Women waited at train stations for the return of their husbands and lovers and kicked up their heels when their men disembarked.

Trains led soldiers to ships and to battle. Along the tracks, American workers, who saved rubber tires and tin for the war effort, waved their arms to the troops, saluting them with smiles. American troops boarded Pullman cars with signs on them that said HITLER HERE WE COME and ON TO TOKYO. During the war, life and death revolved around the arrival and departure of trains. Trains are a primary symbol of World War II. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told.Ĭombining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, The Train to Crystal City reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR’s tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called “quiet passage.” During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans-diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries-behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.įocusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, author Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp the struggles of their fathers their families’ subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II, where thousands of families-many US citizens-were incarcerated.įrom 1942 to 1948, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas.

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