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Ship in a Bottle

By Lance Nixon

German prisoners of war were put to work harvesting beets on Jack Rathbun’s farm near Nisland.

The war hit home for the Lungrens on a Sunday in December.

“I can remember the Sunday when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” says Don Lungren of Pierre, who grew up in a German-speaking home near Vale.”We went to church. We came home, and on Sunday, Dad always turned on the radio to hear what the markets were going to be on Monday morning in Sioux City. Most of the time we didn’t have anything to sell, but he had to know what the markets were.”

On that Sunday in 1941, his father tuned in the set, as always; but he might have let it stay on longer than usual.”They were making a lot of noise on that radio, I can remember that — yelling and stuff,” Lungren recalls.”Dad shut it off and he told Mom he was going to see Grandpa.”

Lungren’s father returned with a strict order:”Henceforth, we don’t speak German anymore.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war against Japan and its ally, Germany. Perhaps because of the mistreatment of ethnic Germans in the U.S. during World War I, and perhaps because of fears that Japanese and German speakers might be suspected of harboring sympathies with the enemy, the family stopped speaking German then and there.

That Sunday the Lungren children also realized Germans were on the other side of the war. And if they had any doubts that Germans were the adversaries, there was more proof. South Dakota would be one of the places where German prisoners of war were stationed as World War II dragged on.

The first prisoners of war arrived in America in May 1942. Historian Arnold Krammer, who has written extensively about the era, notes that not only Germans but also Italian and Japanese soldiers would spend time in American internment camps before the effort ended in July 1946.

“It is remarkable how many people don’t realize that we held nearly 425,000 German POWs (as well as 53,000 Italian and 5,000 military Japanese prisoners) in some 550 camps across the country. They worked in factories, hospitals and brought in the crops since our boys were overseas fighting in the war,” Krammer told us.

In South Dakota, German POWs ended up in parts of Meade and Butte counties doing fieldwork; in Yankton doing bank stabilization work on the Missouri River; in northeastern South Dakota; and in the Sioux Falls area.

“Every farmer in the valley here used German prisoners for a couple years,” says David Rathbun of Nisland, who was about 9 and 10 at the time his family benefited from POW labor in the fields. His brother Grove, four years older, would drive the truck when they went to fetch prisoners from the Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Orman Dam.

The Rathbuns transported prisoners in their 1937 Ford beet truck. An American guard followed in the family’s Model A pickup.

“It was an old CCC camp in the’30s, and the government turned it into a POW camp. It had machine gun towers and barracks and the whole works, big fence,” Rathbun says.”We’d go up in a truck, get a load of German prisoners, maybe 20 at a time, and haul them back to the farm and they’d work. They had to do so much in a day. I’ll give them credit, they were hard workers.”

During threshing, the German soldiers gathered bundles of barley, oats or wheat into wagons. In that era before combines were common, they also pitched bundles into the threshing machine.

With the sugar beets, the POWs took on many tasks: thinning the beets, hoeing them when they were bigger, pulling them and taking the tops off, loading them on trucks for transport to the railroad, where they were loaded on cars and taken to the factory for processing.

There were also prisoners stationed at nearby Fort Meade. The prisoners came from different sectors of the war, Rathbun recalls.”North Africa was the first ones we got. They came in’43. That’s when we got Rommel’s Afrika Korps prisoners, and they were ornery bastards,” he remembers, referring to the German expeditionary force that fought in Africa under Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler’s favorite generals.”They were the old Nazi type. They stabbed one of their own prisoners, killed him with a butcher knife, up at Orman Dam at the prison camp because he was too friendly with American guards.”

Krammer says such incidents weren’t uncommon, though often concealed by the prisoners.”Almost every camp held a minority of die-hard Nazis who often terrorized the others and sometimes murdered one or two, listing the deaths as suicides.”

The prisoners stayed for growing season, and after harvest were moved to other parts of the country.”They shipped them all out, I don’t know what they did with them,” Rathbun says.”And then in’44, we got prisoners from Normandy. They were just run-of-the-mill German soldiers. They were different. They were damn glad to be out of that war. They didn’t mind working in the beet fields.”

Krammer cites studies saying about 40 percent of German POWs were pro-Nazi. Eight to 10 percent were considered fanatics in their devotion to the Nazi cause, while another 30 percent were”deeply sympathetic.” But just as Rathbun suggested, many of the German POWs were not Nazis.

The prisoners were given small breaks to split up the hours of labor.”Our place had the Belle Fourche River running through it. If they got done early in their work, the guard would let them go swim in the river, and they really liked that,” Rathbun says.

There were even stories that the guard would take a dip with the prisoners now and then.”He did, actually,” Rathbun confirms.”I saw that happen. The guard went swimming and left a sergeant, German sergeant, sitting on the hillside looking for the colonel.”

Locals would often practice German with the prisoners.”There’s a lot of German around here. Our neighbors were Low German, I think, and the prisoners were High German, but they could understand each other. They’d talk all the time.”

Another mode of communication was the universal language of food and drink. Don Lungren recalls that his parents and grandparents, Germans themselves, coaxed extra labor out of the POWs.

“They would make a big 2- or 3-gallon pail of chicken noodle soup, and man, I’ll tell you, they could pick cucumbers twice as fast. And Grandpa, he made better than that. His bribe was that if they would look at the end of the trees, by the hog house, there would be some beer there if they would get those cucumbers picked today. They had them done by noon, I think.”

After long days in the Butte County beet fields, prisoners sometimes enjoyed a swim in the Belle Fourche River.

Lungren said other locals would do favors for the POWs.”My family and most of the German families always gave them a treat — chicken noodle soup from the old roosters and that sort of thing and beer at the end of the grove in the trees. The guard would come. Grandpa would loan the guard his shotgun and the guard could go shoot pheasants. And because the guard couldn’t get the pheasants home, I suppose Grandma cooked the pheasants and fed them to the prisoners.”

Sometimes the farmers got more than they asked.”Grandma told one of the prisoners she wanted some little cucumbers because she wanted to make baby dills,” Lungren said. His grandmother had business to tend to, but when she got back to the field, the Germans had picked two bushels of tiny cucumbers — far more than she needed.”We had baby dills for years.”

Marian Ruff added that for German-speaking families, even though many of them had immigrated to America from German communities in Russia, it was awkward having German POWs work in the fields.

“My family, like the other German families, was looked down on because of the war — because they were Germans,” she said.”With the POWs, I think we felt sorry for them because of the way they were treated. They would bring this truckload of guys out to the Vale area and they would have two armed soldiers with them with rifles in case they tried to escape. They were supposed to shoot them.”

The guards weren’t just for show, Krammer says.

“There were escapes aplenty, but most were caught within three days,” he notes. But, he adds that many prisoners quickly figured out they would be treated decently in America.

“Those assigned to American farms were well-treated and modern flea markets still have POW-made handicrafts which they gave to the children of farm families,” Krammer said.

That was the case in South Dakota, too, Marian Ruff said.”They were just really happy to get out of the prison situation and do something. Several of them put together some ships inside of wine bottles. We have one of those. One was given to my grandpa. Several of the families that these prisoners worked for ended up with one of these ships inside of a bottle. It always fascinated me because I had no idea how they did it. Someone said to me recently, ëWell, they sawed the bottom of the bottle and put the ship in and sealed the bottom back on again,’ but I don’t know if that’s what they really did or not.”

And no one knows what it meant to a German soldier, either — building a ship inside a bottle in a prison camp to give to a German farmer in landlocked South Dakota.

David Ruff of Spearfish, Marian’s husband, grew up near Nisland during the war. He spoke German well enough to understand the German POWs who worked for his father and some of the neighbors.

The Rathbun family dog often provided canine companionship for Germans working the fields.

“I often wondered if they didn’t have feelings knowing that they were in a country so far from their homeland and had people there that could speak their language. I think many of the prisoners were quite pleased to find that there were German-speaking people here. They were appreciative of the extra food that was given them and the friendliness of the farmers that they worked for.

“I don’t know if I personally asked one of them or what, but somehow or another in conversation, I learned from them that they were quite pleased with the treatment they were receiving here. I’m not sure exactly where they became prisoners of war, but they mentioned that when they were in France, they were required to drink out of the troughs that the livestock drank out of.”

POWs also made an impact on the other side of the state. Yankton-area historians Lois Varvel and Kathy K. Grow reflected on the German POWs stationed in Yankton in their 2001 book, The Bridge We Built: The Story of Yankton’s Meridian Bridge. They noted that the Yankton Press & Dakotan reported on April 3, 1945, the arrival of the first contingent of German POWs from the Afrika Korps to take part in Missouri River bank protection work. Officials wouldn’t tell the newspaper how many German POWs would come to Yankton, citing policy on POWs, but the newspaper understood they would make up”a sizable force.”

The POWs worked on a project to make sure the main flow of the Missouri River steered clear of the city of Yankton’s water intake. The work had side benefits for the Meridian Bridge.”We had prisoners of war trucked in from Algona, Iowa, and they did revetment work on the Nebraska shoreline. That was their contribution to protecting the Meridian Bridge,” Varvel says.

After the war ended, most of the 375,000 German POWs went back to Germany — but not all stayed there. Some liked what they had seen of life in America. The United States didn’t track the number of former German POWs who ended up immigrating to the land of their captivity; but it was substantial. Krammer notes that John Schroer, a former POW who immigrated to America after being held as a POW in Alabama, estimated about 5,000 POWs made a similar move. Some reportedly returned to South Dakota, too, where the enemy they had fought showed them decency and kindness in victory.

Editor’s Note: The tally of German prisoners of war in South Dakota at any one time during World War II was a floating figure because they rotated in and out of different states depending on the local harvest and other demands. Curt Nickisch, a South Dakota Public Broadcasting journalist at the time, wrote a story for South Dakota Magazine in 2001 in which he reported the number at more than 1,200 POWs through 1944 and 1945. There are also several books available, including Nazi Prisoners of War in America by Arnold Krammer. This story is revised from the March/April 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Warriors First

By Bernie Hunhoff

The World War I doughboy statue at Rock Creek.

Rock Creek is not a forgotten place. A town must be discovered before it’s forgotten, and most Americans — even most South Dakotans — have never heard of the town on the Standing Rock Reservation. Rock Creek is a dot on the state road map but it’s listed as Bullhead. The U.S. Postal Service still calls it Bullhead (zip code 57621). And road signs on nearby U.S. Highway 12 still point motorists to Bullhead.

“They changed the name to Rock Creek years ago,” says Joseph Montana, commander of the Brough-Brownotter American Legion Post 82, perhaps the most active organization in town other than the elementary school.

Montana believes the change occurred because Bullhead was the name of the man who shot Sitting Bull in 1890. Neither he nor any of the other 300 residents seem to mind what a visitor calls the town. They aren’t likely to correct you, even if you’re writing a story for a magazine.

The people of Rock Creek are busy enough with daily living. Visit on any weekday morning and you’ll hear the happy shrieks of children playing at Rock Creek School. Cowboys might be loading saddled horses onto stock trailers for a trip to the tribal pasture. A young career woman — perhaps a teacher or a nurse — may be fueling her small car at the only gas pump in front of a tiny, old store as rooster pheasants scurry through tall grass on the banks of a nearby creek.

“They know it’s hunting season,” laughed Ivan Brownotter, a community leader and historian, when we asked about the pheasants.”Hunting’s not allowed within a mile of town and when the shooting starts they know enough to come to town.”

