Abstract
As Joan Beaumont has shown, the Australian prisoner-of-war narrative of the Second World War is dominated by the experiences of the Anzacs captured in the Pacific theatre. This is perhaps not surprising, given the proximity of the threat from the Japanese Empire and the brutal treatment meted out in the various camps where they were held until the end of the war. They were also the majority, as 21,652 Australians fell into Japanese hands, of whom 7780 (or around 35%) did not survive. In comparison, of those who fought in the North African and European theatres, only 8400 ended up in German captivity – some of them via Hitler’s erstwhile Italian allies – and nearly all were liberated and returned home in the summer of 1945, while the war in the Pacific continued. As a result, they received only a ‘modest’ homecoming and had no audience to listen to their experiences. Some 65 years after the event, this imbalance in the national acknowledgement of their experiences is what Monteath’s book attempts to address.
This is not an easy task to accomplish. As the author himself admits, the experiences of the European POWs pale into insignificance when compared with the horrors of Japanese captivity. His approach is essentially a narrative one – using the tried and tested structure of capture, captivity, captor atrocities, and liberation as his overarching themes. Extensively researched in German, British, and Australian archives, the book also boasts interviews with former prisoners and an impressive range of secondary sources covering biographies and memoirs, as well as the standard histories and specialist monographs on the subject. Most chapters use the generic narratives of the prisoner-of-war experience as a starting point before adding in the Australian dimension. They were a small minority of the 168,640 British imperial prisoners in German hands, but their dispersal across the Stalags and Oflags meant that some experienced or participated in most elements of military captivity under the Nazis, including, for example, the mass break-out from Stalag Luft III (Sagan), where six of the seventy-six escapees were Australian nationals. Only one of the six survived: the other five fell victim to the Nazis’ murderous retribution against the majority who were apprehended in the days following the escape.
The narrative begs the question of whether there was anything peculiarly or particularly different about Australian captivity at the hands of the Nazis when compared with their fellow western prisoners. Did they have better strategies for surviving captivity than other nationalities? The conclusion of the book suggests not, as their return and reception into post-war life shows that many of the traumas and illnesses that beset them went unrecognized and unacknowledged. There has also been a good deal of discussion about whether ‘mateship’ was a factor sustaining prisoners in the Far East, but it may well be that the somewhat more benign conditions in German camps did not produce the necessity of such closely-knit national groupings.
In sum, this is a well-constructed history that tells us as much about the general experiences of western prisoners of war in German hands as it does about those of the Australians. Most of this has been covered in other texts but this has a highly readable style that will make it accessible to a readership beyond the realm of academia. That said, its greatest appeal is likely to be the wider Australian public – exactly as the author intended.