Ruth Beaumont Cook published Guests Behind the Barbed Wire in 2007 with Crane Hill Publishers.  This narrative history tells the story of Camp Aliceville, one of the largest POW camps in the United States during WWII.  In 2008, the book won the Bronze Medal in history from the Independent Publishers Group.

Since publication, Cook has received much additional information about the camp, the German POWs who spent time there, the American MPEG guards who policed the camp, and the citizens of Aliceville who interacted with the camp.  She has also received information about American POWs in Germany and about other POW camps in the United States.

The purpose of this blog is to share as much of that additional information as possible.  If you have information you believe would be of interest to the readers, you are invited to submit it for consideration.

Ruth Beaumont Cook spent four months as an American Field Service exchange student in Germany during the spring and summer of 1961.  She lived with a family in Ravensburg who spoke almost no English, so she learned the language and the culture in ways she would not have in other circumstances.  It is interesting to note that Cook left Germany on August 13, 1961, the day the wall began to go up in Berlin.  Her trip diary makes almost no mention of this event, although she did save newspaper special editions published that day.  No one had any idea then that the wall would remain in place for 25 years.

Subsequently, Cook studied German and English at the Ohio State University and received her degree in Education.  She taught high school in Columbus, Ohio and Birmingham, Alabama before becoming a corporate trainer and a writer.  She is also the author of North Across the River: A Civil War Trail of Tears.