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I had a quick look at this when it appeared in hardback and thought to myself: perhaps a bit niche. Nearly 500 pages on what British PoWs got up to during the second world war? Isn't that a bit much? Which will teach me not to be so quick to dismiss a book in future. For this is a valuable, fascinating and moving book.
- The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the Second World War
- by Midge Gillies
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Exposure since early childhood to the TV series Colditz, countless Christmas viewings of The Great Escape and the odd sighting of The Bridge on the River Kwai had, I thought, grounded me fairly well in the prisoner-of-war experience. (Billy Wilder's excellent Stalag 17 begins, if memory serves, with a voiceover decrying the lack of PoW films.) But no. And if this book proves anything, it is that, for once, the film industry has underplayed the ingenuity, resilience and unlikely heroism of those imprisoned by the Axis powers.
Midge Gillies's father was a PoW, so this book is personal. She recalls that his normal exuberance and fidgeting in front of the TV stopped when he saw Terry Waite, Brian Keenan and John McCarthy stepping on to British soil after years of incarceration in Beirut; and "the photo of RAF pilot John Peters [shot down in the 1991 Gulf War and paraded humiliatingly in front of Iraqi cameras] was too painful for him to even look at." It was getting her father to talk about his experiences that inspired her to write this book.
The PoW condition, it is made amply clear, is a kind of pressurised parody of normal life – with the added existential twist that it is a condition everyone is extremely anxious to escape. But not everyone could, and Gillies concentrates on those who didn't, on the grounds that there are enough narratives of escape out there already.
If you were lucky, the main worry was boredom (apart from hunger, which was, in varying degrees of intensity, the constant top concern, followed by tobacco – the chief currency in all the camps). "I remember the only thing we did, we got lice," says one prisoner – but this was more confined to the Dürchlager, or transit camps. Once you got into a proper Stalag, some kind of society could cohere. The results could be surreal. "'This is a queer gaol, this Hohenfels,' a German censor was said to have commented. 'The French walk about as though they own the place. We Germans like to think that we own it. And the British don't give a damn who owns it. They run it just how they like – and patronise everybody.'"
I note that rather vague "was said to have commented", but further down the page there are documented examples of the kind of demented internal resistance on the part of the prisoners. Stalag 383, for NCOs who refused to work (one likes the sound of it already, insofar as one can like the sound of any prison camp), was particularly notorious. Some guards "had assumed the status of attendants at a holiday camp", and retrieved cricket balls hit over the wire and were obliged to click their heels and say "heil Churchill" before handing over cigarettes. There were imaginary trains to Blighty, and prisoners would go on parade on the hottest days wearing as many layers of clothing as they could find.
Few of these high-jinks were possible if you were in a camp run by the Japanese. These have become a byword for cruelty, but little can prepare one for the heartbreaking descriptions of sadism perpetrated by the Japanese guards, or the exceptionally high rates of mortality experienced by inmates. (Getting on for 50% if you were an American PoW.)
In the end this is a riveting collection of stories about incredible resourcefulness. Many of the PoWs found new skills they had not imagined in the free world, read books they would never have read otherwise (the "university" in the book's title is not mere fancy), and forged friendships that would have been impossible in a more class-bound society. And Clive Dunn's reminders, in Dad's Army, that the Germans don't like it up 'em, would have lost much urgency, one suspects, had he never been captured by them.
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