He may even look back with something like real nostalgia on those days.
In Temple, he worked hard but mostly in good weather. He was fed three square meals a day. No one was shooting at him. As POW camps go, the one in Temple wasn't so bad.
If by some chance that soldier came back here to look for the old POW camp he wouldn't find so much as a trace. The camp was located at what is now Temple College where not a single vestige of the old POW camp remains; the exact site is buried under a parking lot.
Dr. Victor E. Schulze Jr. of Temple has compiled a history of the U.S. Army McCloskey General Hospital, including a chapter on the POW camp. Schulze pieced together the story of the camp from Temple College records and interviews with former employees and residents.
Schulze recounts that in August 1943 a group of wounded Italian and German soldiers were shipped to McCloskey from campaigns in Sicily and North Africa.
Despite being allies in the war, the Germans and Italians did not get along with each other. The Italians were shipped elsewhere and the Germans were admitted to McCloskey, now known as the Olin E. Teague Veteran'sCenter.
'There was a large barbed wire fence surrounding the compound with guards at the main gate,' Schulze wrote. 'Each morning the prisoners were marched to the hospital grounds where they were broken up into work groups, assigned an escort and distributed over the grounds to work.'
The German POWs worked on the golf course. They washed windows and planted grass, trees and shrubs. The Nazi prisoners planted most of the older trees that you see on campus now. The prisoners who worked inside were not allowed to touch a patient or speak to any employee or patient.
Since some of the employees were young, female and pretty and some even spoke German, that rule was sometimes put to the test. The prisoners who were unable to contain themselves were shipped elsewhere.
The late Lottie Fowler worked at McCloskey during the war. In a 1999 interview with the Telegram, she said the German soldiers occasionally showed up at McCloskey to clean the grounds.
'Some of them were cooks and they taught me how to make twisted rolls, all kinds of things. I was 16, going on 17 at the time, and they were very friendly to work with. They never caused any trouble that I can recall.'
Mrs. Fowler said the work was enjoyable but sometimes depressing.
'We got a lot of wounded patients, and some of them were very shook up,' she said. 'The sound of an airplane would make them take cover, just like they were still in combat.'
Still, by all surviving accounts, the German POWs were well cared for in Temple.
'It was said that there was quite a difference between the looks of the German prisoners of war in their dark blue fatigues with the large white letters POW stamped over them and the American wounded being brought in on trains,' Schulze wrote.
The disparity between the condition of the tanned and healthy German prisoners in Temple compared to the images of American soldiers in German POW camps reportedly caused some dissension in this area, especially in Westphalia where German-speaking citizens were sometimes called on to act as translators.
One of the translators reportedly had a relative in a German POW camp that was not being treated with the same deference as the German prisoners.
'People would grumble about that,' Schulze said. 'They would say our own boys were getting worse treatment than the Germans on their home base.'
One German prisoner was killed when he was struck by lightning.
'He took a direct hit,' Schulze said. 'About all that was left of him was his shoes and a belt buckle.'
The course of the war could be traced in the faces of the German prisoners brought to Temple. The early arrivals were strong, able-bodied young men. That changed as the war neared its end. The soldiers were older, and not in the best of health.
'Also, these newer prisoners related stories of impending defeat for Germany, stories that old-time prisoners found hard to believe,' Schulze wrote. 'After the war in Germany ended, the POWs were sent to Fort Hood, and then presumably home.'
Stories circulated for years that some of the German prisoners were allowed to go into town, but Schulze said he never heard anything about that. Some, it is said, never returned.
