Camp Carson: The POW Camp That Became Fort Carson

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of nineteen forty-one, Colorado Springs did what many American cities did: it gave land to the Army. The city purchased acreage south of town and donated it to the War Department. Construction on Camp Carson began immediately, and the first building, the camp headquarters, was completed January thirty-first, nineteen forty-two.

It was named for the legendary frontiersman and Army scout Christopher Kit Carson, who had explored much of this same terrain a century earlier. During the war, more than one hundred four thousand soldiers trained at Camp Carson. The facility served multiple units through the war years, and the training grounds covered terrain that resembled the kinds of landscape soldiers would encounter in Europe and the Pacific.

What is less often remembered is what happened at the end of the war. About nine thousand Axis prisoners of war, most of them Italian and German, were held at Camp Carson. The first prisoners to arrive, in May of nineteen forty-three, were three hundred sixty-eight Italian soldiers captured in North Africa.

As the war progressed, German prisoners followed. The POWs organized stores, competed in sports, staged theatrical performances for each other, and published their own German-language newspaper called Die PW Woche, which translates roughly as The Prisoner of War Week. The camp was redesignated Fort Carson in nineteen fifty-four, the same year the Air Force Academy was authorized and Peterson Air Force Base was expanding.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Colorado Springs had become one of the most militarized cities in the United States, a transformation that began with Palmer's railroad and accelerated through every decade of the Cold War.