Toy German tank a mystery at military museum
Posted on Sunday, October 5, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/239292/
Amid World War II-era pamphlets, posters and playthings, a gray-and-black wooden tank sits in the corner of an exhibit room in the Jacksonville Museum of Military History.
The toy’s gray paint has been battered by time, exposing wood.
The black-and-white German iron crosses, though, are unmistakable.
“It is obviously a homemade item,” said Franz Schmucker, 76, the man who loaned the toy to the museum’s Homefront Collection about a month ago.
The museum collects World War II-era memorabilia, mostly made in America, with a focus on local connections.
The quality of the toy indicates a quiet birth under an artisan’s hands, not the staccato churning of a factory.
There is no manufacturing mark to indicate where it was made.
The origin of the tank is a mystery that Ben Rice hopes to solve with the public’s help..
“We’re trying to see if there are any people out there who would either prove or disprove” the leading theory so far, said Rice, a member of the museum board.
That theory, proposed by Schmucker is that one of the 10, 000 German prisoners of war held at North Little Rock’s Camp Robinson during World War II made it.
Rice believes that the toy could have been made by a German prisoner of war at Camp Robinson, because of conversations he had with a relative who remembered that Japanese-Americans made arts and crafts at the Rohwer Relocation Center in Desha County.
An ex-guard, Harold Medlock, told Rice that he remembered paintings and other crafts. Rice, however, isn’t sure that prisoners at Camp Robinson made such toys or why they would have. Schmucker has forgotten where he found the tank, perhaps at a toy fair six or eight years ago. But he remembers well the German Tiger I tank on which he believes the toy is modeled. He grew up in Nazi Germany-occupied Czechoslovakia in the early 1940 s and saw Tiger tanks — heavy tanks first built in 1942 — in the streets. “As part of the so-called Hitler Youth, we had a lot of military training,” he said. “We recognized virtually all the tanks.” The length of the tank’s gun and the location of wooden exhausts attached to the back of the tank are built to scale, Schmucker said.
Schmucker, a retired U. S. Air Force colonel, immigrated to the United States in 1951. He has lived in Jacksonville since 1970.
In nearly 30 years of collecting military toys, he said, he has seen only two or three wooden toy tanks built so closely to scale.
Most military toys that American children played with in the 1940 s were made in factories to look like Allied forces equipment, he said.
He never has seen a wooden World War II-era Axis forces toy of American or British manufacture.
Rice said he believes that there’s a higher likelihood that if the museum’s toy tank was made by a German POW in Arkansas, the German would have worked in Camp Robinson.
Camp Robinson’s POW facility was about 10 miles from the Arkansas Ordnance Plant, which produced fuses, boosters, detonators and primers from 1942-45.
Jacksonville’s military museum now stands where the plant’s administration building once stood.
Camp Robinson was one of four main POW camps in Arkansas. Along with Camp Chaffee in Fort Smith and Camp Dermott in Chicot County, it housed German prisoners who predominantly were from the Afrika Korps, a Nazi force that fought in northern Africa.
In Drew County, Camp Monticello housed Italians.
Some 425, 000 POWs filled 666 camps in the United States during World War II, said Steve Rucker, director of the Arkansas National Guard Museum at Camp Robinson. More than 371, 000 of the prisoners were German.
The U. S. government opened the camps to ease crowding in Great Britain’s camps, choosing sites in the South and southwest far from urban areas.
The prisoner camp at Camp Robinson, completed in August 1943, was built on 300 acres on the northwest portion of the camp. Originally divided into three compounds, it held up to 4, 000 prisoners, records show.
The prisoners lived relatively comfortable lives within the camp’s confines and could organize their own bands and orchestras, produce plays and study English, according to historical accounts.
They exercised and played soccer, said Medlock, 80, who guarded the German prisoners in 1945 and 1946.
The last Germans left the camp in May 1946.
Most prisoners could earn 80 cents a day working in the camp or with contracted work outside, according to published reports.
Medlock recalled transporting prisoners to the banks of the Arkansas River near Adams Field in east Little Rock. About 30 guards watched the Germans sandbag levees along a stretch of at least two miles.
Sentries and sandbaggers chatted about their countries and cultures, and Medlock said he gave cigarettes, candy and chewing gum to prisoners he liked.
Bernice Chapin, 74, of Conway, recalled seeing 30-50 POWs waiting to go to a factory to work every morning as she made her five-mile trek to Rose City Elementary School.
“They would come in two great big buses,” said Chapin, “and the guards lined them up after he unloaded them.”
For Christmas 1944, a prisoner gave her a picture he had painted of a lakeside church nestled in the Bavarian Alps.
She proudly showed it to people sitting around a table in the Jacksonville Museum of Military History’s boardroom on a recent weekday.
“There’s his name,” she murmured, pointing to the tiny scrawl in the painting’s lower right corner.
Painting was a favorite pastime of the prisoners, Medlock said.
He saw them buy painting supplies — as well as snacks and clothing — at the camp’s post exchange store.
Medlock doesn’t recall the prisoners making toys on camp grounds.
“I’m not saying that they didn’t. I just wasn’t on the scene at the time,” he said. He believes it’s possible some German POWs could have made toys.
Rice hopes that interest in the tank’s origin spurs growth of the museum’s collection of World War II-era toys and memorabilia.
His museum, after all, houses much more than a small, wooden mystery.
Anyone with information about the tank can call (501 ) 241-1943.