Continued from October 13th.
Roland Brashears got together with a reporter from the Grady County (Ok) Express-Star and recounted his memories at the prison camp.
"All this area was fenced off with about eight to ten foot high barbed wire fence to keep the prisoners in. You know, actually they didn't want to escape. It was better than what they had where they came from. Here they got three meals a day, cigarettes and a place to sleep. The guards carried rifles, but because of the Geneva Convention rules they weren't even loaded.
I didn't find out until later that when our boys would go overseas, they would send the POWs back on the troop shops. Since our boys were gone fighting, we needed the POWs to work the farms."
Farmers could come to the camp and make deals for the prisoners. They had to haul the prisoners back and forth to the fields and each truck had an interpreter.
There were escapes occasionally, but they always came back. "Where were they going to go? And, they couldn't speak English."
The Germans would not get intothe trucks if they were dirty, "We would have to take the cattle out at night, clean out the truck and have it ready to go for them to load at 6 a.m.. They carried their own lunchbox. The farmers didn't have to feed them."
More to Come. --Cooter
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