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Let's Remember Benton Harbor...
On 15 April 1944 the 475
MPEG returned to the familiar surroundings of Fort Custer,
Michigan. Six days later it was taken by trucks
to the Van Buren County fairgrounds at Hartford,
Michigan........
..............Duty: Transform
the Grandstand into a POW Side Camp....... |
| ....While
awaiting the arrival of the first POW work details, the
company was divided into clean-up crews to
prepare the interiors of the rooms under, in, and around
the grandstand for use as housing, ablutions, offices, and
mess halls for the troops and the POWs. It
found many of these festooned
with crepe paper streamers and littered
with discarded paper cups and other debris,
leftovers from the last fair celebrated here.
All of this was removed in the
course of preparing the rooms for
military use. |
The Hartford Grand Stand is behind
Pvt. John F. Belshaw, Finnegan, and the truck
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| ....In
due time the camp received its first shipment of POWs. Their
first job was to build a secure fence to create
a stockade to enclose the POW side camp. As soon as stockade security
was assured a complement of POWs from Fort Custer arrived to begin
working in various agriculture-related jobs. Soon work details
were sent out to work in the fields,
orchards, and vineyards of Southwestern Michigan.
This should have proved educational for those guards whose hometowns
were large cities. I learned how to plant celery and
how to protect the young plants from possible frosts.
Besides the outdoor work, |
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POWs were contracted to work for
the House of David in their refrigerated and frozen
food storage warehouses in St. Joseph, Michigan.
(Personal
note: Being stationed at Ft.Custer and
Hartford allowed me to visit Kalamazoo many times.
My file of letters to my wife-to- be has nothing in that date range.
Why not? Every opportunity for an over-
night pass found me hitchhiking
to Kalamazoo. I was such a fixture
on U.S. 12 that I had regular rides from truck
drivers who delivered me on her doorstep. I also had
a number of rides |
| from a particular state trooper
who acquaintance I had made while chasing a POW
detail which was cutting weeds near the highway.) |
...
.........Meanwhile,
the troops of the 475
found the natives to be friendly. Some of the 18- and 19-year-olds
found this to be especially true of the high school girls and recent graduates.
According to our CO, the ladies of Hartford almost
depleted the stockade of guards on Mothers’ Day in competition
with one another to have a GI grace their dining room. This was often
to replace the son for whom a blue star was hung in a front window.
Much of this was chronicled in the Hartford Day Spring. ..
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Pvt. Ray Roberts, Pvt. John Ullian
Eleanor Tuttle, Pvt. Jack Belshaw
at Hartford, Michigan 1944
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..........In
addition to their interaction with the
friendly folks of Hartford the men of the 475
found the cities of Benton Harbor and St.Joseph
to be good liberty towns within convenient distance
for overnight passes. These were celebrated
in a song that was sung to the tune of “Let’s Remember
Pearl Harbor.”
Let’s remember
Benton Harbor
Let’s remember Benton
Harbor
As we go to meet the
foe.
Let’s remember Benton
Harbor
And its neighboring
Saint Joe.
From the Lion Bar
to the Pine Pub
And the Saint Vincent
Hotel
Let’s remember Benton
Harbor
And the rest can go
to hell.
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.....On
May 22, 1944, the 475
MPEG Co. returned by truck to Fort Custer, Michigan
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