It was a long way from the World War II battlefields in Europe and Africa, but Italian and German prisoners were brought to America where they were held in a variety of prisoner of war camps. The largest in Wyoming was Camp Douglas.
The prisoners took part in farming and ranching operations in Converse County and other areas of the state due to a shortage of local men to do the work.
During this time there was a great shortage of young men to perform the work in sawmills and the woods as most of them had been drafted or enlisted in the armed forces.
This lack of manpower led to a World War II prisoner of war camp at Ryan Park in the Snowy Range of south-central Carbon County.
R. R. Crow, the owner of the sawmill and logging operations in the Upper North Platte River Valley, requested prisoners of war (POWS) to help with his sawmill and also to work in the woods, cutting the timber needed for the mill. His request was granted and Italian and German prisoners were housed in the mountain town from 1943 to 1945.
A brief history of the occasion recalls:
“A caravan of more than a dozen buses carrying Italian prisoners of war and their guards passed through Saratoga Sunday, enroute (sic) to Ryan Park, where the prisoners are now employed by R. R. Crow & Co., in timber operations there,” The Saratoga Sun reported Oct. 28, 1943.
The original 114 prisoners were guarded by 40 Army guards and housed at the former Ryan Park Civilian Conservation Corps camp, 20 miles southeast of Saratoga. A month later another 50 prisoners arrived at the camp, the Sun reported.
The prisoners came to Ryan Park from a similar camp in Douglas.
“The Crow Company has found the procurement of manpower an almost insurmountable obstacle to production for some months past, and it is through the securing of war prisoners labor that will result in a much-desired stepping up of production at the company’s local sawmill,” the Sun reported.
Because the prisoners lacked experience in the timber industry a training program was required. “Ten of the most experienced workers on the Crow company staff were released to the Department of Education for the sole purpose of bringing the prisoners of war up to an acceptable rate of production,” according to the Sun.
Early in January 1944, there were 190 men at the camp. Some 160 of them cut, skidded (or moved), and decked (or stacked) the logs with the remaining 30 working as camp cooks and attendants. By the following March, the program was well underway and termed a success. Between 190 and 299 prisoners were employed in the area that first winter.
In the woods the men were organized 10 to a squad with four squads to a unit. At that time five trainers taught the men the handling of tools and horses and how to fall timber, according to a Sun report.
In January 1944, production reached an average of 300 feet per day, cut, skidded, and decked per war prisoner. Even so, the production capacity was only about 25 percent of that of a skilled worker, the Sun noted.
(Cowboy State Daily Staff) 
(Cowboy State Daily Staff)
They Need to Learn the Ropes
By March, the recommendation was to have the training of the POWs continue until they are "able to produce about 80 percent of the production of a skilled woods worker," the Sun reported.
Meryle Hansen was one of the trainers of the prisoners. He had worked for Crow prior to the war as a cat skinner building roads. He was among the skilled timber workers hired to oversee and train the prisoners.
Every morning Hansen and the other instructors met at the prison camp where they were assigned groups of 10 prisoners to work with during the day.
They went in trucks from the camp to the North Brush Creek and South Brush Creek areas where the timbering activities were underway, Hansen said. Hanson also said that a couple of barns in the area were used to keep horses for the timber crews. Local ranchers Clyde Wiant and Fred Ward cared for the horses.
When the prisoners arrived at the barns, the barn bosses would have the horses ready to go. Prisoners who were skidding – or dragging the logs to areas for transportation to the mill – would pick up a horse and begin work.
The workers would hook the logs to harness on the horses, enabling the animals to pull – or skid - the logs to the loading areas. At night when they returned, the barn bosses unharnessed and cared for the animals.
Trees to be cut were marked by the instructor, Hansen said. At noon, lunch for the prisoners was delivered in a steam truck with a hot meal provided from the POW camp at Ryan Park. While the prisoners ate their hot lunch, the civilian instructors made do with a cold sack lunch, Hansen recalled.
The Italian prisoners were kept at the camp until early April 1944, when they were recalled to the Camp at Douglas, the Sun reported on April 13, 1944.
Not long after the Italians were removed, German prisoners were brought in to take their place. The Italian prisoners were "more trustworthy” than the Germans who replaced them and therefore had more privileges, Hansen recalled. He said that the Germans were hard workers, but they did cause more problems for the guards.
Escapees Found at the Rodeo Grounds
On July 20, 1944, the Sun reported that four prisoners who had escaped were rounded up by Marshal Harry Davidson.
The prisoners had walked away from their work on a Friday and were found the next Monday sitting in the grandstand of the rodeo grounds on the east edge of Saratoga. They offered no resistance when apprehended by authorities. Soon thereafter the four escapees were returned to the Douglas POW camp.
In 1945 the Ryan Park camp was closed and the prisoners sent home via England. The site of the camp is now operated as the Ryan Park Forest Service campground.
Of course, not everyone was happy with a POW camp in Wyoming as pointed out in an editorial in a November 1943 Cheyenne Wyoming Eagle in response to an article in the Saratoga Sun. The editorial reads, in part:
“Political and Otherwise”
“Last week's issue of the Saratoga Sun related that 150 war prisoners from the camp at Douglas are at work for the R. R. Crow Timber company in Carbon county. Inquiry in Cheyenne revealed that the number of war prisoners to be so "employed" is to be increased to 300.
