Martin Bender
The German Officer commanded “Aktioin, Sieg heil.” The German prisoners of war quickly fell into formation at attention. With a return “Heil Hitler” salute, each POW shouldered a cotton sack. The work party, one of many that October morning in 1944 in Arizona, was formed and ready to attack a local cotton field.
Mechanical cotton harvesting equipment would not become widely available until the late 1940s and early 1950s. The use of volunteer prisoner of war labor was essential to address the impact of the workforce shortage on the homefront in World War II. In Arizona and other states, cotton farmers contracted with the U.S. Government for the volunteer POWs to work the cotton harvest at a wage of 80 cents a day. With a daily quota of 150 pounds of cotton per man, the POWs received a portion of that daily pay with the remainder going to the U.S. Army for food, housing, and transportation.
Except for Vermont, every state during World War II had POW camps. Of the 1,204 camps nationwide, 39 were in Arizona.
The largest POW camp on American soil was constructed in 1942 and 1943 in Florence, Ariz. The five-acre Camp Florence complex contained barracks, a hospital, bakery, swimming pool, athletic fields, mess halls, and recreational buildings all surrounded by a high barbed wire fence and strategically located guard towers. By June 1945, the compound held 12,772 German soldiers and sailors.
In addition to Camp Florence, smaller branch camps were constructed to locate POWs throughout the agricultural areas of Pinal and Pima County. Eleven-Mile Corner near Florence held 500 German POWs in May 1945. Eloy #1 had a maximum population of 848 Germans in May 1944. Eloy #2 held 292 Italians in July 1944 and 1,703 Germans in June 1945. Casa Grande #1 was home to 1,025 German prisoners in May 1945, and Casa Grande #2 had a population of 226 in October 1945. Other branch camps under the Camp Florence command were built in Stanfield and Marana.
No records were kept showing the percentage of the Arizona cotton crops harvested by POWs during the war years. By the end of the war, however, 90% of the Maricopa County cotton crop is considered a reliable historical estimate as having been picked by prisoners of war.
Repatriation of the POWs after VE Day in May 1945 was a logistical challenge. The focus was on bringing U.S. troops home from Europe. The U.S. Army received and granted requests from cotton farmers to delay the movement of some POWs to cover the labor needs for the 1945 fall cotton harvest. Records kept by the Santa Cruz Valley Producers Association in Pima County show 43.6% of the season’s crop, 1,860,863 pounds of cotton, was picked by approximately 225 POWs between October 1945 and February 1946. The Santa Cruz Valley Historical Society has placed a placard at the Quail Creek Veterans Memorial Park memorializing the significant contribution of the prisoners of war to the survival of the area’s wartime economy.