The Barbed-Wire University
The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the Second World War
Feature films have created the stereotype of the Second World War Prisoner of War (POW). He is the stiff-upper-lipped Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai, or Steve McQueen’ s “Cooler King” in The Great Escape. If he is imprisoned in Europe it will have to be in the forbidding German Schloss of Colditz or the tunnel-riddled Stalag Luft III.
But the true experiences of nearly half a million Allied servicemen held captive during the Second World War were nothing like the Hollywood myth – and infinitely more extraordinary.
The real lives of POWs saw them respond to the tedium of a German stalag or the brutality of a Japanese camp with ingenuity and creativity. They staged glittering shows, concerts and elaborate sporting fixtures and even, amid the terrible privations of the Thailand-Burma railway, improvised daring surgical techniques. Whatever skills or hobbies they took with them to captivity they managed to continue and adapt – to the extent of laying out a 9-hole golf course between the huts of one German camp. Men studied, attended lectures, learned languages, sat for qualifications and exams, on such a scale that one camp was nicknamed “The Barbed-Wire University’”.
The new interests and skills they took out of the camp enabled them to succeed at the highest level – whether actors like Clive Dunn and Denholm Elliott, artists like Sir Terry Frost and Ronald Searle, or the birdwatchers who studied rooks and jackdaws beyond the perimeter wire in distant parts of the German Reich and went on to run the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Drawing on letters home, diaries and interviews with redoubtable survivors now into their nineties, Midge Gillies recreates the daily lives of a truly remarkable group of men. It is a story by turns thrilling, funny, desperate and moving, but never less than inspirational.
Praise
“a valuable, fascinating and moving book … this is a riveting collection of stories about incredible resourcefulness,” The Guardian
“Brilliantly researched…Gillies has weaved her findings into a fascinating and deeply moving piece of social history,” Mail on Sunday
“What the reader is most likely to take away from this rich and well-researched book is a sense of the extraordinary ingenuity and resourcefulness so many POWs displayed,” Sunday Times.
“Midge Gillies has tackled a colossal subject with calm professionalism and a lightness of touch which makes it a great joy to read. An outstanding piece of scholarship which is as readable as it is informative,” BBC History Magazine
“Every facet of this epic story is covered with sensitivity, restraint, and a leavening humour…full of unforgettable stories…Such stories illuminate a great subject in engrossing detail,” The Spectator.
“Rich and insightful panorama of POW life. Every one of the pages hums with human interest and the whole enterprise is conducted with the highest standards of scholarship,” Daily Express
