German POWs in California Were Taken to the Ocean - What Happened Next Shocked Them

They had surrendered in Tunisia and crossed an ocean in the hold of a ship — and then America put them in a camp within sound of another one. At Camp Cooke, on the Santa Barbara coast, thousands of German prisoners worked California's harvest, ate three square meals a day, played in orchestras — and met the Pacific. Drawing on Jeffrey E. Geiger's "German Prisoners of War at Camp Cooke, California" — built on fourteen prisoner accounts — Arnold Krammer's classic history, Provost Marshal General's records and California local histories from Goleta to Pomona, this film follows the long road west by rail, the camp by the sea, the eighty-cents-a-day harvest army, the two escapes, the letters home, and the long way back in 1946. CHAPTERS 00:00 — The Ocean They Could Hear 00:39 — Tunisia — May 1943 01:30 — The Hard Road 02:27 — West by Rail 03:30 — Camp Cooke — June 1944 04:26 — The Camp by the Sea 05:26 — The Harvest Army 06:24 — Eighty Cents a Day 07:31 — Three Square Meals 08:33 — Orchestras and Gardens 09:27 — Into the Pacific 10:23 — The Two Escapes 11:30 — A State Within a State 12:35 — Letters Home 13:37 — The Scoreboard 14:31 — The Long Way Home 15:29 — What Remained 16:23 — The Verdict Sources are credited in the film's closing card: Geiger (McFarland, 1996); Krammer, "Nazi Prisoners of War in America" (1979); Goleta History; Kern and Madera County camp histories; PBS SoCal; U.S. Provost Marshal General's records. Photographs: U.S. National Archives; Signal Corps; Imperial War Museum; Library of Congress — via Wikimedia Commons. #WWII #POW #California #History #Documentary Displaying desc43.txt.