Hostilities ended six months after the United States saw its first action in World War I and only a relatively small number of German prisoners of war reached the U.S. Many prisoners were German sailors caught in port by U.S. forces far away from the European battlefield. The United States Department of War designated three locations as POW camps during the war: Forts McPherson and Oglethorpe in Georgia and Fort Douglas in Utah. The exact population of German POWs in World War I is difficult to ascertain because they were housed in the same facilities used to detain civilians of German heritage residing in the United States, but there were known to be 406 German POWs at Fort Douglas and 1,373 at Fort McPherson. The prisoners built furniture and worked on local roads. The few dozen who died