Pete Mayhall's Aliceville Experiences IV

Above are the final three Aliceville photographs from Bruce Mayhall. They definitely capture the mood and setting of the time. Above left are a couple named Dot and Hugh in front of Jones Drugs. Above right are Billy Mouchette and Olga Gibson out for a bike ride, and bottom right is Mr. McDaniel, the owner of the bowling alley where many MPEG guards took their dates for fun on weekends.

When WWII ended in Europe, Pete Mayhall was able to combine his quartermaster experience and his experience with POWs to qualify for a position involved in disassembling the huge Allied quartermaster service in Cherbourg. In this effort, he used German POWs captured in France as his work force. This process took until approximately September 1945. He returned to the US on January 5, 1946.

After the war, Pete and Ruth Mayhall lived with his parents in Phil Campbell, Alabama for about three months before moving to Florence, Alabama. When their son Bruce wrote about their experiences in May 2008, they had been happily married for 64 years.

My thanks again to Bruce Mayhall for sharing his father's story and these special photographs.

Pete Mayhall's Aliceville Experiences III.

Jones Drugstore was a familiar gathering place in Aliceville during WWII. The first photo in this blog entry shows Billie Frances Pate standing in front of the drugstore which had a soda fountain.

This second photo shows Pete Mayhall's sister Bernice and her husband Hiram in front of the MPEG barracks at Camp Aliceville in 1944.

The stockade office inside the prison compound at Camp Aliceville was the storage location for money and personal items taken from German POWs when they arrived at the camp. These possessions were carefully recorded so they could be returned to the POWs at the end of the war.

Pete Mayhall has said that he didn't find it necessary to speak or understand German while at Camp Aliceville because many of the POWs spoke English. Before the war, they had been teachers or actors or had held other jobs requiring education.

Pete and Ruth Mayhall were with his sister Bernice and her husband at their home near the compound on the night of an attempted prisoner escape. They heard the sirens and the shots, and Pete recalls that the camp authorities had gotten intelligence that a break would be tried. His memory is that three or four prisoners were involved, and that guards in the towers fired on all of them.

Pete Mayhall's Camp Aliceville Experiences II.

Pete Mayhall married Ruth Clement on February 15, 1944 at the Sandusky, Alabama home of one of her former high school teachers. She joined him in Aliceville, and he then moved with her from his quarters in the camp compound to upstairs rooms in a house owned by the man who ran the bowling alley in Aliceville.

Ruth Clement Mayhall is seen at left. Her ID pass for Camp Aliceville is dated 6 March 1944. They shared a downstairs bathroom with another couple who rented rooms downstairs in the McDaniel house.

During the next three months, Pete and Ruth enjoyed picnics and travels through the Alabama countryside with other young military couples, including Pete's sister Bernice and her husband Hiram who was also stationed at Camp Aliceville.

Then came the secret plans for D-Day. Pete was on a ship crossing the Atlantic on June 6, 1944 when the invasion occurred http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm. His ship was constantly zigzagging to avoid German U-boats and their torpedoes. Once in Europe, he was part of the second wave of American troops to land, and he remained in Europe until the fall of 1945. His brother-in-law Hiram was shipped to Europe shortly after Pete. Both men survived the war, and Hiram remained in the Army after the end of the war.

Pete Mayhall's Camp Aliceville Experiences I.

Bruce Mayhall recently shared some of his father's experiences at Camp Aliceville during World War II, and I am happy to post these for my readers. Bruce wrote about these experiences in May 2008.

After enlisting in the Army in May 1942, Glen Howard "Pete" Mayhall was assigned to the Induction Center at Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabama, where he interviewed draftees until April 1943 http://www.mcclellan.army.mil/Info.asp. Then his brother-in-law Hiram Duncan, who was an Army private, told Pete about a new company being formed for Camp Aliceville. Both men were promoted and sent to Aliceville, arriving before the first group of prisoners did in June 1943.

Pete was assigned to work in the company office, but after the German POWs began to arrive, he was moved into the compound and worked for the officer in charge, Captain Scott C. Strohecker. They worked with a First Lieutenant (possibly Nat Aicklen) as well as one or two secretaries who were civilian employees of the camp.

Pete's brother-in-law Hiram worked in the American section of the camp, and he and Bernice (Pete's sister) rented a house across the road from the camp.

The compound office, where Pete worked, was located in a building that sat between the housing for American soldiers and the compounds occupied by the German POWs. In the early years of Camp Aliceville, the prisoners organized much of their own lives inside the compounds, and the three Americans in the stockade office (Strohecker, the first lieutenant, and Mayhall) were among the few Americans who had access to the compound. Pete remembers that, when hard-core Nazis caused trouble with other prisoners, they were shipped out to other camps.

Pete remembers that the 1929 Geneva convention requirements about equal food and housing for prisoners were followed carefully, and that this caused considerable resentment among local citizens. On one occasion, a POW spokesman came to Pete and complained about the amount of bread the prisoners were receiving. Pete told him they were getting the same amount as the American guards, but Captain Strohecker, who was of German descent, understood the cultural differences and allowed more bread.