Joseph Montana and Ivan Brownotter fly flags on a butte above the little reservation town of Rock Creek.

Posed in the center of Rock Creek is a life-size image of a man with a rifle, a tribute to local soldiers who fought in World War I. Indiana artist E.M. Viquesney sculpted the infantryman and eventually produced more than 100 copies for courthouse squares, city halls and parks across the United States. He titled it The Spirit of the American Doughboy.

South Dakota’s only Viquesney doughboy is the one in Rock Creek. It was placed there in 1935, when the town was still Bullhead, after a $1,600 fundraising drive that culminated when Corson County Sheriff Charles Martin gave $500. The statue has been lovingly maintained in a tiny park with a bomb shell displayed over the entrance. Brownotter and other members of the Legion post recently transplanted ash saplings from the river to create a shady border.

Rock Creek has another unusual sight: Numerous tall steel flagpoles, created by a local welder and planted in cemeteries on the north and south ends of town, mark the graves of every deceased veteran since World War I.

The United States government has had a troubled relationship with Rock Creek and other towns on South Dakota’s nine reservations.Many residents trace their ancestries to Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, two of American history’s most famous warriors who fought the U.S. military, and were killed — martyred in the eyes of the Lakota — as their people were being banished to hardscrabble prairies.

But their deaths and many other atrocities, disagreements, broken treaties and conflicts that divided the Lakota and the federal government have not deterred South Dakota’s Native Americans from signing up with the U.S. military, sometimes joining the very same units that wreaked destruction on their Native culture.

That’s not a mystery for Brownotter, who served in the Army in the 1980s and now devotes much of his spare time to the Legion post’s activities. He sees no contradiction to being a Native American in the military.”We love our country and we go to war to make sure our families are protected and so we can protect our culture and our heritage,” he says, while guiding us around town with Joseph Montana, his first cousin.

Montana came home to Rock Creek after serving in the U.S. Army and then living in Spokane, Washington. “My dad was Lincoln Hairy Chin and he was the commander when I was a boy,” he said.”He did all the work of painting and decorating the doughboy and he was the one who put the bomb up at the gate.”

***

The tradition of military service among Native Americans dates back to the Revolutionary War, when some Indians fought with the colonial army while others sided with the British. Indian men also served as scouts and trackers for the Union during the Civil War. In 1898, four women from the Standing Rock Reservation served the War Department as nurses in the Spanish American War. They belonged to the Congregation of American Sisters, a Catholic convent for Native women started by Father Francis Craft, the first priest ordained in Dakota Territory by legendary Bishop Martin Marty. Father Craft, who had Mohawk ancestry, spent 16 years in the territory and survived the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre; he was attempting to defuse the conflict when the shooting began.

He and the four sisters worked at a military hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, and then were transferred to Havana, Cuba, where life must have seemed very foreign from the reservation prairie.

The Rev. Mother Mary Anthony, the leader of the sisters and a granddaughter of Chief Spotted Tail, died of tuberculosis in Cuba and was buried there with military honors by the Seventh Cavalry, the same regiment that was decimated at the Little Big Horn in 1876 and then killed 300 Indian men, women and children at Wounded Knee.

Holidays for veterans highlight the social calendar at Rock Creek. Major Tim Reisch (back row, second from left) marched with Larry Zimmerman, the state Secretary of Veterans Affairs, in a Veterans Day pow wow.

A generation later, U.S. military officials reached out to tribal leaders during World War I, asking them to encourage young men to join the fight against Germany and its allies. Robert Dunsmore, the veterans’ service officer for the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, says oral history suggests that a general visited with a chief from the Standing Rock Reservation.”Then the chief sent runners to all the other tribes and told them it was OK for the men to go fight,” he says.”We were not even citizens of the United States at that time.”

The federal government had forbidden Indians to conduct traditional religious and cultural practices, such as the Sun Dance, and discouraged them from speaking their native language. Ironically, it was partly their language that captured the attention of some military leaders, who sought out bilingual Indians to transmit secret messages.

Little information can be found on the number of Native American soldiers who died during World War I, but among the 12,000 who served was Moses Clown, a young army private from Thunder Butte in Ziebach County. Forty-two years before Moses joined the army, his father, Amos, had fought Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. His mother, Julia, was the sister of Crazy Horse, who said he would”fight to stay free (or) die a free Lakota if it comes to that.”

Crazy Horse’s death is well documented. Far fewer details are available of his nephew Moses’ death in 1918, but we know it happened during a battle in France, and that he received a hero’s burial in South Dakota.”None who witnessed the scene will ever forget it,” wrote the editor of the Dupree Leader.”The father, mother, brothers and sisters of the dead soldier, together with a large number of their friends, had gathered to await the coming of the train and as it came slowly to rest and the flag-covered coffin in the express car came into view, a great wail of sorrow went up from the waiting throng. As it was unloaded, the grief-stricken Indians gathered around with loud lamentations, laying hands and heads sadly and pitifully upon the flag.”

The next morning, Pvt. Clown’s body was buried several miles north of Thunder Butte, along a peaceful stretch of the Moreau River. The Dupree editor described the scene:”To the visitors it looked like a canvas city as their cars came into view over the summit of surrounding hills and descended to the river bank. In the center was a great teepee that had been specially constructed to contain the body. Its outer side was adorned in Indian fashion with illustrations of the tribal history and Old Glory floated beside at half mast.”

Many descendants of the young soldier still live in the shadow of legendary Thunder Butte — a promontory important to the Lakota and a natural landmark that mountain man Hugh Glass supposedly used to keep his bearings on his 1823 cross-country crawl to survival after being mauled by a grizzly bear.

The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation community of Thunder Butte, named for the nearby peak, has a few dozen houses, a church and school. Most of the residents are Clowns, and many of the grave markers in the cemetery bear that family name, which translates to heyoka in Lakota, meaning a wise person who teaches or leads by communicating in unusual ways.

All the Clowns of Thunder Butte know the history of the soldier who died in 1918, even 18-year-old Arnelle Clown who works as a nurse’s aide in Eagle Butte. She heard stories from older relatives, and has visited Moses’ grave in a small, private family plot several miles from town.

***

Moses Clown’s uncle, Crazy Horse, was killed in 1877 by U.S. soldiers at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. Thirteen years later, Sitting Bull was shot when a contingent of 39 tribal policemen tried to arrest the old warrior and holy man at his cabin because the U.S. military feared that he might join the Ghost Dance movement. Sitting Bull and his teenage son, Crow Foot, died during the botched arrest on Dec. 15, 1890 near the village now called Rock Creek.

Arnelle Clown and her extended family know the story of their ancestors’ war history dating back to Crazy Horse.

Historians believe the first bullet to hit Sitting Bull was fired by Lt. Henry Bullhead, the police leader who was also shot in the melee and died several days later. The community was later named in his honor, possibly by James McLaughlin, the longtime agent for the Standing Rock Reservation. A nearby town bears the name of McLaughlin.

Sitting Bull’s cabin was hauled away in 1893 for an exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago. Today a simple sign marks the spot along the Grand River, a few miles south of the community previously known as Bullhead.

The residents of Rock Creek never made an issue of their town’s former name — they just changed it and went on with life — but the history of the tribe over the past 150 years is complicated and contentious. Lakota leaders still clash with the U.S. government over health care, housing, education, law enforcement, taxation and the environment. A text of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which lists the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, is posted on the tribe’s website. In 2016, Standing Rock Reservation officials led a well-publicized protest over an oil pipeline in North Dakota. But it seems that neither historic nor current disagreements stifle the warrior mentality of serving and defending the homeland.

***

Rock Creek’s social calendar revolves around soldiers and veterans. On Memorial Day, the Brownotters, the Montanas and other veteran families hold services at six nearby cemeteries. Flags are hoisted on every veteran’s grave and an honor guard fires a salute. The second weekend of August is dedicated to a VJ Day pow wow, remembering the 1945 Japanese surrender that ended World War II.

The celebration includes Native dancing, races, tug-of-wars and other games. Teenagers re-enact the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, and the Legion and auxiliary prepare several feasts.”We barbecue a whole cow for each meal,” says Brownotter.”We call it a waechujpi, which kinda means you should fill your plate more than once and then take some home with you.”

Adjutant General Tim Reisch experienced the reservation-style patriotism when he and several other officers of the South Dakota National Guard helicoptered into Rock Creek to participate in last year’s Veterans Day pow wow.”We saw great pride in the military,” he says.”The government conquered them and put them on reservations, broke the treaties, killed the buffalo herds and didn’t even provide them food. You could expect there’d be great animosity, but we see no animosity.”

Reisch agrees with Brownotter and others who credit the patriotism to a warrior culture.”Serving in the military fits their history where the warriors were highly revered. I know that a lot of Native Americans will go to active duty and then go back home, a veteran for life. They are proud of their service.”

Reisch served as sheriff of Miner County and head of the state Department of Corrections before assuming command of the state’s National Guard.”Back when I was in corrections I learned about the over-representation of Native Americans in our prisons, which is pretty disturbing.”

He hopes there may be opportunities in his current position to create more positive statistics.”Even before I had this job, the Guard was big on diversity. But we’ve really focused on it,” he said, pulling from the breast pocket of his uniform a plastic card that lists his nine priorities. Near the top — following family support, readiness and safety — is”Embrace Diversity,” which he describes as not just recruiting Native soldiers but going to great lengths to help them succeed.

A sign in Memorial Park at Rock Creek still refers to the town as Bullhead, its former name.

“Every member of our organization needs to feel that they can make it to the top,” he says.”But if you look at the wall of pictures of generals and senior commanders in our headquarters and nobody there looks like you then you will feel you can’t be in one of those positions.” Under Reisch’s command, the number of Native American guardsmen and women has grown from 100 to 142, a 42 percent increase in seven years. The number of officers has grown from four to seven.

Most of the growth has occurred in the Army National Guard, probably because it has units in 22 towns, including many rural communities near reservations. The Army Guard has also worked on visible projects on the reservations, including hauling timber from the Black Hills for firewood, infrastructure missions and medical support.

Based in Sioux Falls, the Air Guard doesn’t have those outreach opportunities.”The Army Guard has two dozen recruiters and they are spread around the state. The Air Guard has two recruiters in Sioux Falls, and you end up recruiting people like the body of people that are already there — so we have to continue to make an effort to expand from that,” Reisch says.

Despite the Army Guard’s recent successes, Native Americans are under-represented: they constitute 8.9 percent of South Dakota’s population, but only 4.5 percent of the Guard. Native American participation appears to be slightly higher in the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines based on figures from the state Department of Veterans Affairs indicating that 6.2 percent of the state’s 72,030 veterans are Native American.

***

Stories from Rock Creek and other reservation communities further illustrate why Native Americans embrace the warrior culture. Robert Dunsmore, the Cheyenne River Reservation veterans’ service officer, hears them daily.

“If not for code talkers in World War I and World War II and Korea, the U.S. might have lost those wars,” he says.”They were sworn to secrecy, and they kept their words so they never talked about it. We’ve heard there were at least 200 code talkers from South Dakota, but we’ve only identified 70 of them. That’s a part of our history we’ve lost.”

Ron Eagle Charging of Eagle Butte says his father was a code talker who never spoke of the experience but instructed his children on the warrior’s duty.”Boys in the family are taught to fight for those who can’t — the weak, the women, the less fortunate. Even if you have differences among warriors you still fight together. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull never got along but they shared a purpose.”

