for the last time.
Somewhere out there in East Texas, there are trees that were felled and fields that were worked by hands that belonged to men the world had counted as enemies. The marker doesn't tell us what became of those men after they went home. It just marks the place where all of that happened, quiet and steady, like the pines that still stand around it.
What the marker says
Camp Fannin was also the site of an internment camp, with the first prisoners of war (POWs) from Germany's Afrika Korps arriving in Oct. 1943. By early 1944, the military designated the site a POW base camp that administered a number of smaller branch camps in east Texas. As a result of a home front wartime manpower scarcity, upon the request of local representatives, the War Department allowed the use of POW labor in forestry and agriculture in East Texas. During its existence, the camp efficiently processed many thousands of POWs and held more than 1,000 at this location. After repatriating the POWs, the camp closed on May 10, 1946. Texas in World War II - 2008