During
WWII the United States Army established the Holding and Reconsignment Point in
Horseheads. It was used to collect and store
military supplies and equipment like tanks and weapons that were shipped
overseas for the war effort. Horseheads
was one of ten sites around the United States that served the army in this
capacity during the war and was chosen because of the area’s extensive railroad
network. The facility was built in 1942 at the cost of $8,228,000. The nearly-700-acre plot had 1.5 million feet
of open or ground storage, spacious warehouses, and 37 miles of railroad
tracks. The Holding Point was staffed by
thirty officers and men from the Army Transportation Corps as well as nearly 500
civilian men and women.
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| Aerial view of the Holding Point in Horseheads |
With
so many men serving in the military and the increased demand for workers in
factories that had ramped up production for the war effort, the area was
suffering from a labor shortage. One source of additional workers was
prisoners-of-war. In August 1944, around
200 German POWs went to work at the Holding Point. The enemy soldiers had been captured in the
Normandy battles and sent to the former Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp
in Van Etten. In 1933, Cornell
University made arrangements with the US government to build a CCC camp in the
Arnot Forest. The camp operated from
November 1933 through May 1937 and again from October 1939 to October
1941. In the early summer of 1944, the
Army began converting the CCC camp into a POW camp. In August, the first German POWs
arrived. They were transported to the
Holding Point daily to work and then returned each night to the camp. They were there for only two weeks before
being sent to the Sodus Point area to work in privately owned farms and
orchards.
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| Civilian Conservation Camp, Arnot Forest, Van Etten, 1934 |
The
146th Italian Service Unit arrived to work at the Holding Point on
August 23, 1944. Italian Service Units
were made up of captured Italian soldiers who volunteered to serve with the US
military. Many of the 50,000 Italian
prisoners captured in North Africa joined the units when they were shipped to
the United States. The prisoners were
carefully screened for Nazi and Fascist leanings before being accepted into the
units. They wore regular US Army
uniforms with a green patch that read “Italy.”
Around 400 men from two Italian Service Units, the 146th and
the 134th, were stationed at the Holding Point. They lived in tents on wooden platforms set
up in the northeast section of the facility.
Each tent had six army cots, rails for hanging clothing, a coal or wood
stove, and electric lights. There was a
mess tent and an army field kitchen.
Prisoners were paid 80 cents a day for their work repairing trucks and
loading war materials for shipment.
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| Tanks, trucks, and other equipment at the Holding Point |
Members
of the Service Units were granted “Limited Liberty” which meant that they could
not go out alone but groups with an MP as guard could leave the facility to go
shopping or attend church. They could
not visit private homes but they could receive visitors at the Holding
Point. On August 27, a group of the Italian
prisoners was taken on a bus tour of Watkins Glen, Cornell, Enfield, and
Elmira. They visited St. Anthony’s Hall
at the end of their tour. Upon hearing
about the trip, locals became angry at the “coddling” of the enemy prisoners
and said they being treated “better than our boys.”
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Model church
made by an Italian prisoner and
given to an
Elmira boy as a confirmation gift
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After
the war, the Holding Point was sold to Webster Industries for $1,260,000. It became an important industrial site and
now is the location of the Horseheads Industrial Center.
