US History II - blog on Canadian involement in WWII / the Angler POW escape

Angler Camp

Map of Canada - Lake Superior and Medicine Hat

Angler Pow Camp

Lake Superior

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angler_POW_escape
• http://www.lynximages.com/POW.htm
• http://www.sedai.ca/images/history/3_1.jpg -  picture of the Angler POW camp

FACTS

• during World War II, 35,046 POW's  and Japanese-Americans were kept in Canadian POW camps. 
• In April, 1941, inmates at the Angler POW camp in Ontario, Canada planned and executed the largest escape plan from a Canadian POW camp during World War Two. 
• Lake Superior- 3 main POW camps in the area.
• roughly 80 German POW's planned on escaping, but only 28 eight actually managed to get out - 5 were shot soon after, 2 more were returned to the camp after being found leaving on a train, and the rest were eventually recaptured.
• Horst Liebeck and Karl Heinz-Grund were the only truly successful escaped prisoners; Liebeck and Grund managed to get as far west as Alberta, using trains as a form of transportation. At one point, they were on a train that was stopped 3 times by militia, and still they didn't get caught. They even had to "repose" in a car full of ice for a while, before they sensibly left, avoiding freezing to death. But finally they were captured on the side of a highway after a suspicious guard in Medicine Hat, Alberta alerted the authorities, and they were sent back to the camp for 28 days in solitary confinement. However, the thing that is probably most surprising is the fact that after they were captured, the two German men were treated as Celebrities, and some local Canadians even asked for their autographs! 

PLANNING THE ESCAPE

• For months, 559 German POW's had been planning their escape from the Angler POW camp, and the date for the planned escape was April 20th. 
• makeshift compasses, clothing, maps, and candles had been fashioned out of materials they could find in their cells;    

- compasses - magnetized needles and  razors

- clothing - redesigned prison clothes (disguised to look like civilian clothes)

- maps - drawn and copied 

- candles - tin cans and kitchen fat (the wicks made of underwear drawstrings

They even managed to blackmail a guard into giving them a radio, which they hid inside a model of the German Battleship, Bismarck

• The German POW's dug a tunnel 45 meters long, which led outside the walls of the camp. This tunnel had all sorts of tributary tunnels leading from barrack to barrack so that other prisoners could cover (during role call) for people who were working on the tunnel or other things.
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Triangle Factory Fire, 1911

If I was an average citizen of New York, March 25th, and I read the newspaper and the articles in it pertaining to the fire, I would have been horrified. Not only because of the tragic fact that 146 men and women had died, but also because of the fact that something like that was able to happen; it takes a lot of ignorance to allow something as large as that to happen.

After the incidents of The Triangle Factory Fire, it proved that the Progressive Era wasn't so progressive; people were not getting treated properly either in or out of their workplace, and the dangers and risks were all still there. If the factory actually had proper standards in the way it was run, there would of not ever been a fire. Plus the fact that the employers didn't trust the workers didn't help; if they trusted their workers, they would never have barred up/locked the one door connecting to the fire escape on the ninth floor, and many more of the 146 men and women would have survived the holocaust.

US history 2 homework

The document from the Report of the Secretary of War (General Nelson A. Mills), written around 1890, was a secondary source about the (then) current status of the Native Americans. Obviously enough, this document was not written for the eyes of the public, for there was in fact evidence that contradicted what the American Government was trying to tell "the people" about the Native's and how they weren't "civilized". General Mills was trying to show the Government how the Indians weren't able to live properly with the conditions that were given at that point and time, so it was an informing document intended to lighten situations, or at least let them be known for what they truly were. I believe this is a valuable source because it was an honest account of what was happening, not a bias Government official trying to convince even more people with more lies. However, like almost all documents recorded, there are some holes. There isn't a defending story to show how the white settlers felt, plus this is in fact a secondary document, which means that it wasn't directly written word for word, and some things could have been misinterpreted. Food for thought...how much can you trust your own secretary? Or how about a secretary of a secretary?