The hopeless yet determined resistance of American and Filipino forces against the Japanese invasion has made Bataan and Corregidor symbols of pride, but Bataan has a notorious darker side. After the U.S.-Filipino remnants surrendered to a far stronger force, they unwittingly placed themselves at the mercy of a foe who considered itself unimpaired by the Geneva Convention. The already ill and hungry survivors, including many wounded, were forced to march at gunpoint many miles to a harsh and oppressive POW camp; many were murdered or died on the way in a nightmare of wanton cruelty that has made the term "Death March" synonymous with the Bataan peninsula. Among the prisoners was army pilot William E. Dyess. With a few others, Dyess escaped from his POW camp and was among the very first to bring reports of the horrors back to a shocked United States. His story galvanized the nation and remains one of the most powerful personal narratives of American fighting men. Stanley L. Falk provides a scene-setting introduction for this Bison Books edition.
William E. Dyess was born in Albany, Texas. As a young army air forces pilot he was shipped to Manila in the spring of 1941. Shortly after his escape and return to the United States, Colonel Dyess was killed while testing a new airplane. He did not survive long enough to learn that he had been awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor.

On October 17, 1965, Navy LTJG Porter Halyburton was shot down over North Vietnam on his 76th mission and listed as killed in action. One-and-a-half years later he was found to be alive and a prisoner of war. Halyburton was held captive for more than seven years. Reflections on Captivity, is a collection of fifty short stories about this young naval officer's experiences as a POW in North Vietnam. This book recounts difficult times but focuses more on the positive aspects--the humor, creativity, friendships, courage, and leadership of an amazing group of Americans and how they helped each other survive and even thrive. These vignettes demonstrate how the human mind, body, and spirit can adapt and find meaning in life in the most challenging circumstances. There are powerful lessons learned from this complex experience that continue to guide the author's life to this day. Despite hardship, suffering, and long separation, Halyburton strongly believes one's quality of life is determined more by choices made than by circumstances, and the most liberating choice we can make is to forgive. Reflections on Captivity furthers the reader's understanding about the nature of captivity, race relations, human relations, aspects of the air war against North Vietnam, and highlights the importance of leadership, ethics, and devotion to duty in difficult times.

The battle for Stalingrad has been studied and recalled in exhaustive detail ever since the Red Army trapped the German 6th Army in the ruined city in 1942. Graphic first-hand accounts of the fighting have been published by soldiers of all ranks on both sides, so we have today an extraordinarily precise picture of the grim experience of the struggle from the individual's viewpoint. But most of these accounts finish at the end of the battle, with columns of tens of thousands of German soldiers disappearing into Soviet captivity. Their fate is rarely described. That is why Adelbert Holl's harrowing and vivid memoir of his seven-year ordeal as a prisoner in the Soviet camps is such an important record as well as an absorbing story.

Popular perceptions of life in Japanese prisoner of war camps are dominated by images of emaciated figures, engaged in slave labour, and badly treated by their captors. This book, based on extensive original research, shows that this view is quite wrong in relation to the large camp at Changi, which was the main POW camp in Singapore. It demonstrates that in Changi the Japanese afforded the captives a high degree of autonomy, that this in turn resulted in a prison camp society that grew and flourished, in contrast to other Japanese POW camps, and that it fostered an independent and combative spirit, and high morale.

The harrowing, and inspiring, story of the capture of one of Britain's top SOE agents in World War Two, his refusal to crack under the most horrific torture, and his final imprisonment in a concentration camp. 'The White Rabbit' was the code name of Wing Commander F.F.E. Yeo-Thomas when he parachuted into France in 1942 as a member of the Special Operations Executive with the Resistance. For the next eighteen months he was responsible for organising all the separate factions of the French Resistance into one combined 'secret army'. On three separate missions into occupied France he met with the heads of Resistance movements all over the country, and he spoke personally with Winston Churchill in order to ensure they were properly supplied. His capture by the Gestapo in March 1944 was therefore a terrible blow for the Resistance movement. For months he was submitted to the most horrific torture in an attempt to get him to spill his unparalleled knowledge of the Resistance, but he refused to crack. Finally he was sentenced to death, and sent to Buchenwald, one of the most infamous German concentration camps. The story of his endurance, and survival, is an inspiring study in the triumph of the human spirit over the most terrible adversity.

