During World War II, Walterboro Army Air Field was a bustling training base and one of the last stops before combat overseas for many groups, including the 510th Fighter Squadron, and thousands of men passed through it on their way to action. More than five hundred black pilots trained there between April 1944 and October 1945 while facing discrimination and segregation. Two hundred and fifty German prisoners of war were also held there, providing essential labor for local farmers before repatriation at the end of the war, and one former prisoner, Helmut Ulbricht, later recalled that although they were prisoners, they were not made to feel like prisoners but like people waiting to go back home. For many, the air field and nearby town were the last taste of home; for some, it was an emotionally fraught battleground; and for others, it was a prison.