aynsley andras staff writer
More than 12,000 prisoners of war (POW) were sent to Louisiana during World War II, with 2,073 sent to camps in the Bayou Region to live in the communities and work the local industries.
“You take a soldier out of the war to ship him 5,000 miles away,” says Glenn Falgoust, local historian and Vacherie native. “He’s as scared of what’s going on to him as the people sitting in their homes around Donaldsonville are of him. So it’s a mutual scenario.”
"You take a soldier out of the war to ship him 5,000 miles away — He’s as scared of what’s going on to him as the people sitting in their homes around Donaldsonville are of him."
Between 1942-1945, more than 425,000 prisoners of war were sent to over 700 camps throughout the United States, mostly located in the South and Southwest, according to the National Park Service. In the Bayou Region, POWs were housed in areas to help with local industry like sugar cane.
“They [local men] just left the territory for like four years, so these sugarcane plantations were in trouble,” says Falgoust. “With no labor, you can’t produce a crop. So here comes the big question about the POWs, what to do with them.”
Several camps were located in the Bayou Region including Donaldsonville, Thibodaux, Houma and Montegut. The Thibodaux camp, located in north Thibodaux on Coulon Road, housed 485 prisoners. Donaldsonville hosted one of the biggest camps in South Louisiana at the Donaldsonville State Fair Grounds, housing about one thousand prisoners, says Falgoust.
The Houma camps came later because of a War Department rule preventing camps within 150 miles of any coast, according to the book Hard Scrabble to Hallelujah Legacies of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana by Christopher E. Cencac Sr. and Claire Domangue Holler. But Louiaiana’s senators got the rule changed so prisoners could work in the sugarcane fields. The first camp in Houma was located near North Woodlawn Plantation house on Woodlawn Ranch Road and the second was on West Main Street between Boykin Street and Wolfe Parkway near Terrebonne High School.
The prisoners ranged from 16-50 years of age, and life in the camps was strict, Falgoust says. The prisoners were not allowed anything relating to the war once they were captured. They were, however, allowed to write letters to their families.
The POWs would work six days a week at farms and would start their days at 4 a.m. Prisoners in the Thibodaux, Houma, and Donaldsonville camps worked mostly in the sugarcane fields. Depending on the location of the camps, the prisoners would work on planting trees, shrubs, cotton, rice, and sugar. The local farmers were responsible for transporting their prisoner workers. Falgoust says the policy was that prisoners who did not work did not get to eat.
Some of the prisoners of war got close to the families at the sugarcane farms where they worked. Some would even feed the prisoners.
“I do know they were very hungry,” says Linda Theriot, an executive at Houma Regional Military Museum. “They didn’t get a lot of food. The owners of the plantation and the neighbors would invite them in to eat. These prisoners of war were not per se criminals for the community. They were criminals only for war.”
