Reel vs. Real: WWII Georgia on the Big Screen

On December 15, 1939, the streets of Atlanta were filled with crowds, bright lights, and festivities. Hollywood actors, film producers, notable Atlantans, and even elderly Civil War veterans flocked to Loew’s Grand Theater on Peachtree Street for the world premiere of Gone With the Wind.

The occasion was the night of a lifetime for Atlanta — a burgeoning Southern city that had been a relatively rustic railroad hub just 79 years earlier. Though some at the premier may have suspected war was on the horizon, they likely did not know that this war would greatly involve Georgia and later inspire several movies depicting the state’s role in a major military conflict, not unlike the Civil War epic premiering that brisk December night.

After the United States entered the Second World War, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, roughly 320,000 Georgians served in the Armed Forces. Georgia’s main role in World War II was not merely to send men overseas, but also to serve as a training ground for soldiers. As the War Department mobilized troops for deployment, several military installations in the state trained newly enlisted servicemen. Fort Benning boasted the world’s largest infantry training school during the war, and the University of Georgia hosted a Navy pre-flight program that trained 2,000 combat pilots.

The Six Triple Eight (2024)

One of the most recent movies to depict World War II training in Georgia is Tyler Perry’s Netflix drama The Six Triple Eight (2024). The film tells the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. It was the only all-Black, all-female unit of the U.S. Women’s Army Corps (WAC) to serve overseas during World War II.

Beyond being produced at a Georgia-based studio, the film has a major Georgia connection through its central character, Lena Derriecott Bell King (portrayed by Ebony Obsidian), a member of the 6888th who was born in Washington, Georgia, on January 27, 1923. She moved with her family to Philadelphia as a young child and later enlisted.

On screen, much of the movie’s first hour takes place at Fort Oglethorpe, a now-decommissioned Army post whose grounds helped form today’s City of Fort Oglethorpe (incorporated 1949) near Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. That post is where the real 6888th trained in January 1945, before heading to a staging point at Camp Shanks, New York, and deploying to England. Filming for the Fort Oglethorpe sequences took place in Atlanta at Tyler Perry Studios on the grounds of the former Fort McPherson.

As depicted in the film, newly recruited WACs typically completed six weeks of basic training, covering drill without arms, defense against gas attack, military customs and courtesy, and safeguarding military information. This was followed by additional specialized training for non-combat Army roles.

Typical WAC specialties included secretarial and switchboard work, motor pool and mechanics, photography, cartography, control-tower operation, bakery, and cryptography. The Army’s purpose in expanding WAC assignments was to free men for combat.

Despite new opportunities, women faced persistent discrimination, and Black servicewomen confronted both sexism and racism. The War Department followed a 10% quota limiting Black women in the WAAC/WAC, mirroring an Army-wide policy for Black inductees. In its first officer-candidate intake in 1942, the Army trained roughly 440 WAAC officer candidates at Fort Des Moines, including about 40 Black women nicknamed the “ten-percenters.”

The film features Captain Abbie Noel Campbell (played by Milauna Jackson), the 6888th’s executive officer, who graduated in that first WAAC officer class at Fort Des Moines. Campbell recounted segregation in quarters and other discriminatory treatment in early postings. These experiences were consistent with broader documentation of the era.

Deployed in February 1945, the Six Triple Eight was stationed in Birmingham, England, where the unit turned King Edward’s School into a living and working space and tackled a massive backlog of undelivered mail.

Working 24 hours a day in three shifts and using a centralized card index that ultimately contained about seven million locator cards, the battalion moved an estimated 17–18 million pieces of mail in roughly three months — far ahead of the six months they’d been allotted.

While the British public generally welcomed the women, the 6888th still encountered discrimination from some American organizations overseas; when asked to accept a segregated recreation hotel, battalion commander Charity Adams Earley retorted that it would happen “over my dead body.”

