The War Was Over. An American Guard Machine-Gunned Sleeping German POWs.

On a Saturday night in July 1945, a 23-year-old American soldier told a waitress in Salina, Utah, that something exciting was going to happen tonight. At midnight he reported for guard duty, climbed a tower, and loaded a machine gun. Below him, about 250 German prisoners of war were asleep in their tents. The war in Europe had been over for exactly two months. In fifteen seconds he fired 250 rounds into the camp. Nine men died, and nineteen were wounded. This is the documented story of the Salina shooting, told from the 1945 newspapers of Utah: the town that woke to the screams, the doctor who worked through the night, the prisoners sent back to the beet fields on Monday, the five Germans hanged at Fort Leavenworth the same week, and the American guard who was never tried. ⏱️ Chapters 0:00 The waitress 0:59 Salina 2:09 Private Bertucci 3:10 Fifteen seconds 4:26 The town wakes up 5:40 Monday morning 6:46 Fort Leavenworth 7:30 The funeral 8:30 Not a trial 9:31 What came after 10:50 What is left 📚 Sources Salt Lake Telegram, Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News, Ogden Standard-Examiner, Salina Sun, Richfield Reaper, July-August 1945 (Utah Digital Newspapers, J. Willard Marriott Library) Time, "Midnight Massacre," July 23, 1945 Allan Kent Powell, Splinters of a Nation: German Prisoners of War in Utah (1989), via Wikipedia, "1945 Utah prisoner of war massacre" Christian Flanders, "The P.O.W. Camp at Salina, Utah," Intermountain Histories Nicholas Demas, "The Salina POW Camp Shooting," Utah Humanities (2008) Twila Van Leer, Deseret News, July 4, 1995; Eileen Hallet Stone, Salt Lake Tribune, Nov. 7, 2016; HistoryNet; Fox 13 (2016) 🎞️ Archive Newspapers: Salt Lake Telegram, July 9, 1945; Salina Sun, July 13, 1945 (Utah Digital Newspapers, no copyright). Photographs: Camp Salina today (CC BY 2.0); Salina Main Street (CC BY 4.0); a map of the camp (CC0); Fort Douglas Post Cemetery (CC0, CC BY-SA 3.0); Fort Leavenworth (Library of Congress, public domain). Film: This Land of Ours: Utah (1950); The Restaurant Operator (1946); Communications and Our Town (1947); Shoshone Irrigation Project (Interior Dept., 1938); Food for America (1941); Troop Train (OWI, 1943); The General Hospital (U.S. Army, 1945); Tunisian Campaign, May 1943 (National Archives); Universal Newsreel, Memorial Day 1945. All public domain, via the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons. No film exists of the camp at Salina or of that night; those scenes are stand-ins and are marked on screen. If your family remembers the prisoners in the beet fields of Utah, or anywhere else in America, tell us in the comments. WWII Frontlines: prisoner of war stories, documented. #WW2 #History #POW