THE NEWPORT NEWS WWII POW CAMPS

Camp Patrick Henry, the German POW Camp, morphed into Patrick Henry Field, now Newport News Williamsburg International Airport.

Another German POW Camp was located at the continuation of the James River Bridge crossover from Virginia Avenue to Jefferson Avenue, below the bridge. More still were housed at Fort Eustis.

The Italian POW camp was on the Old Casino Grounds which was on the hill behind the Victory Arch.

Camp Hill, also used for the Italian POWs, was bounded to the south by the temporary wooden railroad overpass at 58th Street, the James River Bridge/Military Highway railroad overpass to the north, Jefferson Avenue to the east, and the railroad yards to the west.

... I don't think very many of the newsletter subscribers will remember this but there was a German POW camp in Newport News during WWII. Actually while trying to find some information about it, I discovered that there were apparently two in the Newport News area. The one I remember you could see out of the right side of the car (driving from Newport News toward Hampton) as you went over a bridge on 25th Street close to downtown Newport News. It was surrounded by barbed wire and you could see right down into the camp from your car. I was only about 5 or 6 at the time and I might be wrong about the exact location, but I believe it is the one described at http://www.newport-news.org/groups-and-meetings/escort-notes.html that was located at the Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation in Newport News. There was also one at Camp Patrick Henry close to Williamsburg that is described on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Patrick_Henry. These two web sites might be describing the same camp but I don't think so. I definitely remember one close to downtown Newport News. I wonder if any body else might remember this (Joe Madagan - '57 - of FL maybe?) or anyone else about our age or a little older. Maybe Dave Spriggs ('64 - of VA) might know something about it, although it was a little before his time.
 

Early memories are indeed tricky.  Somehow I always thought the camp was on the south-west corner of Jefferson Avenue and Mercury Boulevard (Military Highway in those days).  Between the tracks and Jefferson.  We need our experts to chime in now.
 

I used to pick blackberries near the railroad tracks in the area of 58th and Jefferson Avenue.  There were concrete pads underneath all the vines at regular intervals, and I remember my daddy telling me that's where the prisoner of war camp was.  Later, when I worked as a draftsman at Post Engineers at Fort Eustis, I vaguely remember seeing a map of the same area showing the POW camp extending all the way from about that area to what is now Mercury and Jefferson Avenue.  (There's a trailer park there now).  There were also lots of bee-you-tee-ful drawings that German pow's had done while incarcerated.  I can only assume that those drawings and maps are in the possession of the museum at Fort Eustis, because I remember the Post had not decided what to do with them before I moved to Norfolk and the Army Corps of Engineers.  I never got a chance to go to the museum after it opened to see if that's where they ended up.  (There were also ANCIENT drawings of Fort Eustis that were just moldering in those drawers-----a Crime!!)  I'm betting that David Spriggs ('64 - of VA) has been to that museum and probably knows something about them?  I hope so. 
 

I can remember riding in a car with my parents by the POW camp off Jefferson Avenue and Mercury Boulevard, we rode by the gate and saw quite a few men behind the gates.  There were high fences with strands of barbed wire around them.  As I understand, the men were mostly handsome and attractive people and were allowed to work in the local grocery stores bagging and carrying groceries out of the store.  The camp seemed to be on the southeast side of Jefferson and Mercury.
 

I have read all the different stories about these and most of them are incorrect. The Italian POW camp was on the Old Casino Grounds which was on the hill behind the Old Victory Arch. There was a movie theater built for the army (which later became The Jewish Community Center), and beside it was a gymnasium for army personal as quite a lot of troops were assigned to the port area. AA guns mounted on the roof of the Warwick Hotel, guards with dogs patrolling all the piers and the rail road storage area which contained ammunition, vehicles, food, etc. for the war. The Italian Camp was an open camp; they were allowed to roam in the Casino Ground area and lived in tents. This area was called the Hill. I remember talking to the prisoners as they had books to try to translate with me.

The German POW Camp was located at the continuation of the James River Bridge crossover from Virginia Avenue to Jefferson Avenue.  It was located below the bridge. It had barbed wire above the fence, and had barracks with towers at each corner, and spotlights with armed guards manning each one. You could see the prisoners walking around the fenced in area.

The 58th Street overpass from Virginia Avenue to 58th Street was built for two reasons - to give the army better access to the HRPE Laundry, and for the new homes at Betsy Lee Gardens and new homes that had been built on Briarfield Road and Copeland and Newsome Park.

Camp Patrick Henry was a distribution point for the HRPE holding troops until ships were available to load them and equipment.

Red Skelton's name was brought up. A friend of mine, Bobby Reynolds, Buddy Adjlet, and I went to a movie at the James Theatre. The movie starred Esther Williams and Red Skelton. While the movie was on, there was a person sitting in the middle of the theater laughing very loud at every thing in the movie. Seeing that this person was a red head, red faced, large, and a little chubby, was Red Skelton, we went over and talked to him, and we left the movie with him. He wanted to know if there were any clubs in the area. At that time there weren't any, but we said there was the Elks Club behind the Palace Theater across from the Y, so we took there, and of course there were a lot of men in there playing cards. I don't believe it was fish. He introduced himself and they enjoyed meeting him. We left there and took him to Buddy's parent's restaurant that was located between 34th and 35th Streets on Huntington Avenue across from Newport News Auto Exchange. He became friends with them, and spent a few days with them, and he was shipped out within a week.

While working on the rail road I saw many trains coming in with German Prisoners. I was told they were being sent to West Virginia to one beautiful hotel which was the Greenbriar -  which was true.
 

I have a two volume set of books titled, The Road To Victory: A History of Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation in World War II, edited by Major W. R. Wheeler, © 1946 Yale University Press.