“What's funny about that? Nothing at all except that this is an educational project authorized and supervised by the state department of education.
“The educational feature of the project is supposed to derive from the fact that these war prisoners who recently were engaged in the business of shooting down American soldiers in North Africa are being educated in the art of logging—through the beneficence of the state department of education with benefit of a grant from the federal treasury.
“The logs will be ‘processed’ in the sawmills of R. R. Crow company at or near Saratoga.
“(Mr. Crow is a staunch Republican—[and] twice was a candidate for the nomination for the U. S. senate in the Republican primaries).
“And who are the teachers? Well 10 or 11 of the Crow Lumber company's employees have been put on the payroll of the department of education. They are the faculty, as it were.
“These loggers turned teachers, however, do not suffer the financial handicaps of school teachers who teach Wyoming youth in Wyoming schools. Not at all.
“These Crow employees who have switched to the department of education payroll are paid $1.50 per hour for a 44-hour week. We can imagine that many Wyoming district school teachers that is fancy wages. And we believe there are members of the University of Wyoming faculty who willing would trade their pay checks for one of the pay checks that will go to the state department of education’s ‘teachers”’ at or near Saratoga.
“This project no doubt is strictly on the up-and-up. But we never heard of the state department of education paying $1.50 an hour for teachers to teach American youth how to chop down a tree or any other kind of a trade. And if the department of education were staffed by Democrats, we can imagine the nasty things the Republicans would be saying about the waste of federal funds in the timber near Saratoga. They will continue to sob about federal expenditures, but they will not mention the steady flow of federal funds through the department of education—as long as that department is staffed by Republicans.
“For this ‘logging school’ near Saratoga is only one of a number of projects engaged in by the department of education which in the eyes of the taxpayers who pay the bill are of questionable value.”
R.R. Crow Gives His Opinion
That editorial in the Wyoming Eagle required a reply from Ralph Crow, the lumber operator.
His Dec. 2nd, 1943, letter to the Sun editor reads, in part:
“It has come to my attention that the Wyoming Eagle has used a recent article in your paper as a basis for their editorial on the use and training of Italian prisoners of war in our industry. The writer of the article in the Wyoming Eagle seems to have pretty much mis-understood what the purpose was behind this Italian prisoner of war project and who hoped to benefit by the use of these men, and I will try in this letter to clarify these points.
“During the last two years this operation has undertaken the production and delivery of railroad and coal mine materials used exclusively in transportation, and lumber used for the most part in direct war industries.”
The letter notes that despite the efforts of The War Production Board, United States Employment Service, three independent employing agents, and the timber firm itself it was impossible “to provide us the manpower necessary to fill these critical war orders. . . .In spite of all these efforts on our part we have been falling farther and farther behind in our production and delivery of the products of this plant. During the last year we found it possible to operate at less than twenty-five percent of capacity because of the manpower shortage.
“The War Production Board, the War Manpower Commission, the United States Forest Service, and others have done all in their power to provide us the necessary men, and these three agencies called our attention to the possibility of using Italian prisoners of war being held in the United States Army prisoner of war camp at Douglas, Wyoming,” Crow wrote.
“We immediately began negotiating with the United States Army for the use of a number of these war prisoners to work in our logging camps in the production of saw logs only, this work to be paid for by us on the same basis identically as if free American labor were available and employed for the same purpose.
“Should an unforeseen circumstance occur, which would make it possible for logs produced by Italian prisoners of war to cost less money than if they had been produced by free American labor, an amount sufficient to equalize the cost of these logs must be paid by us to the United States Government.
“None of these war prisoners were experienced timber workers and, as is the case with all inexperienced men, a long period would be wasted while these men learned to cut and skid logs unless training was provided, and since the more logs these prisoners could cut the greater would be their earnings for the Government and the greater their contribution to the war, the Government, through the Wyoming State Department of Education, undertook to train then.
“Logically the only persons qualified to train these men were people already experienced. The experienced men on our operation are earning from $60.00 to $110.00 a week on their regular jobs, and considerable difficulty is being encountered in keeping enough of these men with the prisoners as trainers at rates of pay authorized by the State Department of Education.
“This Company is paying the Government the same rates for the services of these prisoners of war that it has contracted to pay members of Local M-154, International Wood Workers of America, CIO. If the project is successful and the war prisoners learn to produce the logs that are needed on this operation it will greatly help us in the production of critical war materials.—Signed: Yours very truly, R. R. Crow, President (with) cc: Mr. Sam Hitchcock, State Director Vocational Education, Department of Education, Cheyenne, Wyoming.”
The Union Objects
Although the Wood Workers union also objected to using POWs as timber workers, the union soon withdrew the complaint when they couldn’t provide adequate workers to fill the jobs needed to produce lumber for the war effort.
The use of the Italian POWs for timber harvest and sawmill operations at R. R. Crow company continued until the spring of 1944, when the German prisoners replaced them. The men who took part in the operation provided critical work during those years when so many young local men were serving the nation in both the European and Pacific theaters of war.
Dick Perue can be reached at rrichardperue@gmail.com
