Black Prisoner of War chronicles the story of James Daly, a young black soldier held captive for more than five years by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese and subsequently accused (and acquitted) of collaboration with the enemy. One of the very few books about the Vietnam War by an African American, Daly's memoir is both a testament to survival and a provocative meditation on the struggle between patriotism and religious conviction.

First published in 1975 as A Hero's Welcome, Daly's memoir had only a brief exposure before it sank from sight. At the time, most Americans simply wanted to forget about the war. But, as Jeff Loeb argues, Daly's story is a compelling one that merits a much wider readership.

Raised in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant area, Daly fought to overcome difficult circumstances through hard work and religion. When the Vietnam War intervened, he was denied conscientious objector status, despite his strong pacifist beliefs. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army, but only after a black recruiter assured him he would receive a non-combat assignment. Instead, he was sent to fight in Vietnam, where he was denied repeated requests for reassignment. In protest, he refused to load or fire his weapon, even when sent out on patrol.

When his unit was ambushed by the Viet Cong, he began his long ordeal in captivity, first in the jungles of South Vietnam and then in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton."
As a POW, he was still an outcast: a black "grunt" and pacifist among mostly white air force officers who considered any sort of accommodation treasonable. Such charges were eventually leveled at Daly for joining the so-called Peace Committee and signing a letter condemning American actions in the war. Although Daly's decisions were in keeping with his pacifism and he was later cleared of the charges, he remains a controversial figure for many Vietnam veterans.

Exploring the limits of both accommodation and resistance, Daly's memoir forces us to reassess the POW experience and race relations in Vietnam, as well as the complex relationship between personal belief and public duty.

Translated by Ida Egede Winther Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were incarcerated in camp around the world during World War II. And individuals from all walks of life joined international organizations like the Red Cross, churches, and other religious groups to help counter the hopelessness of camp life. One of these was Chris Christiansen, who had just graduated from Theological School at Copenhagen University when he took a position with the World’s Alliance of the YMCAs to work with the British, American, and other Allied prisoners of war in Germany. The next seven years were, for him, \u201can amazing experience.\u201d The prisoners faced cold, starvation, loneliness, deprivation and cruel and arbitrary treatment. Those who served among them — unrecognized in the headlines or history text — worked tirelessly and patiently to relieve the conditions of the prisoners as much as possible. Christiansen, who was also arrested in Berlin and imprisoned in Moscow, experienced this grim aspect of warfare from both sides. His story pays tribute to the prisoners, to the relief workers, to the churches and other service organizations, and to \u201cthat part of the human spirit\u201d that sustained them through this dark period in our collective past.

Captives in Blue, a study of Union prisoners in Confederate prisons, is a companion to Roger Pickenpaugh's earlier groundbreaking book Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union, rounding out his examination of Civil War prisoner of war facilities. In June of 1861, only a few weeks after the first shots at Fort Sumter ignited the Civil War, Union prisoners of war began to arrive in Southern prisons. One hundred and fifty years later Civil War prisons and the way prisoners of war were treated remain contentious topics. Partisans of each side continue to vilify the other for POW maltreatment. Roger Pickenpaugh's two studies of Civil War prisoners of war facilities complement one another and offer a thoughtful exploration of issues that captives taken from both sides of the Civil War faced. In Captives in Blue, Pickenpaugh tackles issues such as the ways the Confederate Army contended with the growing prison population, the variations in the policies and practices in the different Confederate prison camps, the effects these policies and practices had on Union prisoners, and the logistics of prisoner exchanges. Digging further into prison policy and practices, Pickenpaugh explores conditions that arose from conscious government policy decisions and conditions that were the product of local officials or unique local situations. One issue unique to Captives in Blue is the way Confederate prisons and policies dealt with African American Union soldiers. Black soldiers held captive in Confederate prisons faced uncertain fates; many former slaves were returned to their former owners, while others were tortured in the camps. Drawing on prisoner diaries, Pickenpaugh provides compelling first-person accounts of life in prison camps often overlooked by scholars in the field.

In this revisionist history of the United States government relocation of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, Roger W. Lotchin challenges the prevailing notion that racism was the cause of the creation of these centers. After unpacking the origins and meanings of American attitudes toward the Japanese-Americans, Lotchin then shows that Japanese relocation was a consequence of nationalism rather than racism. Lotchin also explores the conditions in the relocation centers and the experiences of those who lived there, with discussions on health, religion, recreation, economics, consumerism, and theater. He honors those affected by uncovering the complexity of how and why their relocation happened, and makes it clear that most Japanese-Americans never went to a relocation center. Written by a specialist in US home front studies, this book will be required reading for scholars and students of the American home front during World War II, Japanese relocation, and the history of Japanese immigrants in America.

For eighteen months during the Second World War, the Canadian military interned 1,145 prisoners of war in Red Rock, Ontario (about 100 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay). Camp R interned friend and foe alike: Nazis, anti-Nazis, Jews, soldiers, merchant seamen, and refugees whom Britain feared might comprise Hitler's rumoured "fifth column" of alien enemies residing within the Commonwealth. For the first time and in riveting detail, the author illuminates the conditions in one of Canada's forgotten POW camps. Backed by interviews and meticulous archival research, Zimmermann fleshes out this rich history in an accessible, lively manner. The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior will captivate military and political historians as well as non-specialists interested in the history of POWs and internment in Canada.

