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The secret WWII files in a Waterloo garage
A 74-year-old cleaning out his garage pulled 300 pages of classified POW testimony from a crawlspace nobody knew was there.
In brief
A 74-year-old cleaning out his garage pulled 300 pages of classified POW testimony from a crawlspace nobody knew was there. Records historians assumed were gone can sit in an ordinary house for decades, and one person deciding to hand them in is what puts them back into public history. Originally reported by Dailymail.
Fourteen years, one hidden room
Jason Hurdle had lived in his rural Waterloo, New York home since 2012 and thought he knew the place. Cleaning the garage in July, he found a crawlspace he had never seen.
A box marked secret
Inside the dusty compartment was a set of files stamped 'secret'. Hurdle, 74, pulled them out and started reading.
Three hundred pages of testimony
The tranche held first-hand accounts written by American prisoners of war during World War II, page after page of what captivity had actually been like.
He took them to the library
Hurdle did not put them online or sell them. He carried the files to his local library, which passed them to the National Archives and Records Administration.
NARA came to collect
Archivists drove out to take custody of the box. They later confirmed the accounts were genuine and had once carried a classified marking.
Podunk to the National Archives
Hurdle told the Washington Post the scale of it still had not landed. A garage find in a small upstate town had become a federal matter.
“I'm in podunk little Waterloo, New York, and this went all the way to the National Archives. We're kind of in shock here”
Nobody knows how they got there
The house has been in his wife's family for generations, and Hurdle has no explanation for the files. A former neighbor kept memorabilia from an ancestor, but that is only a guess.
Written at Camp Lucky Strike
Freed POWs arriving at Camp Lucky Strike in Normandy were told to write down everything they had been through. The goal was intelligence, not memoir.
Evidence at the tribunals
Many statements gathered at that camp went on to be used as war crimes evidence in military tribunals after the war.
Not even on the missing list
Historians had no idea these particular accounts existed. NARA told the Post the files did not appear on any list of documents known to be missing.
Why the archives care
A NARA spokeswoman framed the recovery as a matter of both preservation and access, getting government records back where the public can reach them.
“The discovery of these government records is important and meaningful to ensure preservation and public access to our country's history”
Sixty men in a boxcar
Julian Candelaria, held for months in a work camp, described being packed into railcars with nothing and no way out if the bombs came.
“60 men in boxcars, no food no water, no sanitary facilities, crowded, exposed to bombing”
Three days on foot
Candelaria also recorded a forced march: three days and nights of walking with barely any food and no medical care.
“Walked 3 days + nights with little food, no medical”
He never spoke of it
The Post tracked down Candelaria's obituary. It said that after coming home he refused to discuss what the Germans had done to him.
“After returning home he refused to discuss the events that occurred during his imprisonment”
Bombs killed his companions
Another prisoner, Henry Daly, wrote about running for cover during a bombing and losing two men beside him whose names he could no longer recall.
“We ran for cover, but two of my companions [whose] names I do not [recall] were killed by the bombs”
A sad example
Daly's summary of what the war had reduced American soldiers to was blunt and self-directed, written while the memory was days old.
“a very sad example of what the US soldier was like”
The park bench years
Daly's great-grandson Michael Yanes said Daly never talked about the war at home, and often slept in a park because staying inside the house was too hard.
New words from a silent man
For Yanes, the pages are the first time his family has heard any of it. He said the weight of reading them was hard to put into language.
“Seeing these words written is quite heavy. This is all new to us. The emotions. I can't even describe”
Filed and going digital
The accounts now sit with similar POW testimony at the National Archives and are set to be digitized, which is what makes them readable by anyone.
Not the only thing turning up
NARA also recovered 145 Navy records from an Apollo engineer, a pardon signed by Franklin Pierce, a secret House tally sheet, and a JEB Stuart letter to Jefferson Davis.
The takeaway
Records historians assumed were gone can sit in an ordinary house for decades, and one person deciding to hand them in is what puts them back into public history.
