Grenada’s Great Escape
During World War II, nearly 8,000 German POWs were housed in
Grenada’s Camp McCain, one of five POW camps in Mississippi. The camps offered prisoners the comforts of home—medical and dental care, movies, English classes, athletics. Treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention, the prisoners were fed well with meals they were allowed to cook themselves.
Eventually Camp McCain and the others developed subbranches in the Mississippi Delta, where the prisoners worked in cotton fields, hot work they did not particulary enjoy.
Still, when 30 POWs walked off a Belzoni work camp, they were found strolling downtown Belzoni, window shopping. They were bored, they explained to the frantic search party that included the police, FBI and state highway patrol. In another “escape,” four prisoners were found eating lunch in a Grenada restaurant.
Another more dramatic escape involved a Delta planter’s wife and a German POW who fell in love when he worked on her husband’s plantation. They ran away together, only to be caught in Nashville, on their way east to steal a plane to fly to Greenland.
History Channels.
Grenada-Grenada Lake
A wartime city digs in with key fortifications, then finds itself forced to push deeper for the will to withstand an even greater scourge… A righteous community digs in to demand equality and decency, but faced with violent reprisal must reach down deep for the courage to overcome… A general, faced with a shaming loss, must bore down on an enemy to carve out a place in history… An army, confronted by a rampaging river, dredges up a beautiful solution.
Valor? Perseverance? This place has them down cold—as cold as the waters of the lake that bears its name, drawing sportsmen and recreation lovers from all over the country. History, architectural beauty and plenty of outdoor fun, all here for you. So go ahead. Dig in.
It was the most important Civil War battle that never occurred. With seven solid lines of earthworks and fortifications ringing the city, and more than 20,000 Confederate soldiers manning them, Grenada was braced as the bulwark that would stand between the port of Vicksburg and U.S. Grant’s army. Grant fully expected he would engage in Grenada after he marched his troops overland from Holly Springs. Yet the best laid plans, not to mention earthworks, sometimes come to surprising ends. Grant never reached Grenada, although it could be said that Grenada reached him, in ways that would alter the course of the war.