The system of collection and evacuation of enemy prisoners of war

[Wendy]

This info was taken from :EXTRACT FROM MEDICAL DEPARTMENT, UNITED STATES ARMY, PREVENTIVE MEDICINE IN WORLD WAR II, Volume IX, SPECIAL FIELDS

 

http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/EPWs/EPWs.htm#EUROPEAN THEATER OF OPERATIONS

 

The system of collection and evacuation of enemy prisoners of war was devised in the planning stage before the United States entered World War II. Modified by experience, it was utilized during the war especially in the European theater. Its essential features are outlined in chart 6.

 

 

In the frontline areas, combat troops conducted their captured enemy prisoners of war to regimental and divisional collecting points where they were turned over to Army military police. A few selected prisoners were evacuated from divisional collecting points to a corps prisoner-of-war cage by corps military police and retained, for a time, at corps headquarters for interrogation. The mass of prisoners were taken from divisional collecting points by personnel of Army military police escort guard companies to an Army enclosure. (Or, in 1945, they were also taken to Prisoner of War Transient Enclosures. These transient enclosures are not shown in chart 6, but are indicated in map 8 (p. 384).) At these collecting points, they were processed as thoroughly as possible. Occasionally, prisoners of war were held in these enclosures for several weeks. Evacuation of prisoners from Army enclosures, or from Central Prisoner Of War Enclosures in base sections, to ports in the communications zone, and to ports and camps in the Zone of Interior, was carried out in part by Army military police and in part by Zone of Interior military police. Movement was by bus, truck, rail, and ship, and occasionally by air, according to the situation.

 

Large resources in men, materials, and organizations were required to handle the hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war captured by U.S. field armies in North Africa, Italy, and Northwest Europe during the campaigns of 1942-45. The forces needed for this work were drawn from several technical services and from various kinds of tactical units.

Contributors to the custodial and professional contingents included: (1) The Office of The Provost Marshal General and its associated Corps of Military Police, (2) the provost marshals and military police under their control at headquarters and communications zones in theaters or areas and in field armies and army groups, (3) the Medical Department, (4) the Quartermaster Corps, (5) the Transportation Corps, (6) the Corps of Engineers, (7) staffs and troops of headquarters from the highest to the lowest echelon, (8) entire infantry divisions (106th and 88th Infantry Divisions), and (9) many artillery, armored, and infantry detachments. Nearly all provided personnel, both specialized and general. Various military organizations supplied food, water, clothing, railroad cars, buses, trucks, ships, airplanes, tents, barracks, structural materials, and buildings.

[roque_riojas]

BETWEEN NO AFRICA AND ITALY, THE34th DIVN. CAPTURED MORE THAN

40,000 PRISONERS. I THINK THAT KEPT THE MPS' BUSY.

me of the 34th

[j3rdinf]

POW's were the bane of the dogfaces life. Fianlly with the mass surrendering in Germany mostly we just disarmed them if weapons showed and motioned them back to "our lines?". God only knows who finally kept them. We just couldnt spare the manpower to keep or guard them. As it was, our "supposed Div

figure" of 15,000 men was down to the 12,000 mark from lack of replacements. When you are down 20 percent you are starting to be a hurting puppy. I guess many Krauts were dissapointed in not being captured immediately on surrendering but hopefully they finally found some people to take them in.

Actually just what does a company of maybe 180 people do with 100 surrendering Krauts at a time when one has a objective to take and must move on?

[SonofaMP]

Your right Joe, PWs were the bane of the combat troops.There are several reports of Division MPs escorting PWs from the front lines, ofton going back with the wounded, being captured by a german patrol. Sometimes they were recaptured by our guys, sometimes not.

By the end of the war, there were over 200,000 men in the Corp of Military Police and it still wasnt enough to handle the masses of PWs & "disarmed personel", Most of whom ended up in the 16 large enclosures built along the Rhine,originaly built to hold20,000=40,000 it wasnt unusal for the enclosures to have 60,000-100,000 jammed into them.

My dad was stationed at the enclosure near Bretzenhiem at the end of the war and absolutely refused to ever speak of the place. I cannot even begin to imagine how nasty the place was.

 

The Allies had the same problems with masses of POWs at the end of the North African campaign in Tunisia.

 

Prisoner-of-war enclosure at Mateur.—The most famous, and notorious, prisoner-of-war enclosure in northern Tunisia was located just north of Mateur (captured on 3 May 1943) on the farmyard plain at the foot of Djebel Achkel. A photograph (fig. 32) of the crowding there on the unsheltered sand on 9 May is more expressive than many words. These men were a large portion of the 275,000 prisoners that were captured by the Allies in the last week of the fighting in Tunisia.

 

In spite of the overflow of defeated Axis soldiers, some efforts at preventive medicine were made, even in the teeming barbed wire enclosure at Mateur. General Bradley, who watched the scene unfold, wrote, as follows:

 

* * * We anticipated 12,000 or 14,000 PWs. By nightfall, however, the Germans had overrun our cages. German engineers were conscripted under their own noncoms to expand the enclosure. We doubled and soon tripled that original compound.

 

For two days, as far as one could see, a strange procession of PWs trailed up the road from Mateur as though on a holiday junket.

 

Some came in long convoys of GMC's guarded only by an occasional MP atop each cab with a rifle. [As in the European theater, most of the prisoners were so docile that they did not need guards, but guides to the enclosures.] Others traveled in giant sand-colored Wehrmacht trucks bearing the palm-tree markings of the Africa Korps. On bicycles, farm carts, motorcycles, gun carriages, even burros, they trailed contentedly toward the cages. By the time this flow thinned down we had counted 40,000.

 

When General Eisenhower saw something of the handling of hordes of enemy prisoners of war in the European theater in 1945, he recalled “the time in Tunisia when the sudden capture of 275,000 Axis prisoners caused me rather ruefully to remark to my operations officers, Rooks and Nevins:

 

‘Why didn’t some staff college ever tell us what to do with a quarter of a million prisoners so located at the end of a rickety railroad that it's impossible to move them and where guarding and feeding them are so difficult.

[roque_riojas]

YEP--- THINGS WERE ROUGH ALL OVER. I DIDN'T REALIZE THE MPS'

HAD IT THAT BAD. I WAS IN AN AREA WHERE I NEVER GOT TO SEE

NONE OF THAT. ROCKY

[206thmpco]

Really great info Larry! I had no idea there were that many POWs - especially in North Africa. The photo of the POW enclosure at Mateur is incredible.

No wonder there were so many MPs going back & forth to the states as "escorts".

My Dad mentioned in his letters that some MP buddies saw him when he was in Casablanca & stopped to say hello. You get the impression that he was envious of both the MPs and the POWS who got to go back to the States - even for a short time.

Italy & France were bad, but it was North Africa that my father hated - the heat, the sand,

the people - everything.

 

With all those unanticipated masses of PWs, there must've been huge potential for disease outbreak. Our guys got a zillion injections for every imaginable disease before they left the US, but what about the POWS? When you think about all the precautions

for disease at Ellis Island and here are all these POWS coming to the US with possibly

infectious & untreated diseases.