Kathryn Roe Coker

"During World War II, Virginians watched as German and Italian prisoners invaded the Old Dominion. At least seventeen thousand Germans and countless Italians lived in more than twenty camps across the state and worked on five military installations. Farmers hired POWs to pick apples. Fertilizer companies, lumberyards and hospitals hired them. At first a phenomenon of war in Virginia's backyard, these former enemy combatants became familiar to many--often...