Arizona, 1944: 25 POWs Crawled Out Through a 178-Foot Tunnel

By one account, a German POW camp in Arizona issued two shovels and two rakes for a volleyball court and counted them back every evening. The guards could count the tools, not the dirt. The Army ran its camps by the Geneva rulebook, and by the same rulebook it hanged 14 prisoners. What did 340,000 German prisoners find in America, and why did some of them kill each other? By the War Department's April 1945 count, the United States held 393,969 prisoners of war, 340,407 of them German, in 490 camps. The film goes through the camps one article of the 1929 Geneva Convention at a time: a ration the Army priced at 25 cents against 59 for a garrison soldier, 80 cents a day paid in canteen coupons, bread and water for a man who would not work. It follows the Papago Park tunnel, three killings inside the wire, the hanging of 14 prisoners at Fort Leavenworth, the prisoner newspaper Der Ruf and a county paper's menu story, and checks four stories that circulate today against the pages from the time that we could open. Where it leans on a historian or on Wikipedia, it says so. LINKS Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, 27 July 1929 (Yale Avalon Project) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_cent... House Report No. 728, 1945: War Department statements to Congress (inside this PDF of 1945 House reports) https://www.indianalegalarchive.com/s... Gates County Index, 11 April 1945, p. 4: Bonner at the Ahoskie camp (DigitalNC) https://newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn... In this film: Captain (Kapitän zur See) Jürgen Wattenberg · Captain Cecil Parshall · Gefreiter Johannes Kunze · Werner Drechsler · Horst Günther · Brigadier General Blackshear M. Bryan Jr. · Congressman Herbert C. Bonner · Lieutenant Colonel Edward Davison · Captain Robert Kunzig · Special Projects Division · Camp Papago Park, Phoenix, Arizona · Fort Leavenworth, Kansas · Camp Tonkawa, Oklahoma · Ahoskie, North Carolina CHAPTERS 0:00 Two Shovels, Two Rakes 2:11 A Question of Law 7:43 The Army's Arithmetic 9:38 The Blind Spot Beside the Bathhouse 14:38 The Other War 18:07 Article Forty-Six 22:27 Edited by Prisoners 26:59 The First of April 32:35 Going Home 34:52 Three more stories SOURCES Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (Geneva, 27 July 1929) — treaty text, Yale Avalon Project Investigations of the National War Effort: Prisoners of War, House Report No. 728 (1945) — War Department statements to the House Military Affairs Committee Der Ruf, Nr. 17 (15 November 1945) — front page and masthead Gates County Index, 11 April 1945 — menu story and Bonner visit, DigitalNC The Wilmington Morning Star, 11 July, 15 July and 26 August 1945 — UP and AP reports of the hangings, DigitalNC History of Prisoner of War Utilization by the United States Army, 1776-1945 (DA Pamphlet 20-213, 1955) — Lewis and Mewha CREDITS Public domain unless a license is named. Newspaper pages: DigitalNC, no known copyright. Alexisrael (Commons), own work Fort George G. Meade Public Affairs Office (Flickr 36049346395), via Commons Gates County Index; DigitalNC Marine 69-71 (Commons), own work NARA (id 23936579) Paul McDonald (Commons user Paulmcdonald) Scan credited to smallstatebighistory.com; artist field: German prisoners of war during WWII under direction and control of the U.S. Military TSgt Herman J. Kokojan, US Air Force, DefenseLINK The Shelby Daily Star; DigitalNC The Wilmington Morning Star; DigitalNC The Wilmington Morning Star; DigitalNC (State Library of North Carolina) Txstatetrooper (Commons), own work US Army (as credited on Commons); uploaded by Geo Swan US Army Signal Corps (Pfc. Eugene Scarborough); NARA US Army Signal Corps (Pfc. Eugene Scarborough); NARA; Signal Corps Archive US Army Signal Corps (Sgt. Roy Atchison Jr.); NARA US Army Signal Corps (T/3 Roy Atchison Jr.); NARA US Army Signal Corps (T/3 Roy Atchison Jr.); NARA; Signal Corps Archive US Army Signal Corps (T/5 Roy Atchison Jr.); NARA US Navy; Commons credit line points to Army University Press, Military Review, Jan-Feb 2020 (Hull, "POW-WWII") United States Army; Commons credit link azpbs.org (Arizona Stories) Wiki-ny-2007 (Commons), own work Wikimedia Commons uploader Wikimedia Commons uploader (artist not stated) Licensed: Alexisrael, Wiki-ny-2007 and two Commons uploaders, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Marine 69-71 and Txstatetrooper, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Fort George G. Meade Public Affairs Office, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.... MUSIC "Clean Soul", "Dark Walk", "Deep Haze", "Enchanted Journey", "Floating Cities", "Healing", "Long Note Three", "Silver Blue Light", "Sincerely", "Thinking Music", "Unanswered Questions" — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... #GermanPOWs #WorldWar2 #PapagoPark