Until the late twentieth century, relatively few Americans knew that the United States government forcibly detained nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. At war's end, the nation, including many of those who were confined to the ten Relocation Centers-which President Roosevelt initially referred to as "concentration camps"-wished to wipe this national tragedy from memory. That Damned Fence, titled after a poem written by a Japanese American held at the Minidoka camp in Idaho, draws on the creative work of the internees themselves to cast new light on this historical injustice. While in captivity, detainees produced moving poetry and fiction, compelling investigative journalism, and lasting work of arts to make sense of their hardships and to leave a record of their emotional and psychological suffering. Heather Hathaway explores the experiences of inmates in five camps-Topaz in Utah; Granada/Amache in Colorado; Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas; and Tule Lake in northern California-each with their own literary magazines, such as TREK, All Aboard, Pulse, The Pen, Magnet, and The Tulean Dispatch. Conditions in the camps varied dramatically, as did their environments, ranging from sweltering swamplands and sun-blasted desert to frigid mountain terrain. So too did the inhabitants of each camp, with some dominated by farmers from California's Central Valley and others filled with professionals from the San Francisco Bay area. This disparity extended to the attitudes of camp administrators; some deemed the plan a mistake from the outset while others believed their captives to be a significant threat to national security. That Damned Fence reveals the anger and humor, and the deep despair and steadfast resilience with which Japanese Americans faced their wartime incarceration. By emphasizing the inner lives of the unjustly accused and the myriad ways in which they portrayed their captivity, Heather Hathaway gives voice to Americans imprisoned by their own country for their country of origin or appearance.

A Homeland Denied follows the horrific journey of Waclaw Kossakowski, a young Warsaw University student whose peaceful life was changed dramatically and with far reaching consequences that fateful day of 1st September, 1939. From imprisonment in the notorious Kozelsk prison to the forced labor camp in the Siberian Arctic Circle, the compelling story pulls the reader into a world of suffering and brutality it would be impossible to imagine. Forced to dig runways in temperatures as low as-50oC while under constant threat from sadistic guards, it was an indescribable living hell with death the only companion. He endured and witnessed atrocities which haunted him for the rest of his life with so many friends murdered or frozen to death in the unforgiving cruelty of Siberia. But fate intervened and the icy wasteland was replaced by the blistering heat and dry deserts of the Middle East, where the student who had never picked up a gun was taught to fight-in the Italian campaign, at Monte Cassino, Ancona and Bologna.Yet the intense desire to return to his homeland never left him and only memories of his idyllic life before the war sustained him when he sank to the lowest depths of despair. Waclaw could not know of the terrible suffering of his family or the sacrifices of his countrymen as they fought so desperately to keep Warsaw, only to be denied their homeland in the cruelest way imaginable. Although they were ultimately the victors, they lost everything-their home, their loves, their country and nothing was ever the same again. In a country governed by Communist Russia and controlled by their secret police, it was impossible to return under fear of imprisonment or death and no knowledge of the achievements and bravery of the Poles was allowed to be known. No one was safe under the Stalinist reign of terror. Everything was strictly censored or destroyed and with the passage of time few people were left alive to tell their story. It was only in 1989 that Poland truly broke free from the Russian yoke and its people gained the freedom they had fought so valiantly for.This dramatic and poignant story based on the memories of Waclaw Kossakowski is recounted in vivid detail and documents a tragic period in the history of the Polish people in Europe. His story demands to be told and ensures that many other unrecognized Poles will not be forgotten.

Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts is a wide-ranging investigation of the integral role prisoners of war (POWs) have played in the economic, cultural, political, and military aspects of American warfare. In Useful Captives volume editors Daniel Krebs and Lorien Foote and their contributors explore the wide range of roles that captives play in times of conflict: hostages used to negotiate vital points of contention between combatants, consumers, laborers, propaganda tools, objects of indoctrination, proof of military success, symbols, political instruments, exemplars of manhood ideals, loyal and disloyal soldiers, and agents of change in society. The book's eleven chapters cover conflicts involving Americans, ranging from colonial warfare on the Creek-Georgia border in the late eighteenth century, the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great War, World War II, to twenty-first century U.S. drone warfare. This long historical horizon enables the reader to go beyond the prison camp experience of POWs to better understand the many ways they influence the nature and course of military conflict. Useful Captives shows the vital role that prisoners of war play in American warfare and reveals the cultural contexts of warfare, the shaping and altering of military policies, the process of state-building, the impacts upon the economy and environment of the conflict zone, their special place in propaganda and political symbolism, and the importance of public history in shaping national memory.

