By Kevin Ladd
By the time the 1943 rice harvest season approached, local farmers found themselves in a genuine quandary. There simply weren’t enough young men to gather in the crops. Most of them were in the military, and this was proving to be a “bumper crop” of a year. Gordon Hart, the affable county agent, heard plenty about the problem wherever he went and decided he had to do something about it.
Liberty County at that time had 1,961 farms. Based on the amount of land and the number of farms, the average farm covered 127.1 acres.
The idea of using German war prisoners to harvest the crops was just catching on at that time, but Hart had to follow all of the government procedures in order to bring this about. Hart, accompanied by Mr. Pat Boyt and Mr. J. H. Sandlin, traveled to Huntsville on June 24, 1943 to meet with General L. F. Guerre, Director of Internal Security for the Eighth Service Command. Afterward, he met with the local Farm Labor Advisory Committee on a possible site. This committee met with the TVE board and hammered out an agreement approving the site as a camp for the POWs.
The Internal Security Division for the Eighth Service Command sent some of their people to Liberty to inspect the site. They signed off on the deal and found the site was satisfactory for handling 400 German prisoners and their guards. By October 4, the first contingent of 140 prisoners arrived in Liberty and was taken to the fairgrounds, where they immediately went to work readying the site as a prisoner-of-war camp. By October 12, when the POWs started to work in the rice fields, the Liberty camp housed 500 prisoners.
An interesting research paper by Jeannie Carmody, written 20 years ago when she attended Lee College, identified the typical German prisoner as about 20 years old, tall, husky and quite handsome. Most of the men, she said, were veterans of General Erwin Rommel’s highly-touted Afrika Korps. Some of them were his top men, but they fit in well with their keepers and earned the respect of their guards. Some of the local girls, it is said, thought the German men were quite handsome.
The man in the middle of the whole operation was County Agent Hart, who had to serve as the intermediary between the government and the local rice farmers. He had to get each contract signed, sealed and delivered. Each prisoner was paid the minimum per daily wage as set by the Beaumont War Manpower Commission. Carmody’s research suggests the men usually earned about 70 cents per day. Hart’s wife said her husband spent almost every day at the camp, making sure everything went smoothly, but she suspected he mainly liked to partake of the food prepared by the good German cooks.
The late Dr. Albert L. Delaney, Sr. of Liberty served as the camp physician and established some friendships that he maintained throughout his life.
Many of the end results of the German POW camp, however, were never widely published. The Farm Labor group left the TVE a balance of $3,745.15 in the bank. They also paid out some $3,700 in rent for the facility, an additional financial bonus. The Farm Labor Committee also added two new wells and two new pumps on the fairgrounds, and these remained for the benefit of the TVE after the war was over. All in all, 511 camps were established across the United States during World War II, and 120 of that number were in Texas. When you go out to the Trinity Valley Exposition the next time, try to imagine it with 500 German prisoners housed there.