The film’s climactic speech echoes that spirit, capturing the “two-front war” many of the more than one million African Americans who served in WWII described — fighting fascism abroad and racism at home, a sentiment embodied in the “Double V” campaign.

Summer of My German Soldier (1978)

While Georgia installations like Fort Oglethorpe trained U.S. troops for combat overseas, some posts in the state also came into direct contact with foreign enemies held as prisoners of war (POWs).

Bette Greene’s 1973 young-adult novel Summer of My German Soldier follows Patty Bergen, a Jewish American girl who shelters an escaped German POW in rural Arkansas; Greene later described drawing on experiences from her Arkansas childhood.

The Emmy-winning 1978 NBC adaptation of Greene’s book, starring Kristy McNichol (Patty), Bruce Davison (Anton Reiker), and Esther Rolle (Ruth), relocates the story to Georgia; Rolle won the 1979 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress for this role. Filming took place in Georgia towns, including Crawfordville and Madison.

During World War II, Georgia operated five major POW “base camps” at Fort Benning, Fort Gordon, Camp Stewart (now Fort Stewart), Camp Wheeler, and Fort Oglethorpe —plus dozens of smaller branch camps across the state that supplied labor to farms and industry.

In the film, POWs are shown at a rural Georgia branch camp near the fictional Jenkinsville; historically, branch-camp prisoners commonly worked seasonal agricultural jobs to alleviate home-front labor shortages. Typical workdays ran eight to 10 hours, six days a week, and POW work clothing was marked with large “PW” stencils when sent off-site.

One early scene has military police escorting POWs into Patty’s family store to buy straw hats for the heat. While it seems generous, humane treatment was a U.S. policy grounded in the 1929 Geneva Convention, which governed POW treatment during WWII and was enforced through War Department regulations and inspections. Camps also maintained routines that balanced security and welfare, including early reveille, work or details during the day, meals, hygiene, and evening lights-out. These things mirrored examples documented at other U.S. POW facilities.

Anton’s fixation on news about his escape also tracks with period practice. U.S. camps typically offered libraries, movie showings, and access to newspapers; by mid-1944, the War Department even authorized subscriptions to the New York–based German-language Neue Volkszeitung. Some camps published their own papers, including a POW newspaper at Fort Benning; other German-language POW papers circulated across the national camp network.

Finally, the film’s Georgia setting isn’t just cosmetic: the South and Southwest hosted a heavy share of POW sites because temperate climates reduced heating demands and camps could be sited near agricultural work. However, the nationwide network ultimately spread to nearly every state.

The Great Escape (1963)

The United States was not the only country to host POWs during World War II. Throughout the war, more than 120,000 Americans were held by the Axis. Treatment varied by theater; it was commonly harsher in the Pacific — where Japan was not a party to the Geneva Convention — while most American POWs were captured in Europe by Germany or its allies.

POW experiences abroad inspired countless media. Like Summer of My German Soldier, one of the best-known films set in a German POW camp centers on a famous breakout. The Great Escape (1963) offers a slightly fictionalized account of the 1944 mass escape by Allied airmen from Stalag Luft III, today in Poland. The film follows a multinational group who plan to free 200 prisoners via three tunnels and notes that while Stalag Luft III began in 1942 to house U.K. and U.S. aircrew, by 1944 its population represented many nations.

Among the POWs at Stalag Luft III was at least one Atlantan. Frank DeSales Murphy, an Emory student who trained as a navigator, was shot down over Münster, Germany, on October 10, 1943, and spent 16 months at the camp before its January 27, 1945, evacuation and his transfer.

An inaccuracy in the film is its portrayal of Americans participating in the March 24, 1944, escape. In reality, the camp was divided into nationality-based compounds — North (British), South (American), East (British), West (American), Center (shifted from British to American), and a German staff area — and the breakout originated in the British-controlled North Compound; no tunnels reached the American compounds. The movie instead centers three fictional American characters (Hilts, Hendley, Goff) as key escapees.