In April 1863 after the U.S. Dakota War of 1862, after the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men in the largest mass execution in U.S. History some 270 Dakota men were moved from Mankato, Minnesota, to a prison at camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa. Separated from their wives, children, and elder relatives, with inadequate shelter, they lived there for three long, wretched years. More than 120 men died. Desperate to connect with their families, many of these prisoners of war learned to write. Their letters, mostly addressed to the missionaries Stephen R Riggs and Thomas S. Williamson, asked for information, for assistance, and for help sending and receiving news of their loved ones. Dakota elders Clifford Canku and Michael Simon, fluent Dakota speakers, provide both the Dakota transcription and the first published English translation of fifty of these letters, culled from Riggs's papers at the Minnesota historical society. They are a precious resource for Dakota people learning about the travails their ancestors faced, important primary source documents for historians, and a vital tool for Dakota language learners and linguists. These haunting documents present a history that has long been unrecognised in this country, in the words of the Dakota people who lived it. The dedication written by the authors, both of whom are descendants of Dakota prisoners of war, declares: "Our relatives are watching over us. / We are humbled as we honour our ancestors. / Woecon kin de unyakupi do / We accept this responsibility you gave us".

NORMAN CROSS was the site of the world's first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp constructed during the Napoleonic Wars. Opened in 1797, it was more than just a prison: it was a town in itself, with houses, offices, butchers, bakers, a hospital, a school, a market and a banking system. It was an important prison and military establishment in the east of England with a lively community of some 7,000 French inmates. Alongside a comprehensive examination of the prison itself, this detailed and informative book, compiled by a leading expert on the Napoleonic era, explores what life was like for inmates and turnkeys alike - the clothing, food, health, education, punishment and, ultimately, the closure of the depot in 1814.

With expert scholars and great sensitivity, Out of Line, Out of Place illuminates and analyzes how the proliferation of internment camps emerged as a biopolitical tool of governance. Although the internment camp developed as a technology of containment, control, and punishment in the latter part of the nineteenth century mainly in colonial settings, it became universal and global during the Great War. Mass internment has long been recognized as a defining experience of World War II, but it was a fundamental experience of World War I as well. More than eight million soldiers became prisoners of war, more than a million civilians became internees, and several millions more were displaced from their homes, with many placed in securitized refugee camps. For the first time, Out of Line, Out of Place brings these different camps together in conversation. Rotem Kowner and Iris Rachamimov emphasize that although there were differences among camps and varied logic of internment in individual countries, there were also striking similarities in how camps operated during the Great War.

Much of what has been written about the treatment of prisoners of war held by the British suggest that they have often been treated in a more caring and compassionate way than the prisoners of other countries. During the First World War, Germans held in Britain were treated leniently while there were claims of British prisoners being mistreated in Germany. Was the British sense of fair play present in the prison camps and did this sense of respect include the press and public who often called for harsher treatment of Germans in captivity? Were those seen as enemy aliens living in Britain given similar fair treatment? Were they sent to internment camps because they were a threat to the country or for their own protection to save them from the British public intent on inflicting violence on them? Prisoners of the British: Internees and Prisoners of War during the First World War examines the truth of these views while also looking at the number of camps set up in the country and the public and press perception of the men held here.

Preserved within this book is the diary of Lieutenant Walter J. Hinkle. The diary begins in the spring of 1941 as he prepared for a new assignment in the Philippines. After Japan attacked the Philippines in early December, Hinkle was wounded and taken to a hospital for surgery. When the Philippines fell in May 1942, he became a prisoner of war at the Davao Penal Colony, where his wound refused to heal and his right leg was amputated below the knee. As a bed-ridden invalid, Hinkle wrote about his life as a prisoner of the Japanese. To prevent the growing diary from being confiscated by camp guards, Hinkle concealed it within a false compartment built into his wooden leg. His 136,000-word diary offers a rare and very personal account of one of the longest periods of Japanese military captivity experienced by any American during the Second World War. Hinkle's writings are supplemented by excerpts from several other diaries for context. These additional writers include a Japanese soldier, Filipino local, Bataan Death March survivor, and Davao Penal Colony escapee.

Romania allied itself with the Nazis in the Second World War to protect itself from the Soviet Union and to promote its own brand of fascist nationalism. When George Tomaziu, who had spent the 1930s preparing for a career as an artist, was invited to spy for Britain, he agreed because Britain then represented the only possible bulwark against Nazism. He went on to monitor German troop movements through Romania towards the Russian front, observing, on one occasion, the mass-killing of Jews in the small Ukrainian town of Brailov. He knew he might be arrested, tortured and killed by Romania’s rightwing regime but thought that if he survived, his contribution to the war effort would be recognised. It wasn’t. After Romania turned Communist, he was sent back to prison in 1950 and kept him there for 13 years. Following his release, the British helped him get out of Romania and he settled in Paris. This is his memoir.

