HAMILTON, Mont. — Buried at the bottom of an inside page of a May 1946 edition of a Ravalli County newspaper, there is a very small story about a remarkable coincidence at the farm of Homer Bailey.

It was so short that it would be easy to miss hidden beneath a column about who was visiting whom in the valley that week.

But if you did happen to spot it, you would learn that a man named George Wandler had returned home to the Bitterroot after serving with George S. Patton's famous Seventh Army during its push through France.

The story said that a German prisoner of war recognized Wandler as the man who took him into custody when Wandler found the German begging for food at a French woman's house.

The only other piece of information the article offered was that the German had been brought here to work in the beet fields.

For Mary Lyn and Larry Strate, the story was another tiny piece in a historical puzzle they're intent on putting together on the little known fact that the Bitterroot Valley once housed German prisoners-of-war labor camps.

Toward the end of World War II, Bitterroot farmers were struggling to find the labor pool they needed to harvest sugar beets, apples and other crops.

After trying conscientious objectors and Mexican nationals, the farmers opened up their fields to a new crop of laborers imported from the battlefields of Europe.

Almost overnight, guard towers and wire went up around a labor camp on Homer Bailey's farm just north of Corvallis. Over the course of several months, German prisoners filed through the camp to work in nearby fields and orchards.

"This is really a story about us trying to uncover a story," Strate said. "There's so much that we don't know. We hope that there are people who can share what they know about the camps."

Betty Bailey is 95 years old this year.

The wife of Homer and mother of Mary Lyn, the Hamilton woman can still remember the searchlights that swept across her family's fields after the German prisoners arrived in late 1945.

"I was uneasy when they first came here," she said. "My brother was a prisoner of war in Germany. We were all uneasy back then."

Sitting at her kitchen table that's filled with newspaper and magazine clippings, Betty Bailey points to a faded newspaper photograph of a man and little girl standing together on the picture's edge. In the background, a group of men are stooped over in work.

"It's the only photograph that we have of the prisoners of war at work," Lyn said. "That's my father and that little girl is me."

So far, the research team has not been able to find a single photograph of the camp that was located at the spot where Lyn's brother now has a trailer sales business.

There's so much they don't know.

The stories in local newspapers about the camps were short and lacking detail. No one knows for sure where the prisoners worked or where they were captured or whatever became of them.

"There are just so many questions and so few answers," Strate said. "We went through the records at the museum and old copies of the Ravalli Republican and Western News. There wasn't really a lot there."

Bailey remembers the challenges her husband and other Bitterroot Valley farmers faced with so many of the young off to war during World War II.

Initially, she said farmers brought in men from the Philippines to help, but they didn't stay long. Then they tried letting school out and using students to thin and harvest the sugar beets, but that didn't work either.

The next group that appeared was conscientious objectors to the war.

"They were worse than bad," Bailey remembered. "They didn't like the living conditions on the farm. They had a strike. I can remember the apples falling off the trees and no one was harvesting them.

"They sat down against our shop. I could see them from my kitchen window all day long. Sometimes I would just stare at them and frown."

Mexican nationals were the next laborers imported into the valley. Most were young, well-bred men who Bailey believed had probably never dirtied their hands. The labor camp was built for them.

"They couldn't work either," she said.

After the Mexicans left, the German prisoners of war arrived on the scene.

"The camp suddenly had guard towers," Bailey said. "The searchlights went around and around all night long. I remember being afraid. I didn't feel like I could let the kids go outside. That darn light would go around all night. I kept the kids in my bed when dad was gone."

The guards at the camp carried rifles and they marched their prisoners into the fields. Often as not, they would go right by the Bailey home.

At one time during World War II, there were about 500 prisoner of war camps in the United States. The prisoners who spent time at branch camps at Tucker Crossing north of Corvallis and near Stevensville were part of a contingent initially sent to Camp Rupert near Paul, Idaho.

That camp was the largest of its kind in Idaho. It housed about 4,000 prisoners in 172 buildings over a 300-acre enclosure.

Lyn and Strate hope they can find additional records about the Bitterroot camps there this spring.

As best they can tell, at its height, there were 395 German POWs in the Bitterroot, with about 150 at Tucker Crossing.

Bailey thinks the Germans must have been farm boys.

"They knew how to work in the fields," she said. "I don't think they were happy, but they didn't have any choice. The army was there with their guns watching over them."

Bailey doesn't have any photographs except the one faded newspaper shot. She's not surprised that there aren't more.

In those years when everything was rationed, photography was not something people spent much time doing.

"I don't have a lot of photographs of my family from that time period," she said. "You might be lucky to get a roll of film and so what you had was very precious. You were very careful about the pictures you took. I kind of doubt that we would have been encouraged to take pictures of the camp."

Bailey remembers that most people were troubled.

"We still didn't know what was going to happen tomorrow," she said. "My parents were in terrible shape with the fact that my brother was a prisoner of war."

"We all lived just day to day,' she said.

Her brother, Bob, was a paratrooper who was taken prisoner at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He was at a camp that General Patton's men attempted to liberate and was shot in the back as he attempted to escape.

Don Wandler of Stevensville has a happier story to tell about prisoners of war.

It was his brother, George, who came face to face with a man he had captured in battle.

"As soon as he turned 18, George joined the service," Wandler said. "He was thrown right into the middle of the European campaign."

George had just been released from the service and was serving as a guard in the Bitterroot when the incident occurred that has become part of Wandler family lore.

"He was on the Bailey ranch when it happened," Wandler said. "It was his job to make sure that no one got out of line. All of a sudden, one of the prisoners came running right at him. He had live ammo in his rifle.

"He was about the shoot when the man started saying: 'Do you remember me? Do you remember me? You captured me. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Getting out of that war and coming here to America.' "

Wandler said his brother — who is now deceased — didn't like to talk much about the war, but he did tell that story.

Wandler can still remember the buildings that once housed the German prisoners right alongside the Eastside Highway. He thinks it was about 30 years ago that someone tore what remained down.

"You talk to most people these days and they're not even aware it existed," Wandler said.

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Information from: Ravalli Republic, http://www.ravallirepublic.com