Paul Lawrence (left) and Ron Eagle Charging of Eagle Butte say Native American veterans struggle for access to health care.

Eagle Charging, 69, is one of several hundred Vietnam veterans on the Cheyenne River Reservation. He began his Vietnam tour as an ammunition specialist.”All I did was put the weapons together. We screwed the rocket heads on and loaded the helicopters.” Out of boredom and curiosity, he volunteered to be a door gunner on a helicopter, a position with a famously short lifespan.

Eagle Charging says he and other door gunners bolstered their courage by smoking marijuana laced with opium.”It made you so you’re not afraid to die,” he says, and it helped temporarily. But he came home with a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes, which he blames on Agent Orange.

Paul Lawrence, a fellow Vietnam veteran and a friend of Eagle Charging, lives with prostate cancer and diabetes. He says Native American veterans face special challenges, especially regarding PTSD.”They (Veterans Administration officials) like to blame the PTSD on the poverty and problems on the reservations instead of what happened to you in the war.”

Eagle Charging laughed in agreement:”To me PTSD is misnamed. Politicians made me sick. The P should be for the politicians.”

On the day we met the two Vietnam vets, they were planning to attend a meeting that was called to examine why the veterans clinic at Eagle Butte had suddenly closed. The story circulating around town was that the contract for the clinic had expired without any prior notification from the VA.

***

Cecilia Brownotter has received two Gold Stars from the U.S. government as recognition of family members lost in battle. Her brother, Joseph Hairy Chin, was killed in World War II, and a son, Dean, died in Vietnam in 1967. Five of her seven sons joined the U.S. military.

A deceased soldier’s marble headstone stands among several hundred graves that lie in a church cemetery at Thunder Butte. Wood crosses, many with names erased by the ravages of time and weather, mark most of the burial sites.

Cecilia, 89, lives with relatives in a small house near Rock Creek’s doughboy. For years, her husband, Clayton, a World War II veteran, and his cousin Lincoln Hairy Chin tended to the statue. Clayton, a tribal councilman, was known as the guy who could raise the funds, while Lincoln preferred the more solitary work of brushing red, white and blue paints on a picket fence that surrounded the doughboy.

Today, the fence is gone. Now the little park features the sacred circle of the Lakota, formed in cement blocks painted white, yellow, red and black. The ash trees from the river valley are starting to grow.

Children at the school watch as adults show respect to the warrior vets with tree plantings, flag raisings and pow wows. Veterans also talk to the youth about the benefits of joining the military.”I tell the kids that you get to see the world,” Ivan Brownotter says.”You learn a trade and you have benefits that will help you further your education.”

He suspects his preaching probably has less impact than the annual events, especially the VJ Day re-enactment of Iwo Jima.”We always give the teenagers plastic guns and helmets and camouflage shirts,” says Brownotter.”We shoot fireworks as the flag goes up on the hill. There are always a few girls who join in. It’s impressive to watch.”

The re-enactment was started long ago when Lincoln Hairy Chin was commander of the Legion post in Rock Creek. Montana, his son, revived it when he returned from Spokane a few years ago to work with the local Head Start program. Montana also founded a group called Band of Brothers that organizes holiday dinners, dances, movie nights and other events for the people of Rock Creek.

The legacies of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull may be partly responsible for a strong military tradition on the reservations, but the present-day service of Montana, Brownotter and their generation plays an even bigger role in how today’s Indian youth view the world that surrounds Rock Creek and zip code 57621.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Bombs Over the Badlands

By Paul Higbee

Once in a while, in or near the Badlands, a hiker will chance upon a gleaming, fully exposed, big caliber shell casing on the white hardpan ground. Sometimes the discoverer guesses it to be a remnant of the frontier wars, maybe from a great Gatling gun.

In fact, it’s a remnant of 20th century military exercises. More than 300,000 acres in southwestern South Dakota were designated by the federal government as a gunnery and bombing range, active from the 1940s into the 1970s.”The Badlands were littered with .30 caliber and .50 caliber shell casings,” says historian Phil Hall, author of Reflections of the Badlands.”And I’ve found some unexploded shells.”

He’s also come across scattered pieces of tin that, brought together, form the shape of World War II era bombs, a couple feet long with fins.

“Dummy bombs,” Hall says.”They looked and flew like real bombs, and they were filled with sand so they had the weight of real bombs.” It was possible, he adds, for dummy bombs to incur real damage, like one that slammed through a church roof in Interior.

Much of this debris was cleared away in recent years, but not all. What remains is easier to find than first-hand accounts of gunnery and bombing action during World War II. The range was cleared of people and livestock in 1942, although some ranchers didn’t hesitate to briefly sneak cattle back when grass conditions were good. There were no reports of civilian ground deaths, and only rumors of animal fatalities.

With a world war looking likely in the late 1930s, South Dakota’s congressional delegation pushed for developing an Army air base within the state. Preliminary plans took form in 1941, and moved into implementation phase after Japanese bombers hit Hawaii that December. By the fall of 1942, Army Air Corps pilots were flying B-17 bombers out of spanking new Rapid City Army Air Base — today’s Ellsworth Air Force Base. Much touted empty land immediately to the southeast helped South Dakota win the base and bomber mission, because airmen-in-training could pelt the rugged terrain with bombs and smaller ammunition.

Only the land wasn’t empty. The Rapid City Daily Journal in 1942 assured readers the range sat south of Badlands National Monument so that tourist travel wouldn’t be impacted. A curious reader could glance at a map and see south of the national monument meant the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. More than 100 families across the reservation’s north side lost homes and ag land when the federal government declared eminent domain.

“My grandfather had an allotment from the time the reservation was started, and in 1942 he and my grandmother had six kids and had just built a new house,” says Clifford Whiting of Kyle.”He had about 400 acres and was given 15 days to get out, and got very little money for the land.”

Unless they were able to enlist, many of those forced out had great difficulty finding work. In the case of Whiting’s grandparents, who had created a sophisticated irrigation system and spring cellar, the reservation lost a key dairy supplier.

None of which, of course, diminished the courage and commitment airmen demonstrated in the skies over the Badlands and reservation. They learned the functions of big four-motor B-17s, manned by crews of 10. Additionally pilots, typically 21 or 22 years old, were expected to develop qualities so they could effectively lead their crews into combat. Full crews included a pilot and copilot, navigator, radioman, engineer, bombardier and gunners. All jobs were tough to master; failing and”washing out” was a universal worry. What’s more, crew members learned as much as they could about one another’s jobs so they could step in when in-flight emergencies struck. Crews who demonstrated top proficiency departed Rapid City for eventual combat stations around the world, including England to become part of the Eighth Air Force as it destroyed the German oil industry and supported the Normandy invasion. Late in the war B-29 bomber crews also trained in Rapid City.

The public always grasped what bombardiers did but sometimes forgot that B-17s and other bombers were also armed with machine guns. Quality machine gunners were essential, and the Army was surprised by how difficult it was to train them. Even country boys who bragged they could dispatch a rabbit at 300 yards found aircraft gunnery — firing at aerial or ground targets from a moving plane — a whole different challenge. Lots of .50 caliber machine gun bullets were spent fixing the deficiency. Hall thinks flaring tracer bullets that accompanied volleys of machine gun fire largely accounted for grassfires that occasionally ignited during maneuvers. Sometimes incidents happened far off the designated range, in surrounding counties and on the Rosebud Reservation. Crews found the vast prairies a navigational challenge.

Whether it was a bomb that wasn’t a dummy, or a tracer bullet, something from a plane triggered a fire half a mile from Sand Hill School east of Wanblee, recalls Joe Stratton. He was a student there, 12 or 13 years old, and he heard no explosion.”It was a grass fire,” he remembers,”but it was early spring or late winter and it didn’t amount to much.” Another time an entire plane dropped from the sky near Wanblee, making a safe landing after an apparent malfunction. Stratton says it was able to fly away off frozen ground after mechanics arrived to make repairs.

Airborne, the B-17 was an impressive sight.”Some of them were quite low, maybe 500 feet or lower,” Stratton says. Future U.S. Senator Jim Abourezk recalled the novelty of seeing a bomber fly over his hometown of Wood when he was a boy. In December of 1943, a B-17 crashed at Soldier Creek west of Mission, killing the crew.”I was awed by the stories of the kids from Mission who had hurried out to pick up pieces of the airplane as souvenirs,” Abourezk wrote in his autobiography. That set up a dilemma for him. He found himself hoping for a bomber crash near Wood, but couldn’t imagine how it could happen”without killing one of our service men.”

Or many more than one. A B-17 accident never rocked Wood, but planes did crash at Rapid City, Kadoka, Soldier Creek and other South Dakota locations, typically resulting in the deaths of all 10 airmen aboard.

After the war ended, the bombing land wasn’t offered to those who previously owned it. The matter of cleanup had to be considered, the federal government said. In the 1960s the South Dakota National Guard gained permission to train there. That was the era, Hall believes, when the use of live ordnance peaked, more so than during World War II. By the 1970s something else explosive played out across Pine Ridge. As more and more residents embraced the idea of tribal sovereignty, questions were raised. What were the feds thinking, repurposing reservation land after the national emergency that justified eminent domain passed? How was it the federal government’s prerogative to invite the state National Guard in, and to eventually transfer part of the bombing range to the Interior Department for creating the Badlands National Park’s south unit? Memories of the government’s assertive presence decades ago still colors discussions about land use today, with issues ranging from grazing leases to a proposed tribal national park.

Eventually some families, including Clifford Whiting’s, were able to repurchase land — at much higher prices than what their parents and grandparents received in 1942, of course.

Ansel Wooden Knife, who ran a cafe at Interior for many years, became a go-to guy for stories about the bombing range. He recalled his mother-in-law’s description of shells hitting her house along Highway 44 during World War II. Wooden Knife found artifacts, sought out abandoned installations and could guide curious people to historically significant sites. A lonely site some consider the epicenter of bombing range history sits north and west of Potato Creek. A hilltop is ringed with 80 or 100 old cars, forming a circle a couple hundred feet across. It was an aerial target.

Wooden Knife directed photographer Mike Heintz to the cars several years ago. Heintz recalls”driving and driving across probably 15 or 16 miles of raw prairie. When I got there it was windy so the grass was lying down, and the cars were creaking.”

Heintz thought of the spot as an isolated, metallic memorial to airmen who once passed overhead. It’s appropriate that there’s somewhat of a mystery to this eerie place. Some histories and press reports say the cars were hauled here for National Guard exercises in the 1960s, but most local people interviewed for this article believe the big target dates back to World War II. Car bodies from the 1930s are dominant, but Heintz photographed at least one post-war model. Is it possible an original group of cars took hits from World War II airmen, and that the site was expanded with more cars brought in years later?

Either way, Wooden Knife thinks, this place that feels like a memorial should be considered an actual one.”I think everything should be preserved,” he says.”They’re reminders that there’s a price for freedom.”

During both World War II and the Cold War, South Dakotans enlisted at high rates. That was especially true for the Lakota people. And even on the home front, their loved ones experienced the sights and sounds of warfare, literally in their back yards.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Real Hero

By Roger Holtzmann

The World War II heroics of Rapid City’s Kenneth Scissons became wonderful content for comic books of the era.

Superman crash-landed in a Kansas wheat field in 1938. Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and their archenemies soon followed, and together they ushered in the Golden Age of comic books.