Prisoners often came to the stockade office with requests for materials they could use for creative projects to ward off boredom. Once, a prisoner named W. Reissig, who was an artist, asked for help in locating things he could paint. Later, Reissig gave Pete a painting he had created on mattress ticking with improvised colors found in the infirmary. The scene, Life on the Mississippi, reproduces a postcard Reissig obtained. This painting still hangs on the wall of the bedroom Bruce Mayhall sleeps in when he visits his parents' home in Florence, Alabama.

More of Pete Mayhall's recollections and photos of Alicevile during WWII will appear in subsequent blog entries.

Father of Heidelberg Waitress Spent Most of War at Camp Aliceville

I had an interesting e-mail recently from a man named John Coon, who is retired from the US Air Force. He spent the years 2000 to 2008 working for the US military near Heidelberg, Germany.


Shortly before returning to the United States, Mr. Coon was having dinner in a restaurant near Heidelberg when the English-speaking German waitress commented on his Southern drawl. During their subsequent conversation, she told him that her father had spent most of WWII at Camp Aliceville, and she knew many things about the former POW camp.

Mr. Coon plans to return to Germany and will try to find out more about her memories. If he does, I will post the information here.

He also reported the sad news that John Michael Parrish, son of Wendell Parrish, passed away near the end of September at the age of 61. Those of you who have read Guests Behind the Barbed Wire will remember that Wendell Parrish was the American airman who was interned at Stalag Luft IV and provided the contrasts for me between American POW experiences in Germany and those of German POWs at Camp Aliceville. We offer our sincere condolences to Wendell and his family.

PLEASE NOTE: The photos in this blog entry were provided by John D. Coon and are used with his permission.

Mobile, AL Newspaper Shares German POW Story

A friend in south Alabama recently sent me a clipping from the Press-Register in Mobile. It was about a 74-year-old woman who remembered being a 10-year-old when her father supervised a work force of German POWs who were transported from Loxley to the Hallett Lumber Company in Mobile during WWII.



Shirley Mosley's father was made a deputy sheriff and was authorized to carry a gun so he could guard the prisoners who worked in the lumberyard. Loxley (in Baldwin County) was one of 20 satellite labor camps in Alabama that housed German POWs on temporary work details. One of the Germans told Mosley's father that he was not a Nazi and had been a college professor in Germany before the war.



Sometimes, the POWs were given scraps of wood, and at one point, the former college professor built and stained a wooden jewelry box that he gave to Mosley's father as a gift for her teenage sister. The box contained an inscription burned into the inside of the lid. It read as follows:



German soldat - Wilhelm Lisicky, Berliner. P. W. Camp Loxley - 1945, War 1939-1945.



If anyone reading this column has additional information about Wilhelm Lisicky, it would be interesting to know what happened to him after the war and what he did with his life. You can send a comment to me at this blog and/or contact newspaper reporter Hope Northington at PO Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.

Independence Day Claims Judge Robert Hugh Kirksey

Aliceville, Alabama native Robert Hugh Kirksey passed away on Saturday, July 4, after a fall at his home on July 1. He was 87. Appropriately, this Alabama patriot shares his date of passing with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who also left this world on July 4.

The photo at left, which appears in Kirksey's memoir, With Me: Growing Up in the Faith, shows him with his grandson, Richard Kirksey Heard, on the day the Aliceville "Avenue of Flags" was dedicated in about 1987.

I did not know Judge Kirksey well, but his memoir, along with a series of historical articles for the Pickens County newspaper, was a huge source of information and inspiration as I worked to recreate Aliceville during WWII in my book, Guests Behind the Barbed Wire. He brought the town that hosted Camp Aliceville to life on the page, and his daughter Mary Bess (Paluzzi) became one of my favorite friends as she read my manuscript chapter by chapter and pointed me in so many good directions. My prayers are with her and her family as they remember a wonderful husband, father, and grandfather.

Those of you who have read Guests Behind the Barbed Wire will remember the wartime stories of Robert Hugh Kirksey who was home on leave when the first German prisoners came into Aliceville on the Frisco in early June 1943. Kirksey served as a First Lieutenant in the 333rd Regiment of the 84th Infantry Division. He was awarded several medals, including the Purple Heart, for an injury suffered in Germany.

One of the images from his memoir that stands out in my mind is a story on page 158 that describes his troop train pulling into the railway station in Birmingham, England as he was headed for the front in Europe. "As we sat in our train in that station, another train, headed North, back toward Scotland, stopped on the track just opposite us," he wrote. "We pressed our faces against the windows and looked across at that train. Its passengers had their faces similarly pressed to their windows. 'Look!' some soldier said in a loud voice. "They're German prisoners!'

"That startling coincidence probably stunned me more than anyone else on our train, for immediately the thought flashed in my mind, 'What if they are going to the German Prisoner of War Camp in Aliceville, Alabama. Here we are, reluctantly headed for their homeland; and there they are reluctantly headed, perhaps, for ours.'...The pathos of war was etched in my mind and I can see those German faces clearly in my mind, even today."

That simple story said it so well.

When I pulled my copy of With Me from the shelf this afternoon to find that story, I came across the inscription Judge Kirksey wrote on the title page on March 1, 2005. "To Ruth Cook--Thank you. May God continue with you, as he has with me!"

May God Bless and Keep Robert Hugh Kirksey.