Based on a series of one hundred pen and ink drawings by Captain Benjamin Comeau, a POW at Camp #1 in Korea from 1950-53, Honey Bucket Charlie contains letters Comeau wrote during his time in the prison camp, as well as photographs and interviews with his son, brother, and grandson. From Central Texas, Comeau enlisted in the Marine Corps during World War II, was wounded at Iwo Jima, left the Marine Corps and then joined the army in time for service as an infantryman in the Korean War. He was taken as a POW by the Chinese in November of 1951 and remained a prisoner until June of 1953. Comeau remained in the army and later served a year in Vietnam. He was an extraordinary man who has left us an equally extraordinary group of drawings describing his time as a POW. Honey Bucket Charlie has an introductory chapter by author and scholar Lewis Carlson.

Despite their insistence that the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops was the condition for the release of prisoners of war, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam took little action to account for American POWs at the end of the Vietnam War. Almost two decades would pass following the end of the war before significant internal political changes, shifting regional alignments, changing Western interests, Sino-Soviet rapprochement, a nonmilitary settlement of the Cambodian conflict, and the collapse of the Soviet Union would bring Hanoi to the point of recognizing the importance of mending its relationship with the West. From the Paris peace talks to the U.S. government's decision in 1994 to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam, Hanoi's policy on American MIAs and POWs is examined, with particular focus on the influence of individual decision-makers on the process and the ways the Vietnamese leadership arrived at their negotiating strategies.

After the publication in 1962 of ""One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"", Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began receiving, and would continue to receive throughout his life, testimonies from fellow survivors of the gulag. Originally selected by Solzhenitsyn, the memoirs in this volume are an important addition to the literature of the Soviet gulag. Written by men from a wide variety of occupations and social classes, the writing in ""Voices from the Gulag"" lends a voice to the many ordinary people - including a circus performer, a teenage boy, and a Red Army soldier - whom a brutal system attempted to erase from memory. For the first time in English, this is a collection of memoirs from the gulag selected by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

On December 1, 1941, the author's unit was sent to the southern Philippine island of Mindanao to establish an air base. Less than six months later, on May 10, 1942, Sergeant Nordin was captured by the Japanese. For two years he was imprisoned on Mindanao before boarding a Japanese hellship destined for Moji, Japan. He spent the remainder of the war working on the railroad in Yokkaichi. Throughout his time in captivity, the author detailed the conditions and his thoughts on the camps in a secret diary that became the basis of this work. This powerful story recounts the horrors of the prison camps, the torturous journey on the hellship, and the little things that provided him and his fellow prisoners the strength to survive.

Taken prisoner after the fall of Singapore in 1942, Arthur Godman spent the next three and a half years on the Burma-Siam railway, living in camps along the River Kwai. Like other POWs, he experienced disease and malnutrition and witnessed the painful deaths of many of his comrades. Yet somehow he retained his sense of humor and perspective, recalling, among the casual cruelties inflicted by the Japanese, small acts of kindness between guards and prisoners which enabled him to retain his faith in humanity. In order to survive he attempted to achieve a relationship with his captors based on their common experience of adversity; learning Thai, teaching bridge, and stealing food. This glimpse of the terrifying world of the POW includes pictures by two other famous artists who were captives.

By the time of the Armistice in 1918, around 6.5 million prisoners of war were held by the belligerents. Little has been written about these prisoners, possibly because the story is not one of unmitigated suffering and cruelty. Nevertheless, hardships did occur and the alleged neglect and ill-treatment of prisoners captured on the Western Front became the subject of major propaganda campaigns in Britain and Germany as the war progressed. "Barbed Wire Disease" looks at the conditions facing those British and German prisoners, and the claims and counter-claims relating to their treatment. At the same time, it sets the story in the wider context of the commitment by both governments to treat prisoners humanely in accordance with the recently agreed Hague and Geneva Conventions. The political and diplomatic efforts to abide by the new rules are examined in detail, along with the use of reprisals against prisoners, Britain's voluntary relief effort and the effect of face-to-face negotiations at the height of the war. This comprehensive analysis, using unpublished official files and cabinet papers, concludes by documenting the first ever efforts to bring war criminals to justice before international tribunals.

The book is a moving account of about two thousand South Asians mostly sailors and soldiers from villages in Bengal, Nepal, the Northwest Frontier and Punjab, who were held for years in German prison camps. They attracted the close attention of army officers, diplomats and secret agents, of emigrant revolutionaries of India, of German artists, academics and industrialists. The book introduces and makes available rich German archives as yet unknown to the non-German speaking world.

In the spring of 1942, the federal government forced West Coast Japanese Americans into detainment camps on suspicion of disloyalty. Two years later, after stripping them of their livelihoods, liberty, and dignity, the government demanded even more by drafting them into the same military that had been guarding them as subversives. Most of these American citizens grudgingly complied with the draft, but several hundred refused and practiced a different sort of American patriotism-the patriotism of protest.
"Free to Die for Their Country" is the first book to tell the powerful story of the men who rejected the government's demands. Based on years of research and personal interviews with the resisters, their families, and their supporters and detractors, Eric L. Muller's work recreates the welter of emotions and events that followed the arrival of the draft notices in 1944: the untenable situation of the Japanese American men caught between national loyalty and personal indignation; the hypocrisy of the government in asking men to die for their country when it had denied them their rights as citizens; the shoddy trials of the protesters that produced convictions and imprisonment; and the treatment of the resisters by the Japanese American community, who looked upon them as pariahs who were hindering progress toward assimilation.
Muller looks behind the horrible story of the internment camps to find a tale less well known and even more troubling, illuminating a dark corner of American history during World War II. Affecting and clear eyed, "Free to Die for Their Country" reveals, in almost cinematic fashion, an untold chapter of our recent past.