George Hecht and the Parents’ Institute swam against the superhero tide by launching True Comics. Hecht and his editorial advisory board published 84 issues from April of 1941 through August of 1950, believing that children might also like stories that were exciting and factual. Each issue carried a banner that proclaimed,”Truth is stranger and a thousand times more interesting than fiction!”

Hecht celebrated real live heroes: World War II raider Jimmy Doolittle, baseball star Stan Musial, inventor Thomas Edison and President Theodore Roosevelt. He found another in Sgt. Kenneth Cuthbert Scissons, a Lakota-English-Norwegian soldier from Rapid City who became a one-man army during World War II, a man the Nazis specifically targeted for capture, and a man whose seemingly superhuman exploits made him the epitome of Hecht’s real comic book stars.

Scissons was born on a ranch south of Colome in 1915, but came of age in Rapid City, where his father, John, worked for the Warren-Lamb Lumber Company. His Lakota lineage stretched back to his grandmother, Hannah Mule, twin sister of Little Big Man, the renowned Oglala Shirt Wearer from Crazy Horse’s band.

Scissons attended Rapid City Indian School through sixth grade, navigating the sometimes-treacherous ways of boarding school.”Dad said a lot of the bigger boys picked on him when he first started,” says Ruth Ahl, Scissons’ oldest daughter. That stage soon passed as Scissons proved to be a natural athlete who excelled at every sport, including boxing.

Wearing a bull snake necklace was likely tame for Scissons, who took heavy fire from Nazi troops during one particularly harrowing battle.

In seventh grade Scissons transferred to public school, but his formal education didn’t end well, according to Sharon Schaefer, Ahl’s younger sister.”What I picked up is that he was part way through his senior year and got into it with his basketball coach,” Schaefer says.”After that he just said, ‘I’m not going back.'”

Scissons’ first job was at Warren-Lamb; he spent 10 hours a day shoveling sawdust into boxcars, and was happy for the opportunity.”Times were tough,” he later recalled.”If you ever stopped and put your shovel down somebody else would pick it up, then you no longer had a job.”

When Warren-Lamb cut back during the Depression, Scissons joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and was posted to a camp near Hill City. He stood a stout 6 feet by then, and had energy to burn. At day’s end, when the other workers clambered into trucks for a ride down the winding mountain road to their base camp, Scissons would set off cross-country, racing over the rugged mountain terrain on foot.

“He ran so fast he thought his heart was going to burst,” Ahl says,”and he was always at the camp, leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette when they got there.”

Scissons met Melvin”Tuffy” Cory while he was with the CCC. One day Cory showed Scissons a picture of his sister, Evelyn.”My dad looked at the picture and said, ‘This is the woman I’m going to marry,'” Ahl says.”Everybody thought he was nuttier than a fruit cake.” Scissons had the last laugh, though; he and Evelyn met in the spring of 1937, and were married two weeks later.

Evelyn’s parents didn’t learn of the wedding until a relative sent them a clipping from the Deadwood newspaper.”My mother was working in Mitchell at the time,” Ahl says.”Grandma and Grandpa Cory drove there to see her, and Grandma said, ‘Well, hello Mrs. Scissons.’ My mom tried to explain things, and told them Dad was a Sioux Indian. Grandma Cory started crying and said, ‘Are you going to live in a tee pee?'”

Grandma Cory’s worst fear was never realized: the newlyweds’ first home was a snug one-room house that Scissons and his father built on New York Street in Rapid City.

Scissons hunted and fished in the Hills to put food on the table, and supplemented his CCC income by playing in a band for dances held in Hill City; he played saxophone, clarinet, piano and guitar, thanks to lessons he took at the Indian School. These attracted rowdy crowds, and Scissons felt right at home.

“One night Mom and Dad were walking down the sidewalk, and some guy wouldn’t step aside after Dad said excuse me,” Ahl says.”The guy said, ‘I’m not stepping aside for any damn Indian!’ Dad hit him so hard he flew into the middle of the street. A couple days later the police came to the house and told Dad that the guy had not regained consciousness, and if he died Dad would be charged with murder.

“Thank God the guy came around.”

Scissons and his wife Ruth were married two weeks after they met.

Scissons joined the South Dakota National Guard in 1936. After basic training he was assigned to the headquarters company of the 109th Engineering Regiment in Rapid City.

Scissons signed up for a second hitch three years later, a perilous moment in history. Germany overran Poland in the fall of 1939, plunging Europe into a war that many Americans feared would soon be at their doorsteps. Scissons and every other volunteer surely understood that the Guard might soon require more of them than one weekend a month, but they signed up anyway.

“Dad was extremely patriotic,” Schaefer says.”He believed in doing whatever was necessary to protect the country. That was how he was raised. You were loyal.”

With war on the horizon, Scissons and five other soldiers from the 109th — Leroy Anderson, Jerry Gorman and Richard Griffin of Sturgis, Bill Turner and Andrew Hjelvik of Lead — volunteered for federal service and were shipped overseas almost a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were among a contingent of Americans who trained with elite British Commandos and took part in raids on occupied Europe, the idea being that they would rejoin their old units when U.S. forces formally entered the war. Their combat experience would season the mass of green troops.

Scissons tried to transfer into the Army Rangers, an American battalion modeled on the Commandos, when it formed in mid-1942; his athleticism and outdoor skills would have fit perfectly within the unit, which specialized in operations behind enemy lines. However, the Rangers only accepted single men.

When the Allies invaded North Africa on November 8, 1942, Scissons was put ashore at Algiers, Tunisia. His first taste of combat came during a raid against the German-held airfield at Bizerte — a mission that blew up almost immediately when the attackers met heavy resistance and withdrew. Scissons was with a squad assigned to safeguard the force’s line of retreat, and their part of the plan also went sideways: they got ambushed and were embroiled in their own firefight.

“[German soldiers] pinned us down with tommy-gun fire from the ridge,” Scissons said in an account of the engagement carried in the Rapid City Journal and dozens of newspapers across the country.”I told our leader our only chance was to go around the hill and clean them out.”

Scissons and his comrades had to cross a stretch of open ground to get where they needed to be.”I didn’t stop to look behind me [as I ran] but when we reached a creek bed only five of our original 12 were left,” he said.”We got halfway up when we ran into more tommy-gun fire and lost another man. As we were down to too few to take the ridge we decided to withdraw.”

Scissons and Guy Wright, of Oklahoma, provided covering fire while Jerry Gorman and another soldier started back down the hill. When German soldiers rose to fire,”we really went to town on them,” Scissons said.”It was like popping off squirrels Ö every time I pulled the trigger over went a German.”

Scissons earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest military decoration, in just over 4 minutes that day. His account of the firefight sounded much less heroic than the official citation:

“Upon the ambush of his unit by the enemy, Private Scissons, seeing two of his comrades attempting to crawl to safety, did, without regard for his own life, engage the enemy with his rifle and draw their entire fire upon his position. Only after his comrades reached safety did Private Scissons attempt to withdraw, having accounted for approximately ten enemy soldiers. His coolness and courage under fire, and his desire to sacrifice himself, if necessary, for the safety of his comrades are a profound inspiration to members of the Armed Forces, and reflect the highest traditions of our country.”

The Nazis dubbed Scissons “Mustachio Commando” because he always wore a handlebar mustache.

Most of the attacking party died or were captured that day, and the airfield suffered no damage. Scissons and his squad managed to escape through country”swarming with groups of Germans,” he recalled. By the time they made it to friendly territory four days later, Scissons had lost,”everything but the shirt on my back, but what I missed most were the pictures of my wife and three-year-old daughter Ruth.”

Scissons’ story didn’t need embellishment to earn him a Distinguished Service Cross, but True Comics tweaked the tale for their young readers. In its version, the Bizerte raid was a smashing success, Scissons talked like an Indian from a western movie and he was a sergeant rather than a private; the last was a forgivable inaccuracy, as he seldom remained one or the other for long.

Scissons earned four Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, in addition to the Distinguished Service Cross, during his time in service. He was a good soldier in every respect but military discipline — a shortcoming that could be attributed to his pugnacious character, the very quality that made him an exceptional warrior.

“Kenny was a one-man army over there,” said Chuck Cory, who served with him in Tunisia.”He’d leave base and we’d never know when he was going to come back.”

Scissons infiltrated enemy outposts, struck silently, and then left a calling card to demoralize the rest. The Germans paid Scissons the ultimate compliment by hanging wanted posters of him across Tunisia; they dubbed him”Mustachio Commando” because he always wore a handlebar mustache.

When the Allies landed at Anzio, Scissons was asked to penetrate enemy lines and capture Germans for interrogation, an assignment he called his worst of the war. Month after month of mortal danger and operating on his own left him with little patience for rear echelon types, even those who outranked him.

“Dad went through hell over there,” Ahl says.”My understanding was that he had several court martials. My mother said she always knew when he was fighting because it was Sgt. Scissons. When he was back at base it was Pvt. Scissons.”

Scissons returned from overseas in the spring of 1945, but his first stop wasn’t Rapid City.”Dad spent six weeks at a base in Texas,” Ahl says.”He was a trained killer, so they thought they had to mellow him out, I guess Ö you don’t just come right back to your family after something like that.”

Scissons entered law enforcement as a conservation officer with the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department. After 20 years, he finished his career as a criminal investigator with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Scissons died on September 9, 1973. Ahl received many condolences upon her father’s death, including letters from Gov. Richard Kneip and longtime South Dakota promoter Almon”Hoadley” Dean.”I had the greatest respect for your father,” Dean wrote.”He was a gentleman, a patriot and a true warrior, held in high esteem and respect by all who knew him.”

No hero — real or fictional — could ask for a better epitaph.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Utopia That War Built

By Michael Zimny

The Black Hills Ordnance Depot rose among the plains of Fall River County in 1942.

There’s a lost city, out among the rolling hills of Fall River County, south of Red Canyon, where the last ponderosa stands give way to yucca-studded grasslands undulating outward like a rattlesnake glissade. For some — children of the Depression and World War II, real-life Rosie the Riveters, Lakota people looking for a better life off the reservations — the strange ruins faintly visible from Highway 471 were once their own little prairie heaven.

Watch carefully from the road, and you might not know what to make of what you see — when suddenly hundreds of earth-covered domes bulge from a sun-facing slope, all in tidy rows, concrete faces casting shadows.

This was Igloo. For 24 years, the U.S. Army’s Black Hills Ordnance Depot (BHOD) provided livelihoods for thousands of workers and their families here — as well as a sense of community and solidarity of purpose unlike anything that many Igloo alums feel they’ve ever seen since.

In 1941, as the U.S. prepared for its possible entry into World War II, the Army’s Ordnance Department sought to vastly increase its weapons and ammunition storage facilities. Western South Dakota and Nebraska were viewed favorably for munitions storage, as their altitudes and low humidity were conducive to longer shelf life. South Dakota Congressman Francis Case lobbied hard for the Southern Hills. Though there were concerns about where the help would come from in such a sparsely populated area, the presence of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad helped win the day for the future BHOD.

A 21,000-acre site was acquired in the treeless, coyote-wandered hills between Edgemont and Provo. The devastation wrought by the Dirty Thirties had already depopulated much of the land, making acquisition less painful. The Army Corps of Engineers set up at Union Station in Hot Springs, a town hard hit by the Depression. Construction began in the spring of 1942. By August, 6,000 workers were employed on the project, double the population of Hot Springs.

