IN THE FIRST HOUR OF JULY 8, 1945, six-year-old Rodney Rasmussen was startled awake in his bed in Salina, Utah, by the unmistakable rhythm of machine gun fire a mere 300 feet away. He dressed and hustled to the front porch in time to see the flash of the .30-caliber Browning in the guard tower across the street still raining bullets into the compound where 250 German prisoners of war had been peacefully sleeping in neat rows of canvas tents.
Salina, a town of 2,600 people tucked between the Pahvant and Wasatch Mountains, where the dirt gradually brightens from beige to the signature burnt orange of southern Utah, seems an unlikely location for the largest mass murder of German prisoners on U.S. soil during World War II. The biggest hazards I encounter on my visit are the Tootsie Rolls still clinging to the sidewalks two weeks after a classic
