Prisoners of War

2nd Lt. Francis D. “Mack” McCarroll, US Army Air Coprs, was shot down over Sicily on July 28, 1943, captured, and sent as a prisoner of war to LuftStalag III, in Germany. In response to Red Cross instructions, his mother sent him what she believed to be the blanket her father had used during the American Civil War, when he escaped from a Union hospital in Tennessee and walked home to Alabama in February 1865. Mack told his family that it saved his life in January 1945, during a five-day forced march through blizzard conditions to a new camp. Mack’s blanket (7-12) came home with him. His family kept it as a memento of Mack’s service and ordeal, and of his grandfather’s, a symbol of the determination of two men, caught in the chaos of war, to return home.

Rrecently, however, it was determined that this blanket does not date to the Civil War, but to much later in the nineteenth century. John Roach may have used it, but not in 1865. We do not know how or when this blanket was first thought to be his Civil War souvenir. We do know that this is not the only case in which objects and the stories told about them do not quite match up. Does this news necessarily invalidate the feelings connected with this blanket? Mack—and the rest of his family—believed his grandfather’s blanket had saved his life, too. Our journey with this blanket has been, indeed, an object lesson. We are reminded that memory is fallible, objects are lost, labels get mixed up. We are also reminded of the power of objects, and of the human need to invest objects with meaning, as carriers of memory.