Nearly overnight, tiny Provo was transformed into a worker’s tent camp. Other workers commuted from Edgemont and Hot Springs. Private homes became makeshift cafeterias. Every available living space nearby was rented. Wooden sheds were converted into sleeping quarters.

Conditions may have been squalid during construction, but the region was still reeling from the Depression. Building the BHOD was a paying job, and permanent employment at the Depot would be a better gig than anybody could have known.

Robert Raymond, a kid from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, moved to the Provo workers colony with his sister and her husband in 1942.”We lived in a tarpaper shack and a tent,” he recalls. But the lean times paid off.”After a year, we were eligible to move into Igloo. It was the best place I ever lived in my life.”

Around 800 dome-shaped structures that resembled igloos were built on 21,000 acres between Edgement and Provo.

Construction of the BHOD was a tremendous feat of engineering, logistics and labor. In just a few months, 802 of the”igloo” structures that would give the installation its popular name were erected. Purpose-built for munitions storage, the reinforced concrete domes — called”igloos” because they were thought to resemble traditional Inuit ice dwellings — covered with earth, were designed to direct explosions upward, not outward. Housing units and communal spaces were also built, and a looped railroad spur accessible to the igloos for loading and unloading war materiel.

A movie theater was picked up and moved from Lusk, Wyoming. A grocery store was hauled over from Chadron, Nebraska. Stonemason Monte Nystrom — famous for his Black Hills stonework including the State Game Lodge at Custer State Park — built several sandstone guard posts. The first shipment of munitions came in the fall of the same year construction started.

These were heady times at the BHOD.”The sheer excitement, 24/7 hustle and bustle of war time — neighbors coming home from or going to war. Test explosions on the Prairie” — are some of famous resident Tom Brokaw’s memories of his years (1943-44) at Igloo.

The Ordnance Department was one of the largest employers of civilians during the war, and for a place hard-pressed for jobs, the BHOD was a Keynesian dynamo. Clarence Anderson moved to Igloo from Hot Springs as a young boy.”Our family was extremely poor. We moved from a house that had two rooms and a path out to the outhouse. We had running water from one spigot. We had one light bulb that had a socket set-up to where we could have extension cords. I remember my mother had gone out and bought a toaster and we were all so excited because before that our toast was always made on the wood stove. When we moved to Igloo, we were very similar to all the families coming there. They were families that were out of work looking for a place to get a new start. We moved into a house that had five rooms, two bedrooms and an interior bathroom with running water. We were really excited as kids over that.”

“The Depression was just over,” recalls Robert Raymond.”We basically had nothing back on the reservation. We moved there and we had everything — there were jobs, money, brand new houses, indoor plumbing, ice boxes, a brand new school.”

Despite the tough times, labor was still an issue since nearly all of the military-aged men were off fighting when Igloo came online. The Ordnance Department had to look outside of the traditional labor pool for workers. Recruiters worked hard to attract workers from the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations. By 1945, 160 Native Americans were employed at BHOD.

Native American recruitment overlapped with heavy recruitment of women. When the first shipment of munitions arrived at BHOD, Goldie Lovell, a pioneering female truck driver, was there to haul the cargo to storage. Women like Lovell were Woman Ordnance Workers (WOWs). Immortalized by campaign poster icon”Rosie the Riveter,” WOWs worked at many traditionally male occupations during the war effort. Like Rosie, they often wore a red bandana. But instead of the white polka dots Rosie wears, theirs were emblazoned with white bombs, fuses lit.

“At Igloo, many, many of the workers were females, including my sister,” Raymond says. In that, Igloo was in line with depots and armories throughout the nation. In 1946, WOWs constituted over 46 percent of the Ordnance Department workforce nationally.

A stanza written by Igloo worker Clara Jackman captured WOW pride in verse:

Though we’re not Miss Americas
Nor shaped like ancient Venus
We’re doing a job for Uncle Sam,
You’ve got to hand it to us.

Women ordnance workers, or WOWs, were immortalized in posters featuring Rosie the Riveter.

For those who could find a job at Igloo, the post offered adequate — if not fancy — housing, a self-contained community with grocery store, bowling alley, roller rink, the Cactus Inn lounge, even a dance hall where acts like the Tex Beneke Orchestra would play. Anything Igloo didn’t have could be found in Edgemont. Many families didn’t own a car, but that was no problem.”There was a bus that went back and forth to Edgemont,” says Clarence Anderson.”At the time that Igloo was developed, very few people had cars. And for those who did, not long after they decided people had to have insurance, so if you didn’t have liability insurance you had to park your car right inside the gate.”

One unique aspect of Igloo life that there seems to be some consensus on — people got along, regardless of their ethnic background. For a hardscrabble, working class town built from nothing on a desolate stretch of sunbaked steppe, Igloo was a real deal melting pot by many accounts.

“We lived in a section of Igloo where the housing was mostly Indian,” Raymond says.”However, other Indian families were scattered throughout the housing area. There was no apparent racism to me. It was the best place I ever lived in my life.”

“In 1943, the American Indians were very much discriminated against and they moved there and joined in with all the other people and became part of that big family,” says Clarence Anderson.”Many didn’t stay long because it was an awfully new culture for them, but an awful lot of them stayed for the duration and went to school with us. As young kids we had no idea that there was a prejudice against Indians because they were our neighbors and friends.”

In addition to white, Native American and African American employees, there was also a contingent of Italian prisoners of war at Igloo. They served as part of a national experiment with”Italian Service Units,” in which Italian POWs who didn’t demonstrate overt fascist leanings were allowed some measure of freedom in exchange for work. It’s rumored that the Italians had a knack for drawings, and that some of their bawdier masterpieces can still be seen inside some of the igloos.

The Igloo years coincided with the baby boom, and unsurprisingly people who grew up there remember it as a paradise for kids.”There were lots of kids around,” remembers former resident Beverly McBride.”It was very family-oriented. The houses were small but nice. Every house had a sidewalk.”

“People were just coming off food stamps,” says Yvonne Grubbe.”We had the commissary and that food came through the military. So we had a lot of advantages out there. You know all of the new buildings and everything, the schools. We had a roller-skating rink that was fabulous. And there was a big wonderful swimming pool, a huge community center, two basketball courts. You could walk around anytime, day or night. We had a big theater, and I think the first price I ever paid to go to a movie was 15 cents. Mom would give me a quarter and I could get a cold drink and popcorn with the rest of the change. They had all the movies that were put out in the big cities. We never had a loss for things to do.”

Facilities for play were abundant. Basketball was the most popular sport. Jim Anderson, who’s compiled an extensive online filing cabinet of BHOD memorabilia, remembers how the students from the reservations brought their”run and gun, full court press” style of play — popularized by Leonard Quick Bear and the St. Francis Mission teams of the 1930s — to the gyms at Igloo. The Provo Rattlers took their high-energy game to three state tournaments, making it to the 1954 finals (where they lost to Hayti) behind Lakota stars, brothers Dan and Herb Goodman.

The federal government recognized in 1942 that the children of itinerant BHOD construction workers, and ultimately permanent employees, were going to need an on-site school. In a matter of weeks, enrollment at the Provo School had jumped from 15 to over 200. Long-time Buffalo Gap principal Adelaide Ward was brought in as district superintendent, along with her lifelong colleague and friend Christina Hajek. The two devised a temporary plan to expand the Provo School, and bus excess students to school in Edgemont until a permanent school for BHOD workers could be constructed at Igloo. In 1943, the new school was completed. Though situated on Igloo proper, the school was still administered by the Provo School District, hence the school retained the Provo name, and Igloo athletes wore the Provo Rattlers uniform.

Enrollment at the Provo School skyrocketed after families moved to Igloo.

Adelaide Ward was a towering figure in the minds of Igloo youth, and undoubtedly made an impact on a generation of kids from Dust Bowl beginnings.

“I’ve always felt that she was one of the people that put me on track to, what otherwise might not have been a very successful life,” says Clarence Anderson.”She was a pusher. When she walked down the hallways you could hear her for a long ways. She’d been in a car accident and had a pretty healthy limp and she was, not overly heavy but a big woman, and when she’d walk you could hear her coming. I think to this day, she did it purposely, because everybody kind of shaped up as she was coming down the hall.”

“I was like, ‘Man we can’t get away from her, what’s the deal here?'” says Yvonne Grubbe.”She was quite a disciplinarian and all she had to do was walk down the aisles and the hallways. And you never knew when she’d show up at the door at any classroom and just watch and be quiet. We’d behave. Because we didn’t want her to catch us doing anything bad. She never even had to raise her voice really. She had the power, and we knew she did. And, of course, that was a different time. We didn’t sass back. We did our homework. We didn’t really do anything out of line. Anything that we did went back to our parents.”

Ms. Ward served as principal of Provo High School until her retirement in 1961. Christina Hajek served as principal of Provo Elementary. The two moved away some time after retirement, but occasionally returned to take care of business at the house they owned together in Provo, and possibly to maintain a connection to the community.

By the summer of 1945, some 4,200 people lived at Igloo, more than in Hot Springs today. As Igloo grew, so did the surrounding towns. The war effort had elevated a sleepy, seen-better-days backwater — hammered by broken banks, ruined homesteads and the decline of Hot Springs as a well-heeled spa resort — to a thriving economy with a housing demand that was hard to satiate.

Post-war, over a period of several years, there was a dramatic decrease to about 700 BHOD employees and a return to something more like the pre-war gender balance in the workforce.

While female workers would always play a major role at Igloo, victory overseas ended the halcyon red bandana days.”When the war ended and the veterans came back, they had veterans’ preference and most of those females lost their jobs as veterans took over,” Raymond says. His sister was one of those that lost her job, so the family moved on.

The conflict deficit didn’t last long. In the summer of 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and America became involved in another war in Asia. The Korean War effort nearly doubled the number of workers to about 1,300.

After Korea, there was another slowdown and some workers were laid off, then life went on for the workers and families at Igloo. There was always the occasional rumor that the Depot would lay more people off or shut down for good, but it was the height of the Cold War. Keeping America’s military good and lethal was the lifeblood of the prairie melting pot. When Nikita Khruschev assaulted his desk with a loafer at the United Nations General Assembly, that was probably a net good for wage earners from Hot Springs and Pine Ridge who might land a gig at Igloo.

Igloo had all the amenities of a typical small South Dakota town, including stores and a movie theater.

In the absence of a major war, the installation made itself useful as a conveniently remote place to conduct bomb disposal and explosive ordnance parts salvage. In 1962, a relative peacetime, 575 civilian and military employees worked at Igloo, and about 1,800 people lived there.

Ironically, the decision to shut down Igloo was made during the ramp up to the Vietnam War (during which, by some estimates, up to 7 million pounds of ordnance were dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). In 1964, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara launched an effort to reduce military expenditures, even as he recommended a bombing campaign against North Vietnam. The BHOD, and 95 other installations quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of the Department of Defense.

“A cry of anguish went up from coast to coast,” wrote South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, in an editorial for The Progressive entitled”Swords into Plowshares.” The statement wasn’t entirely hyperbolic. Workers — and their representatives — at installations from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to BHOD argued that the cuts would devastate economies and communities.

McGovern was empathic:”One readily sympathizes with the men and their families who lose their jobs as a result of defense shifts or cut-backs.” But he was also circumspect:”Do we want the Defense Department to meet the military needs of the nation in a business-like manner, or do we want it to function as a gigantic WPA responding to local and Congressional pressures all across the land?”