There are two text chapters discussing POWs and several photographs.

After the reunion dust settles, I will scan all pertinent text and photos for the newsletter and web site.
 

I think we should defer to Dale Parsons' (June '48 - of VA) memory on this one. According to various documents, at some point the Italians (after they were no longer officially POWs) were utilized to augment local stevedores, so it sure makes sense that they would have been quartered nearby. 

... I forgot to mention, I don't know what the Italian compound on the old casino grounds was called (if anything), but Camp Hill (or at least the major part of it) was not located there. The title you included in the POW web page probably needs to be adjusted accordingly.
 

Wow, I can't believe how many great responses there were about the POW camps on the Peninsula during WWII. Thanks to Norris, Linda May, Sheila, Dimples and Joan for their responses and special thanks to Joe, Bill, Norm and Dale for their very insightful and in-depth responses. I have since learned that in addition to the camps at the Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation and Ft. Patrick Henry and Ft. Eustis already mentioned there were seven other POW camps in Virginia during the war including Camp Allen, in Norfolk, Camp Ashby near Virginia Beach which was the largest camp in the south Hampton Roads area covering 22 acres and housing 6,000 German troops, and a "special" German POW camp at Camp Peary in York County.

Wikipedia says "The POWs kept at Camp Peary were not just an ordinary sort, but rather, many came from captured German submarine and ship crews which the Germans had thought lost-at-sea with crews presumed dead. It was important for Nazi authorities to be unaware of their capture, since that also meant secret code books thought lost-at-sea may also have been compromised. Thus, extra secrecy was necessary............Many of the German prisoners-of-war who were secretly kept at Camp Peary during WWII did local farm work, and some liked the area so much that they remained and applied to become U.S. citizens afterwards."

All this talk about foreign POWs in the U.S. during the war got me wondering about any possible escape attempts they might have made. I could find nothing about any actual successful attempts but I did learn that of over 400,000 German POWs incarcerated in the U.S. during the war that there were 2,222 individual attempts made and not a single one ever made it back to Germany. 56 of them were shot to death, most by authorities, but some at the hands of trigger happy civilians.

The most noteworthy escape attempt that I could find information about was called the "Not So Great Escape." Like the Allied Great Escape which Paul wrote about, the Germans forged documents and civilian clothes, etc. They also scraped together U.S. currency not by forgery but by selling forged Nazi paraphernalia to U.S. guards. On Christmas Eve, 1944, 25 men (12 officers and 13 enlisted men) escaped through a 200 ft. tunnel from Camp Papago Park, AZ POW camp. Most were, recaptured but some just turned themselves in. The last one walked into a farmhouse and turned himself in on 1/27/45. For a complete and fascinating account of this escape check out the web site below.

http://www.historynet.com/the-not-so-great-escape-german-pows-in-the-us-during-wwii.htm 
 

Camp Patrick Henry morphed into Patrick Henry Field, now Newport News Williamsburg International Airport.

Ref: http://www.nnwairport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=74&Itemid=69

Need more proof?
 

Camp Patrick Henry   

7th Street  
9th Street
Avenue “D”
Avenue “E”
 

Newport News Williamsburg International Airport

Cherokee Drive
Turnberry Boulevard
Peebles Drive
McManus Boulevard
 

Hampton National Cemetery is located in Hampton, Va., near Hampton Roads, in the vicinity of where the historic Civil War naval battle between the Confederate Merrimac/Virginia and the Union Monitor iron-clad ships occurred in 1862. The cemetery’s first burials took place in 1862 and the cemetery is among numerous national cemeteries with origins that date to the Civil War.

Burials at Hampton National Cemetery included many soldiers who died at Fort Monroe and other military hospitals in the vicinity. There are 638 unknowns soldiers buried at Hampton National Cemetery--most of them Civil War soldiers who fell in combat and were originally hastily buried on the battlefield. There are also 272 Confederate soldiers buried in a separate section.

Hampton National Cemetery is one of 13 national cemeteries in which World War II prisoners of war are interred. There are 55 German and 5 Italian POWs buried in the Phoebus Addition section of Hampton National Cemetery, which is a discontiguous tract of the cemetery.

During World War II, on April 14, 1942, a German U-boat, U-85, was sunk by the U.S.S. Roper off Cape Hatteras. The entire crew was lost and the boat sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. On April 15, 1942, full military honors were provided for 28 German sailors from U-85 and they were interred at Hampton National Cemetery. The bodies and a few life jackets were all that surfaced after the submarine was sunk. On board the ship, when it sank, was an Enigma decoding machine. The machine was recovered from the ship during a dive in 2001 and is currently on loan from the German government to the Atlantic Graveyard Museum located in Cape Hatteras, N.C.

Hampton National Cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 26, 1996.

The Union Soldiers monument is a 65’ tall granite obelisk that was erected through the efforts of Dorothea Dix, the superintendent of women nurses in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. In 1868 Dix transferred ownership of the monument to the United States. The monument inscription reads: “In Memory of Union Soldiers Who Died to Maintain the Laws.”
 

From a history of U-85: "29 sailors from U-85 were buried Hampton National Cemetery, Hampton, Virginia, with military honors, the evening of April 15, 1942.  Fifty-two prisoners from Fort Monroe, Virginia prepared and later filled in the graves.  At 2000, the burial service was read by the Catholic Chaplain, followed by the Protestant Chaplain.  The firing party of 24 seamen fired three volleys, and Taps was sounded."

Local people were attracted to the scene by those activities. One of them, who lived nearby, was the father of Janie Branch (nee Hudson), Class of 1954, Hampton High School. For years, he told and retold her that story, but she never quite believed him.

But when I shared this picture with her, a few years ago, she readily identified her father as being the man marked by an arrow I later added (see revised picture, below).