Camp 10 – Fingal

Date Opened: November 1945
Date Closed: November 1946
Capacity: 325
Type of POW: Enemy Merchant Seamen, Civilian Internees, and Combatant Other Ranks

Description:

The success of employing POW labourers on farms in Southwestern Ontario in 1944 and 1945 prompted an increasing number of farmers to POW labourers. In order to make more POWs available throughout Southwestern Ontario, the Department of Labour establish temporary farm hostels at Centralia, Glencoe, and Fingal. While the Centralia and Glencoe hostels housed POWs in tents, the Fingal hostel made use of the recently vacated No. 4 Bombing and Gunnery School.

Established in 1940, the No. 4 B&G School trained thousands of airmen as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan up until its closure in February 1945. The hostel made use of many of the training school’s buildings which meant few changes were required apart from a barbed wire fence erected around the prisoners’ barracks and mess.

Throughout the Summer of 1945, the Fingal hostel provided POWs to local farmers and agricultural representatives continued to receive applications for POW labourers even as the harvest season closed. With civilian labourers unavailable, the Department of Labour authorized the placement of hand-picked POWs on individual farms in the area but they still required an internment camp to administer the project. As the current Camp 10, a tented camp at Chatham, was unsuitable for year-round occupation, the Department of National Defence elected to close that camp and transfer the camp staff and necessary POWs to Fingal.

When Camp 10 (Fingal) opened in November 1945, staff immediately began placing POWs – all hand-picked non-combatants to ensure they were not security risks – on individual farms. These POWs lived with the farmers and their families and worked as general farm hands.

While the Fingal camp remained operational through the winter, there were few POWs physically in camp as the majority lived with the farmers they worked for. More prisoners arrived at the start of the 1946 farming season, including combatant POWs. Most were placed on individual farms but some were loaned out for the day. Like Chatham in 1945, Fingal also served as the administrative centre for POWs working from the POW farm hostels at Glencoe, Centralia, and Chatham.

Camp 10 closed following the end of the 1946 harvest. Although there was some discussion of retaining selected POWs in Canada, the federal government bowed to public pressure and instead elected to transfer all remaining POWs to the UK for their eventual repatriation.

In the decades following the end of the war, the buildings were moved to other locations or torn down. Today, the site is home to the Fingal Wildlife Management Area and is a popular place for hiking and wildlife watching. Although much of the camp area has been reforested, some foundations remain and, as can be seen below, the layout of the airfield remains visible to this day.

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