From a budgetary perspective, he had a point — one that dovetailed well with a larger point he was making (one that’s still argued today), that”many of the most vocal ëeconomizers’ are the biggest ëspenders’ when it comes to armaments. Place the label ëdefense’ on a project and it will zip through the Congress with little or no floor debate.”

Still, one could argue that if any Defense project in America warranted the WPA treatment at the time it was Igloo. The BHOD not only helped revive a severely depressed portion of the former Dust Bowl, it was probably one of the federal government’s most successful attempts at a long-term employment program for Native Americans from Plains reservations. For that reason, Sen. McGovern and Sen. Karl Mundt did plead with the Secretary of the Army that Igloo was an extraordinary case, that nearly 20 percent of workers employed were Native American, that the closure would ripple outward damaging communities throughout the area. Edgemont had just built a new hospital, which wouldn’t likely survive.

In April, McNamara announced the impending closure of Igloo, to be carried out in phases, completed by the summer of 1967. Less than six years before Pine Ridge would erupt into open insurrection at Wounded Knee, tribal members lost not only a rare source of employment, but something rarer still — a place where Lakota and other Native Americans had worked and lived in relative harmony with non-Indians for 25 years.

In its heyday near the end of World War II, nearly 4,200 people lived at Igloo. By 1967, the depot had been closed.

After the closure, Provo dwindled down to a few houses. Edgemont prepared for the worst:”It was devastating,” says Clarence Anderson, who lives in Edgemont.”I remember the day when the announcement came out. It was just like the town had a heart attack. When the base closed, that was just a tremendous impact on the community. I would say almost half the population of Edgemont was lost at that time. We had a very vibrant business community — three auto dealerships, three hardware stores, two grocery stores, clothing stores — and it just went down to virtually nothing.”

The Department of Defense attempted to move displaced employees to other bases. As workers moved on, the short-lived prairie utopia was systematically dissolved by the cool bureaucratic hand. Yvonne Grubbe, having grown up a child of Igloo, worked at the business of taking it apart.”As people were transferring to different installations, the Army and Air Force would see what was available on this great big sheet that went out from the government. If they needed this stuff, it would be shipped out to whoever asked for so many chairs, or so many beds, or whatever.”

“And they even came in and took out the individual houses. There’s housing that came from Igloo all throughout the state. Lots of it went down to the Indian reservations. A lot of it came to Edgemont. People bought the duplexes and remodeled them. We tried to get rid of everything we possibly could.”

The 801 igloos and some other structures remain. Through the years, several schemes were hatched — including frozen meat storage — to make good economic use of the igloos, but none panned out. The prairie utopia is now entirely situated on private ranch land — a strange, distant sight, like an apparition on a seldom traveled road.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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The One That Got Away … Briefly

By Michael Zimny

A unique sculpture in Spearfish reminds us of a time when a national public art program was possible.

Fish Story — a tri-part set of sculptures — was created by artist Marion Overby for the old Spearfish post office. The New Deal’s rural post office murals brought art that dignified rural life to accessible settings.

An alumnus of the influential Cranbrook Academy of Art who later worked alongside designers Charles and Ray Eames, Overby received commissions from at least two small town post offices during the New Deal era. Her terra-cotta relief mural Early Postman is still on display at the post office in Mason, Michigan.

The old Spearfish Post Office was built in 1940, as part of an accelerated federal building program. The simple style and brick facade are typical of “Class C” post offices built in small towns during the era. The sculpture was commissioned in 1943. Overby wrote that she named the piece Fish Story because, “I am sure the country around Spearfish is full of tall tales of fishing and record-breaking catches.”

Carved from California walnut, the sculpture depicts a Native American fisherman with a spear and a non-Native fisherman in waders with rod-and-reel. Despite their differences in hairstyle and dress, both men look nearly identical. A fish trio swims between them.

“When this building was abandoned by the post office in 1996, the Smithsonian came and took it to D.C.,” says Kathy Standen, a personal banker at Great Western Bank, which occupies the old post office building today. “When the bank reopened in 1999, our bank president went to Senator Daschle and asked him if we could have that artwork back. Senator Daschle made it available for us and then they brought it back and put it back up on the wall.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Manganese Memories

By Michael Zimny

Frequent cross-state travelers may sometimes wonder: What the heck are those brick and concrete ruins just north of Interstate 90 a few miles west of the Missouri River? All alone on the swollen grass seas west of Oacoma, their mystique recalls Caspar Friedrich’s depictions of pastoral ruins.

So what are they?

The vestiges of what was a sizable manganese mining operation. According to a local, the open-ended concrete structure was a mineshaft and the brick building housed an auger.

Manganese — which is instrumental in steel production — was discovered in the black soil strata of the river bluffs in the 1920s. In 1929, the Deadwood Pioneer Times announced the formation of the General Manganese Corporation, dedicated to mining the metal from what it described as, “undoubtedly the largest deposit in America.”

State attorney general and future governor Merrell Sharpe, who farmed and practiced law in Oacoma, was involved in the project from the outset, acquiring much of the land.

The operation picked up steam as the build up to U.S. entry into World War II called for more steel, and consequently more domestic manganese production. Prior to the war, America was dependent on Russian imports. In 1941, the Argus Leader claimed that, “Up to 95 percent of our steel needs … have come from Russia, where it was mined practically with slave labor producing a very economical ore.” Most likely, the short-lived Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and Russia impressed upon U.S. planners the need for manganese-independence.

In 1941, the increased demand led the federal government to build a pilot plant to experiment with cost-effective methods for separating manganese from the surrounding shale. After the war, local papers reported that Merrell Sharpe, who had leased the land to the government, announced plans to utilize processes developed by the Bureau of Mines to expand private mining operations. Those methods must not have proven cost-effective enough to compete with imports in the post-war economy. A 1954 Rapid City Journal article on the flooding (for Lake Oahe) of Oacoma gave it a, “last chance for survival as an important town if supplies of manganese are cut off from Brazil and Russia.”

To date, the Oacoma manganese deposits are still considered too low-grade to compete with those in say, South Africa. One day, a new technology may unleash their potential. Then condominiums will kiss the skies on either side of the Oacoma/Chamberlain divide. For now, they’re moldering reminders of that time we tried to simultaneously stick it to the Third Reich and the damned Russkies.

Note: The old mining site is on private property. We were granted permission to access. Please enjoy respectfully from the road.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Rekindling a Memory

By Paul Higbee

Writer Paul Higbee (left) toured the B-17 crash site with Harold and Greg Stone, who have used decades-old reports to pinpoint the spot on Rapid City’s east side where the bomber went down.

On a September day in 1943, a pair of 12-year-old boys set out on foot across Rapid Creek and into fields familiar to them, immediately east of Rapid City.

Although they knew Rapid Valley’s countryside, this was no routine hike. An airplane had crashed here the night before and they decided to investigate. Sure enough, the boys found smoldering remains–not big pieces of wings and fuselage but bits of debris blown across hundreds of feet. Surprised to find no one about, they picked souvenirs before encountering two military policemen who told them to leave. The MPs had been rerouting traffic along old Highway 40, which ran right through the crash site, and apparently weren’t expecting gawkers who hiked cross-country. The policemen didn’t confiscate the souvenirs and had no way of knowing they were chasing away the individual who would rekindle South Dakota’s memory of this tragedy seven decades later.

The crash, late on the evening of September 6, 1943, took the lives of all 10 Army Air Corps men aboard. They were flying a heavy four-propeller bomber, the mighty B-17 Flying Fortress, and were part of the 398th Bomb Group. Their peers in the 398th would shortly complete Rapid City Army Air Base training and make their way to England, serving under General Jimmy Doolittle in the Eighth Air Force, and pounding Nazi targets in 1944 and 1945.

The Army Air Corps quickly investigated the Rapid City crash and determined the crew had been well rested, the ground crew fully competent, and found no indication of in-flight mechanical failure. But the report noted that western South Dakota’s rugged terrain could present challenges. Rapid City, the investigators noted,”is practically surrounded by hills and the path of the airplane was over the hills located between the city and the Air Base.”

It’s likely that pilot Orville Prater, flying at night, lost sight of the base’s lights, obscured behind a ridge as he descended. Perhaps at that moment he pulled his plane up because he thought he was about to hit the ridge, or maybe he spotted radar towers on a hilltop and decided they were too close. Either way he pulled the B-17 almost straight up, went into a stall, and then dived.

“I would say he went up 200 feet before he fell off, directly right down on the nose,” witness Harry Rothermal told investigators. He added that he was the first on the scene.”I went down, parked within 500 feet of the crash. There was intense heat and bullets whizzing all around … there were no signs of life. Just total wreckage.”

Customers exiting a late movie at the Elks Theater, two and a half miles away, heard the explosion after impact.

Harold Stone, one of the boys who walked to the wreck the next day, heard nothing. He was at his family’s home on St. Joseph Street, between the Elks and accident site, when the B-17 crashed a few minutes after 11 p.m. Later, Harold’s older brother came home and reported what happened.

“That family sacrificed itself entirely for the war effort,” says Harold,”and just as much so as if he had died at Normandy.”

When Harold visited the crash site on a September morning 69 years later, he said time had stripped some details from his 1943 memories. The smell of the smoldering ruin — intense or waning? He can’t recall. His friend Chuck Coyle, the other boy to walk to the site, never forgot how each of the four propellers churned into the ground to form pits. Probably so, but Harold doesn’t remember that. And his souvenirs are long gone, perhaps tossed by his mother when he served in the Army during the Korean War.

But never faded or lost were Harold’s questions that stemmed from his 1943 visit. Who were the airmen? What went wrong? Most haunting is a question that can never be answered: What raced through the flyers’ minds, as they knew they were falling without enough altitude to pull out of the dive?

Later, as Harold discovered the degree to which Rapid City had forgotten the crash, a new question formed:”What if you were a family member, maybe a nephew or niece to one of those airmen, and you knew he died here, but you visited Rapid City and found no marker or record?” he asks.

Rapid City forgot in part because none of the flyers were local. Newspapers made only brief, passing reference to the accident — typical of coverage of such incidents in the middle of World War II, when every day brought casualty news. In fact, the crash happened during the very week that the United States and its Allies began the dramatic invasion of Italy.

By 1943 no one doubted that air power would prove central to the war’s outcome, much more so than anyone could have predicted just a few years before. The issue of Time magazine on newsstands the night of the crash optimistically noted that bombers”may decide the war before an Allied soldier sets foot on western European soil.” If that was the hope (although one that proved sadly naive) then the nation understood the need for swift preparation of military pilots and aircrews. Americans knew that training fatalities were as inevitable as combat deaths. In fact, the previous June a B-17 flew from Rapid City to a Badlands gunnery range, caught fire, and broke up in flight, killing all nine aboard. Also in June, three B-17s flying in formation over Miner County collided in flight, killing 11. Those planes had taken off from the Sioux City, Iowa, base, and the 11 fatalities make the crash the deadliest South Dakota aviation accident to this day. All totaled, there were 120 fatal B-17 accidents in the United States in 1943, claiming 789 lives. Most of the time crews were novices, working to rack up flight hours. By no means was the B-17 considered unusually dangerous. Small fighters had accident rates many times that of the B-17, but often just a single pilot was aboard when a fighter went down.

