By Wesley Harris
While World War II raged across the globe, Americans back on the home front were heavily engaged in the war effort. Evidence of the conflict permeated every community—training camps, military maneuvers, war bond events, scrap drives. The federal government imposed rationing of food, rubber, and gasoline to fulfill military needs. Unlike the Middle East conflicts of more recent times, World War II affected everyone personally and most did their part to support the country.
One of the most fascinating aspects of home front life during WWII was the presence of prisoner of war camps across America. There were hundreds of them, housing mostly German and Italian troops. The Japanese rarely allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. Many American civilians found jobs working in the POW camps as electricians, carpenters, and nurses.
In June 2006, I met a former German prisoner of war when he returned to visit Camp Ruston, one WWII’s largest internment facilities. Horst Blumenberg lived at Camp Ruston from October 1944 to January 1946 after his capture in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when American planes attacked his submarine, the U-664. Horst and some of his crewmates barely escaped as their U-boat sunk.
Once the brief battle was over, the planes aided survivors by dropping rafts and life vests and calling the U.S.S. Borie to the scene. In the eight hours until the Borie arrived, Blumenberg found himself at the bottom of a raft, covered with the blood and bodies of his wounded comrades.
Blumenberg eventually reached an interrogation camp near Arlington, Virginia. He declared himself an “anti-Nazi” and cooperated to some degree with the Americans. For his own protection, he was separated from his crewmates who were sent to a “Nazi camp” in Arizona.
“I was the only one at Camp Ruston. I said I wasn’t a Nazi,” he explained. “In 1943, it was a very dangerous thing to do that. If Hitler had won the war, I would have been a dead duck.”
Blumenberg’s early cooperation with his captives dissolved as he became a problem prisoner for Camp Ruston authorities. After one escape attempt, an American official wrote, “He is believed to be a Communist and is certainly an agitator. His manner is surly, arrogant and overbearing because of services once rendered. For all reasons above he is deemed uncooperative.” Anyone who did not cooperate was considered a Nazi or a Communist.
The wire fences of Camp Ruston prompted homesickness and even mental instability in some prisoners. Blumenberg admitted the confinement drove him a little crazy and his frequent escape attempts from Camp Ruston were more to ease his own mind than return to Germany.
In one escape, the young sailor and three other prisoners fled the branch camp at Barksdale Army Airfield where they had been sent on a work detail. Guards shot at them as they went over the camp’s wire fence. They made their way to the Red River where they found a log and floated downstream. They lived off the land, scrounging rice, peanuts, and corn from fields for about a week.
They left the river and headed west toward Texas. In DeSoto Parish, about 75 miles into their trek, a local law officer confronted them. They tried to pass themselves off as lost Swedish sailors traveling to the west coast. After taking them into custody, the officer fed them hamburgers and Cokes before turning them over to the FBI for transfer to an isolation cell at Camp Ruston with bread and water meals. They told authorities they escaped because they were tired of eating SPAM, the meat emulsion many American GIs had learned to loathe.
During his 2006 visit, Blumenberg presented several pieces of memorabilia to Louisiana Tech, the repository for Camp Ruston archival materials. He enjoyed talking with the media and others who wanted to know more. He allowed me to escort him to the site of old Camp Ruston and question him for hours about his experiences. I had previously interviewed Horst by phone and e-mail for a book I wrote about the U-boat sailors at Camp Ruston. In addition to Blumenberg, the entire crew of the U-505, the first enemy vessel captured by the U.S. since the War of 1812, was held at Camp Ruston.
After the war, Blumenberg was shipped to Europe where he labored in a series of British work camps before he was released to return to Germany. His family had never heard of his fate. “By the time I got home, it was September 1947, and the war was over in 1945,” he said. The continued incarceration long after the war ended angered him. But Blumenberg had definite plans for his future.
“The day I walked through the door [in returning home in 1947],” Blumenberg said, “my mother asked me, ‘What are you going to do?’ I say, the first chance I have, I’m going back to America. She said, ‘You haven’t even sat down yet after all those years and you’re telling me you will go to America?’ I said yes. Which I did.” Blumenberg moved to the United States in the 1950s, became an American citizen, and worked as an engineer, retiring in Kentucky.
Horst was one of many former POWs who returned to Camp Ruston to reminisce and show family members where they sat out the war. I corresponded with Horst for several years after his 2006 visit. He loved sharing stories of his adventurous life. Eventually, Horst’s emails stopped. After surviving the horrors of war and the near misses of his captors’ bullets, “Taps” sounded for my German friend in 2011. His request to be buried at sea was granted.
Like American servicemen of that war, any remaining Camp Ruston internees are in their nineties, so any more return visits are unlikely.
Part of the Camp Ruston property is owned by Louisiana Tech; the rest of the camp was transferred to Grambling State University several years ago. Only a few rapidly deteriorating buildings remain of the once sprawling camp.
Courtesy of the Lincoln Parish Journal