Army & Navy – Springtime in the Rockies

Officers at Camp Hale, high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, made public last week a report of more treasonous goings-on.

It was from Camp Hale, where U.S. troops train for mountain work, that Private Dale Maple recently deserted with two German prisoners (TIME, March 6). Most recent revelation: probably eight other U.S. soldiers were involved in the plot that already had Naziphile Maple facing a charge of treason.

Scandalous but less serious were further revelations: three WAC privates, among the few dozen WACs stationed at Camp Hale, had been court-martialed and thrown in clink for writing notes (contents not specified) to the Nazi prisoners. Two others are being held for investigation.

Camp officials denied that the WACs were involved in the escape plot. Husky German prisoners who volunteer to do maintenance work at the skyhigh, isolated training center, go around stripped to the waists, love to inflate their chests, flex their muscles, and kid with the WACs. In the opinion of Camp Hale’s baffled officials the susceptible WACs were guilty, at worst, of springtime indiscretion.

From a convoy of trucks carrying German prisoners of war to their quarters near by, crudely printed leaflets fluttered into the streets of Tishomingo, Okla. They proclaimed:

“U.S.A. People Nation. Have you would this war? Would you sacrifice your life for the Judaism and the capital? Your man father brother son and fiance fall now and know not for what. . . . Germany rest victorious. Hitler come.”

At a camp near Phoenix, Ariz, this week a Nazi prisoner was found hanged.