Time moved on, the war ended, and Harold grew up to fight another war. He came home to Rapid City and in 1953 started a successful furniture manufacturing enterprise, a company that evolved into Dakota Bison Furniture. At age 81, Harold is still found in the plant or on the showroom floor daily.

“I went down, parked within 500 feet of the crash. There was intense heat and bullets whizzing all around … there were no signs of life. Just total wreckage.”

The Rapid City crash wasn’t the only World War II aviation tragedy to touch Harold. In 1944, in Nebraska, his brother-in-law Earl Endres was badly burned in a B-26 accident that killed other fliers. A few years ago Harold learned that his brother-in-law’s accident was well documented online. He wondered whether a few mouse clicks would answer his questions about the Rapid City crash.

He found information, all right, but it took more than a few clicks. An initial Internet search was just the beginning of a two-year journey Harold and his son, Greg, have taken to bring the night of September 6, 1943, out of darkness.

“We learned there’s an industry called aviation archaeology,” says Greg, who runs Dakota Bison Furniture with his father.”Several years ago the government sold its old crash reports to private companies, and we started with one of those companies. I think it cost us $40 to buy the report, which was written within a week of the crash, and runs about nine pages.”

The report says the doomed B-17, Army 25226, was among several to take off that evening for night flight training. It left the runway at 8:06 with instructions to”fly locally” until midnight. But at 9:45 all planes were ordered by radio to return because of anticipated stormy weather. Apparently Army 25226 had flown a considerable distance because it wasn’t until 11:03 that it approached Rapid City from the southwest and received landing instructions. After that no further word was heard from the plane, but seven minutes after the instructions were given, says the report,”the Control Tower operator observed a brilliant flash of light which appeared to be an explosion and a crash,” a few miles distant. While bad weather was, indeed, on its way, it hadn’t hit yet and visibility was good.

The report includes photos of the crash site, almost certainly taken the same day Harold and Chuck visited. Best of all, though, is the list of names of those aboard. The airmen came to South Dakota from Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. Orville Prater, the pilot, was a second lieutenant who had earned his wings just four months before at age 21. There were three other officers: copilot Walter Duma, navigator Steven Kosciow, and bombardier Bryant Grover. Everyone else’s rank was sergeant–engineer John McCarty, assistant engineer George Barton, radio operator Frank Heuser, assistant radio operator Thomas Cox, and gunners Robert Vanhatta and Paul Eisenhart.

Knowing the names after nearly seven decades represented a big step forward, although learning more about the men and perhaps even seeing photos of them proved labor intensive. A 1973 fire in St. Louis destroyed most of the individual military records Harold and Greg hoped to examine. But from the crash report they knew the fliers’ home counties. Then they contacted libraries in the county seats and asked for help finding obituaries. In most cases the librarians delivered.

For example, Harold and Greg learned copilot Duma of Cleveland was Harry and Katherine Duma’s only child.”That family sacrificed itself entirely for the war effort,” says Harold,”and just as much so as if he had died at Normandy.”

Harold and Greg also discovered that Sergeant Heuser of Chicago had a brother who learned of the crash while serving in England, and that Sergeant McCarty was older than most Army Air Corps aviators. McCarty, age 30, left behind a widow in Akron, Ohio.

Oddly enough, given Harold’s visit in 1943 and the report’s site photos, pinpointing the exact crash location has been difficult. New roads, tree belts growing and disappearing and industrial development changed Rapid Valley. Old Highway 40 is East Centre Street now, paralleling modern-day Highway 44, a stone’s throw away. With the site definitely pinpointed, Harold thinks, a nearby marker could be erected like one along Highway 34 in Miner County recalling that B-17 crash.

Harold hopes to find someone with a high quality metal detector because he believes plane fragments were buried on-site rather than hauled away. Hunting for buried plane parts would make Harold and Greg serious amateur aviation archaeologists, indeed. Still, even without that kind of search, the pair is reasonably certain they’ve found the ground where the plane hit. There’s no doubt that when they visit they’re at least standing within the debris field, thanks to an examination they did with a photo in the crash report. The black and white picture shows a line of hills and a building with a distinct, sharply slanted roof in the distance behind the debris. They found the building still standing and lined it up with the hills, but just in the nick of time. Soon after Harold and Greg got the report, the old building was torn down. The owner, of course, didn’t know its relevance to local aviation archaeology. By the time it was gone, Harold and Greg had taken their own photos matching site lines in the report’s photograph.

Speaking of photos, the librarians who found obituaries also found a few portraits of the airmen. There they are, smiling across the decades, in uniform. They knew when the photos were taken that the war might lead them to places of mortal danger in Europe, North Africa or the Pacific. Death in South Dakota would have crossed no one’s mind.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Suspects in Sturgis

By Paul Higbee

Historic Fort Meade was home to Nazi sympathizers during World War II.

A little less than a year after the United States’ entry into the Second World War, the strange soldiers of the 620th Engineer General Service Company arrived at Fort Meade, near Sturgis. On work details they wore blue fatigues, not green. Prisoners of war were typically issued blue fatigues, but no “PW” lettering adorned the 620th’s work uniforms.

These soldiers numbered between 100 and 200 most of the time. Despite that small number, writer E.J. Kahn would note after the war, the 620th claimed “the distinction of being responsible for four-fifths of the convictions under the Eighty-first Article of War recorded against the 11.5 million men who served in the army during the Second World War.”

Conviction under the Eighty-first Article is deadly serious business: it means being found guilty of aiding the enemy. Members of the 620th were American soldiers, but it didn’t come as a complete surprise when some plotted acts for the glory of the Third Reich.

“What made the company unique was that, except for its officers and a cadre of noncommissioned officers, it was filled entirely with men who were suspected of subversive activity or disloyalty,” wrote Bob Lee in his book, Fort Meade and the Black Hills.

The army had to prove nothing for a soldier to be sent to the 620th, Lee added. Suspicion sufficed.

At Fort Meade the 620th painted barracks, hauled trash, planted trees, graded a landing area for military gliders and made camouflage netting. They were issued no arms.

Like other Fort Meade military personnel, they were free to live off the post grounds. Many lived in Sturgis or Deadwood apartments and commuted to the fort five days a week. Weekends were spent enjoying the Black Hills’ amenities, and pursuing the charms of local young women, many of whom missed boyfriends sent to combat in North Africa, Europe or the Pacific.

Certainly the soldiers of the 620th enjoyed cushy wartime duty, maneuvering their way through pine forests en route to picnics in Custer State Park, rather than through land-mined jungles or sniper-protected villages. The military eventually heard criticism about that, but at the time the army found itself in a bind. Exempting from military service those men who didn’t approve of the nation’s war policy wasn’t fair, plus, doing so would offer an easy out for those hoping to avoid enlistment. At the same time, the army didn’t want these men, some of whom were vocal in their admiration of Adolf Hitler, in regions where they could pass information to the enemy or sabotage American war production. The War Department studied maps, decided Fort Meade was about as far removed from the war as a soldier could get, and formed the 620th under a confidential order in October 1942.

Most of the 620th soldiers were of German or Italian descent. Other companies were established elsewhere for soldiers suspected of sympathy for Japan. It should be noted that many men of the 620th wished the United States no harm in the war, and hoped the whole affair would simply end quickly.

Because formation of the 620th was confidential, the Black Hills public didn’t know of its makeup, although a few remarked that lots of the men spoke with accents and knew all the lyrics to German beer hall songs. “The citizens of Sturgis, had they known the 620th was filled with soldiers the army considered undesirables, would have been shocked, since they had treated these men as freely and as generously as they had the other soldiers from the fort,” Lee wrote.

Stone stables at Fort Meade housed 86 horses each. Located just east of Sturgis, the fort now stands as a National Historic Site.

Along with being shocked, the citizens of Sturgis likely would have worried the soldiers might try something rash if a militant leader joined their ranks. That leader came along in March of 1943, in the person of Dale Maple.

Maple wasn’t typical of the 620th. Maple wasn’t German or Italian. Actually, he wasn’t typical by any standard of American young men. He was, when he arrived in South Dakota, a 22-year-old graduate of Harvard, where he’d studied government and publicly expressed admiration for Hitler’s fascist regime. He attracted enough attention for his views at Harvard that Time magazine once described him as a “native U.S. Nazi.” In his hometown of San Diego, as a child, he’d seen his name in the press often as a piano prodigy. Southern California music critics predicted big things for him in concert halls.

Maple graduated from Harvard, with academic honors, in the spring of 1941. He was still on campus doing post-graduate work the next December when the United States declared war. Hours after Maple heard news of Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor, he phoned the German embassy in Washington. He told an official there it looked obvious the German ambassador and his staff would shortly be expelled from Washington, and said he would like to join them when they traveled home to Germany. The embassy official told Maple no.

So Maple joined the United States Army. Had he been sent overseas, deserted and made his way into German territory, he would have had no trouble communicating his Nazi sympathies. He’d learned German and spoke it fluently. But Maple never got near the war. After training as a military radio operator at bases in North Carolina and Maryland, Maple was transferred to Fort Meade in early 1943. The army decided that the support he declared for Hitler at Harvard made him a case for the 620th.

Speaking to South Dakota Magazine 57 years later, just a few weeks shy of his 80th birthday, Maple recalled the 620th was quartered in barracks built for and by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s, on the west end of the fort grounds. “We received no military training as such,” he said. “Of course, there were no thoughts that we’d be part of the Okinawa invasion.”

While Maple’s well-documented remarks left no doubt why he’d been sent to Fort Meade, he said some of the others “had no idea why they were in that unit.”

Maple rented an apartment in Deadwood, found he had lots of time for reading and backroom gambling, and made some friends in Deadwood’s bars. Black Hills acquaintances recall him as tall, handsome, well mannered, soft-spoken and a remarkable piano player. He had one minor brush with the law in Deadwood when picked up for tampering with someone’s car.

The 620th liked Spearfish Canyon. In the summer of 1943 the soldiers would sometimes rent a cabin there for weekend parties where beer flowed and rousing choruses of German beer hall songs rattled the windows. The army suspected espionage might be being plotted in the cabin and bugged the place. Surveillance uncovered nothing.

But it was proven later in court that the army had good reason to worry about subversive plots. Maple and a few friends in the 620th spent time in the Black Hills, in the words of E.J. Kahn, “exploring, largely in conversation, courses of action they might take to demonstrate their disaffection — espionage, desertion, mutiny, sabotage, guerrilla warfare against the United States, and so on.”

Site of Orman Dam POW Camp north of Fort Meade near Belle Fourche.

Helping German prisoners of war escape appealed to the conspirators, but no prisoners came to Fort Meade until after they had left. The first week of December 1943, the 620th transferred to Camp Hale, Colorado, 120 miles west of Denver. On one hand, the soldiers disliked the move because everyone but married men had to live at the post. On the other hand, 200 German prisoners were also quartered there.

Imagine Hogan’s Heroes in reverse. The German POWs had a still for making schnapps, acquired a pistol and American military uniforms, and regularly got themselves out of their compound and allowed visitors in. The 620th men, in blatant violation of regulations against fraternization, won the prisoners’ confidence and friendship with gifts of candy, tobacco and whiskey. When POW Erhard Schwichtenberg said he wanted to see the American West, the 620th got him out for a couple days and drove him several hundred miles through Colorado. Nobody missed him. When Maple got a three-day leave, the only place he wanted to visit was the inside of the POW compound, where he spent the entire period, wearing a German uniform and drinking schnapps — and learning that Schwichtenberg and another prisoner named Heinrich Kikillus wanted to escape as much as Maple wanted to help them.