Murphy’s oral history helps set the real scene. He recalled the American compound “immediately adjacent” to the British one, with POWs shouting across barbed wire and a 30-foot gap; that is how news of the escape first reached the Americans. The next morning, March 25, he woke to commotion as guards descended on the North Compound.

British policy during the war encouraged escape-mindedness as a way to force the enemy to expend resources; in 1939, the British formed M.I.9 specifically to promote and assist escapes.

After the Germans recaptured escapees, 76 got out; only three reached safety. Fifty were executed on Hitler’s orders, a Geneva violation that hardened American resistance in the camp. Murphy remembered Americans disrupting roll call until guards aimed machine guns to restore order.

Daily life details the film only hints at also appear in Murphy’s account: scarce rations supplemented by International Red Cross parcels (biscuits, coffee, powdered milk, canned meats/fish, soap, cigarettes), often sabotaged by guards who punctured cans to prevent stockpiles; weight loss was common. As the war ground on, both German rations and parcel deliveries grew less frequent.

Clothing was similarly scarce; many POWs, Murphy included, largely wore what they were captured in, with Red Cross items filling gaps. The region’s cold made fuel rationing keenly felt. Murphy recalled stoves lit for only two hours a day. Contemporary accounts also note snow on the ground the night of the escape, with a patrol spotting tracks near tunnel “Harry” around 5 a.m. on March 25.

As the Soviets advanced, prisoners were ordered to evacuate Stalag Luft III on January 27, 1945, marching through snow before rail transfer to Stalag VII-A near Munich. There, Murphy was among roughly 80,000 POWs until liberation by U.S. forces on April 29, 1945.

A Real Ending to a Real War

Film is a powerful medium. It is unmatched in its ability to lift audiences out of their daily lives and into other worlds, often into earlier versions of our own. But no single movie can capture the full complexity of a historical event as vast as World War II.

Germany signed an unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945, in Reims; the act was reaffirmed in Berlin on May 8, the date widely marked as V-E Day. Many U.S. forces in Europe were reassigned to the Pacific or staged for a possible invasion of Japan, but a huge demobilization also began. By the end of 1945, the War Department had returned more than four million service members to the United States.

Among those coming home were Georgians such as Frank DeSales Murphy of the 100th Bomb Group. After liberation from Stalag VII-A (Moosburg) on April 29, 1945, he was processed through Camp Lucky Strike in France, which was designated RAMP Camp No. 1 for newly liberated POWs, before shipping back to the U.S. and making his way to Fort McPherson and home to Atlanta.

Four months after Germany’s surrender, Japan formally surrendered on September 2, 1945, aboard USS Missouri, ending World War II. The U.S. accelerated demobilization through late 1945. The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — the subject of The Six Triple Eight — returned to the U.S. in February 1946 and was disbanded at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

For German POWs held in the United States, the journey home varied. As the war ended, the War Department ran reeducation initiatives (including classes in English, American history and government, and required viewings of atrocity films) through its Special Projects Division and related programs. Because of postwar labor needs, many POWs remained in U.S. custody into 1946 and, upon transfer, were sent not directly to Germany but first to Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands for reconstruction labor before repatriation, which was a common practice across the Allied system. A number of POWs who had been held in Georgia returned in the 1950s, seeking work and stability after the devastation in Europe.

The return of veterans marked the start of a transformed Georgia, swept up in postwar urbanization and industrial growth. Women gained new footholds in the workforce, and Black Americans and other minorities pressed for civil rights — momentum that would define the mid-century South. Millions of veterans used the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (G.I. Bill) to pursue education, buy homes, and start families, fueling a broad economic and social shift.

Stories carried home by veterans and later retold in books, television, and film continue to help new generations see the scale of Georgia’s role in a global conflict, much like the crowds who filled Atlanta’s streets on that cold December night in 1939 for Gone With the Wind’s premiere.