Maple bought a decade-old Reo sedan. On February 15, in broad daylight, he simply drove the car to a rendezvous point just off the post grounds, and Schwichtenberg and Kikillus strolled away from a work detail and climbed in. Nobody noticed for more than 24 hours that the prisoners were missing and Maple was AWOL. By the time they were missed, the trio was far south down U.S. Highway 85, in New Mexico, implementing a Black Hills plan that called for getting to Mexico first. From there the idea was to reach Argentina and secure passage by ship to Spain, and from Spain travel to Germany.

After two flat tires and an electrical problem, Maple got the car within 17 miles of Mexico. Then he ran out of gas, and the three companions hiked cross-country into Mexico by night. A Mexican border patrolman stopped them 3 miles inside Mexico on the afternoon of February 18, and turned them over to United States authorities.

At a military trial two months later at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Maple said the escape had been merely a ploy to call public attention to the injustice of companies like the 620th. Further, he claimed, he’d only pretended to be a Nazi at Harvard in hopes of winning German scholarship money to pursue post-graduate studies at the University of Berlin. Nobody bought his stories and he was convicted of desertion and aiding the enemy, and sentenced to death. Three fellow conspirators in the 620th — Paul Kissman, Theophil Leonhard and Friedrich Siering — were court-martialed and sent to prison. The German prisoners, it was noted, simply had exercised their right and duty to attempt escape.

After Maple’s death sentence was handed down, nobody in the military or federal government seemed to want to see it carried out. The secretary of war sent a memo to President Franklin Roosevelt, saying of Maple: “While he is undoubtedly legally sane and responsible for his despicable acts, under all the circumstances I am unable to escape the impression that justice does not require this young man’s life. I feel that the ends of justice will be better served by sparing his life so that he may live to see the destruction of tyranny, the triumph of the ideals against which he sought to align himself, and the final victory of the freedom he so grossly abused.”

Maple did live to see the triumph of American ideals and freedoms, and, in fact, to prosper by them. Roosevelt commuted his sentence to life in prison, and later it was reduced to 10 years at Leavenworth federal penitentiary. He proved a model prisoner and was still a young man when released in the 1950s.

ìI came back to California and got into a venture building commercial fishing boats,” he said. “I learned about insuring boats, and that led me into the marine insurance business worldwide.” He never returned to the Black Hills.

It is possible the Black Hills would have forgotten Maple and the entire 620th had it not been for E.J. Kahn’s series of articles about the company and Maple’s trial, published in 1950 in the New Yorker magazine. Suddenly people who had wondered about those soldiers’ accents and their knowledge of German beer hall songs had answers.

As for Fort Meade, the War Department declared the post surplus the same month Dale Maple went to trial, April of 1944. Fort Meade then became a Veterans Administration hospital.

“Ironically, aside from the station complement, the 620th was the last company-sized army unit stationed at Fort Meade before the post’s abandonment as a military installation,î Lee wrote. ìIt was a strange ending for a garrison that had included many of the army’s most highly regarded and decorated outfits during its long years of service.”

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Lady Leatherheads of Madison

By Roger Holtzmann

A football game at Eastern following World War II seemed impossible until the women decided to have one of their own. Back Row: Mary Pardy, Beverly Coombs, Marlys Bower, Doris Treloar, Muriel Tupper, Joyce Rave, Nancy Baughman, Susie Lowry. Middle Row: Anna Ruth Lang, Dorothy Carper, Phyllis Linafelter, Ruth Hart, Joyce Walters, Beverly Rubin, Barbara Stearns, Captain. Front Row: Donna Haley, Laurel Caldwell, Dona Keiner, Jeanette Johnson, Carol Weber, Elaine Norris, Captain, Janis Holsworth, Pauline Grytness. Photo courtesy of Barbara Stearns Turner

Rosie the Riveter was everywhere during World War II, flexing her biceps, representing the women who were proving they could weld and grind and rivet as well as the men who had been called away to the front lines. Rosie’s real life sisters changed a lot of attitudes about what”the delicate flower of womanhood” could do, not in the least their own, and that empowering message was not lost on the young ladies of Eastern State Teachers School in Madison.

Like many colleges, Eastern felt obliged to give up some campus activities during the war years. Among these were the annual homecoming celebration and most intercollegiate sports, including football, which would have been next to impossible in any case because so many of the region’s young men were overseas or away doing war-related work.

Victory had been achieved in Europe and the Pacific by September of 1945, and the entire country was eager to resume their interrupted lives. Homecoming was again on the schedule at Eastern, but the traditional football game seemed out of the question: just three men enrolled for the fall term that year. Where could 11 Trojans be found to don the blue and gold?

Enter the women of Eastern.”A bunch of us were sitting around after gym class and we thought, if we’re going to have homecoming, we’ve got to have a football game,” says Susie Lowry, who was a freshman in 1945. None of them had ever heard of women playing football before, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t do it.”We decided we should have a game of our own.”

Susie, who now lives in Globe, Arizona, was the daughter of V.A. Lowry, Eastern’s president from 1933 to 1962 — a state college residency second only to I.D. Weeks’ tenure as head of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. V.A. took the unprecedented notion of women playing football, not to mention his daughter playing football, more or less in stride. Daisy Lowry might have objected more strenuously, as any mother might, if she harbored any hope of changing her daughter’s mind.

“My mom saw this coming,” says Susie with a laugh.”She tried to make me a lady but it never really worked out.”

Barb (Stearns) Turner, a freshman enrolled in commercial courses, was another woman ready and willing to strap on a leather helmet. Barb, whose home is in Brookings, was the best natural athlete among the women at Eastern, according to Pauline (Grytness) Lunde, one of her teammates.

There was a lot of clowning around. A few of us fell down, just to make it look good, but it wasn’t really rough or anything.

“That might be stretching it a bit,” says Turner modestly. If nothing else, she at least qualified as one of the most experienced women when it came to rough and tumble. Her training began early, at home where she learned to hold her own with five brothers, and continued through school as she played pick-up football in vacant lots around Madison. Turner also played intramural sports,”but we didn’t have opportunities (or intercollegiate competition) like the girls of today,” she says with an understandable touch of envy.

Lining up with such eager athletes were a bunch of ladies on a lark.”Football was the last thing some of the girls would have thought about. Unless they were interested in a boy, of course,” says Lunde, of Rapid City.”But when you’re 18 and unattached, you make your own fun.”

Which was also a case of making a virtue of necessity, according to Turner.”Gas was rationed. Tires were rationed. We couldn’t just get in the car and go like they can today. We had to make our own fun.”

Robert C. Nelles, another freshman at Eastern that year, was on the committee in charge of organizing homecoming. The very idea of women playing football”was enough to curl your teeth,” he wrote in an account of the game for the History of Lake County, but the committee nonetheless gave its stamp of approval.

“Football Game To Be Played By Debs,” announced the Madison Daily Leader, which doubtless led to a few fussbudgets around town muttering about what that campus crowd would think of next, and how the younger generation was going to hell in a hand basket. They were a silent minority, however.

“Nobody had a real problem with girls playing each other in football,” says Turner.”Boys playing girls … now that might have caused a stir.”

So it was game on in Madison!

Miss Leota Van Ornum, the college’s physical education teacher, agreed to serve as coach. There was a high school on Eastern’s campus where students training to be teachers did their practice teaching. Robert Ormseth, who coached the school’s football team, promised to lend her a hand.

There were two groups of Eastern coeds at the time: those who lived at their homes in Madison while attending classes on campus, and those from surrounding small towns who lived in the dorm. They were as distinct as oil and water, so the 23 girls who wanted to play quite naturally divided into two teams, Townies and Dormies.

“What’s a nicer word than rivals?” wonders Lunde when asked how the two groups related to one another. Though the game was played in good fun, in other words, it would be safe to say that the spirit of competition was not entirely absent.

Uniforms presented a minor problem, and not for the reasons that might come to mind first. After five years in storage, apparently without mothballs, the college’s jerseys were rife with holes and most of the pads were literally coming apart at the seams. Enough serviceable uniforms were eventually scrounged from the on-campus high school and Madison Central; with a nip here and a tuck there, the Dormies in gold and Townies in blue were ready to take the field when Homecoming Day arrived.

Football was the last thing some of the girls would have thought about. Unless they were interested in a boy, of course.

“A fairly large group of spectators showed great interest and enthusiasm during the game,” according to The Eastern, the campus newspaper. Friends and family and alumni had to be well represented for that to be so because the 23 players constituted almost half of Eastern’s enrollment that term. Robert Nelles and Paul Tommeraasen, two of the three male students, had been pressed into service as game officials; the third was married, and he had to baby-sit. That left precious few student bodies to fill the stands — which dimmed the women’s enthusiasm and sense of fun not at all.

“We tried to be almost real, with huddles and all that,” says Lowry.”There was a lot of clowning around. A few of us fell down, just to make it look good, but it wasn’t really rough or anything.”

Pauline Lunde remembers that she and some others went to the homecoming tea that night with bandages on,”which was kind of funny because it was supposed to be this formal affair,” but a few skinned knees and grass burns weren’t enough to assuage the disappointment of at least one young lady. Joyce (Rave) Evans was one of a number of players who had never even seen a football game before; she later recalled that the game wasn’t as hazardous as she’d been led to expect after all the bother of getting fitted out in a helmet and pads.”Football didn’t impress us farm girls much,” she told a reporter when the two teams held a reunion in 2001.

The neophyte gridders proved more adept at defense than offense, holding each other scoreless until the game’s final minute. Doris Treloar of the Dormies finally broke through and scored a touchdown, which was immediately answered by Nancy Baughman of the Townies. A.E. Swan, the college librarian who was serving as the referee, considered that an opportune moment to end the contest on an amiable note. Either that or he was tired and wanted to go home, as a rumor later alleged.

Nelles claimed that a large number of broken nails contributed to getting the game called early, and we could dismiss this as a frivolous tale told by men, a mere stereotype, if not for the halftime show. There were no rousing, locker room exhortations to win one for the Gipper for these women. They had more important things to do: namely, to stay on the field and touch up their rouge and face powder before the amused spectators.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! If only they’d chosen to do something entertaining, to poke a little fun at themselves, the Daily Leader might not have dubbed them”The Powderpuff and Rouge Elevens,” and the demeaning, now-common term”Powderpuff Football” might never have been heard.

As football games go, Eastern’s homecoming contest wasn’t quite the stuff of legend. That doesn’t mean the women didn’t make a little history. This was the era of great football nicknames, like Michigan’s four-sport phenom Elroy”Crazy Legs” Hirsch and Illinois’ legendary runner Harold”The Galloping Ghost” Grange. An epic nickname was likewise born that day in Madison: Pauline”Swivel Hips” Lunde, so christened by her husband Bud.”I think it’s kind of cute, don’t you?” says Pauline’s daughter Holly, a moment after letting slip the family secret.”I just think it’s great they played the game. It’s just so hard to imagine my mom ever playing football!”

On a grander stage, Madison’s Lady Leatherheads can make a credible case they were the first women to ever play an organized football game. Not that any of them seem terribly interested in making such a claim. They seem quite content with the shared memory of a crisp October day when they were young and brimming with life and able to make their own fun.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.