Herbert Martin Massey was by any measure, a remarkable man. He was wounded three times in three separate conflicts, the first of which, in the First World War, almost killed him. Brought down in flames by one of Germany’s great aces, Werner Voss, he somehow recovered from his horrific, life-threatening injuries to continue his flying career in the Royal Air Force, only to be nearly killed once more in the Palestine Emergency of 1936, when his life was saved by the thin metal of his cigarette case. Then, at the age of 44 and having risen through the ranks to Group Captain, he was shot down over Holland on the second of the Thousand Bomber Raids in June 1942. Massey was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Stalag Luft III at Sagan. Here, he was to excel as the Senior British Officer, vigorously defending the rights of his fellow prisoners of war, the men now under his command. Respected and admired by his comrades and captors alike, fate handed to him the decision to authorise the Great Escape, the famous breakout from Sagan in March 1944. Too badly wounded to join the escape himself, Martin Massey was the man to whom the Germans first broke the news of the execution of fifty of those who had been recaptured. Repatriated to Britain because of his wounds shortly afterwards, it was Massey who brought home the details of the murders which began the process of bringing the perpetrators to justice post-war. Decorated for his gallantry and leadership six times, men like Martin Massey come along only rarely. This book, using previously unseen documents and photographs, tells his story.

It is August 1945 and World War II is over. Japan has surrendered. As the Western world rejoices, deep in the jungles of British North Borneo the small number of remaining Australian and British prisoners of war are massacred. Of the 2434 prisoners incarcerated by the Japanese at the Sandakan POW camp, only six, all escapees have survived. The POW's sent from Singapore in 1942-43 to work on airfield construction, endured frequent beatings, and were subjected to other, more diabolical punishment. Sustained only by an inadequate and ever diminishing rice ration and with little medical attention, many died of malnutrition, maltreatment and disease. Lynette Silver, through painstaking research and interviews with survivors, as well as a study of Japanese records, has pieced together a detailed and highly readable account of the lives and ultimate fate of Sandakan's POW's. She tells a totally gripping and horrifying tale, not only of the prisoners, but the reasons why they, and their story, became World War II's most deadly secret.

Extraordinary times. Extraordinary courage.Here, from the bestselling author of The Great Escape, are eight true and startling escape stories from the Second World War. The heroism of the servicemen who dared to defy their captors in this volume is matched only by that of the underground movements and ordinary civilians who helped the escapees in these stories of daring, invention and doggedness against the odds. From the account of the Spitfire pilot left for dead by an execution squad in Sicily to the story of the air gunner forced to blag his way across the Baltic, every one is an unputdownable classic. 'As long as there are prisons men will try to escape from them; and as long as there is an RAF it will bring to the problems of escape the qualities of high resource, pure cussedness and that indefinable, damnably annoying refusal to lie down when dead, of which all the stories in this book are such excellent - and, I think, such exciting - examples.' H.E. Bates

A jaw-dropping account of life as an RAF doctor during the Second World War.
As an RAF medical officer, Aidan McCarthy served in France, survived Dunkirk, and was plunged into adventures in the Japanese-American arena comparable with those of famous war heroes.
Interned by the Japanese in Java, he helped his fellow prisoners with amazing ingenuity in awful conditions. En-route back to Japan in 1944, his ship was torpedoed but he was rescued by a whaling boat and re-interned in Japan. His life was literally saved by the dropping of the Nagasaki atom bomb. He was then eyewitness to the horror and devastation it caused.
"This is an almost incredible account written with humour and dignity." - Pete McCarthy
"This book is an epic." - Sir Dennis Spotswood, Marshal of the RAF
"His description is terrifying but fascinating." - Air Marshal Sir William Coles

Over the course of many years Richard Pursehouse has painstakingly unravelled the story of a First World War prisoner of war camp which held captured German personnel in the very heart of the English countryside. He first became aware of the existence of the camp while walking over Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, finding sewer covers in what appeared to be uninhabited heathland. Intrigued, the author set out to investigate the mystery and discovered that the sewers were for two Army camps - Brocton and Rugeley - that had been constructed for soldiers training during the First World War. What he also found, however, was that the Brocton Camp site also included a segregated autonomous prisoner of war camp. With the aid of an old postcard, Richard was able to identify the exact location and layout of the long-lost camp. His research continued until he had accumulated an enormous amount of detail about the camp and life for its prisoners. He found a file by the Camp Commandant, Swiss Legation correspondence, stories in newspapers, letters and diaries, and received photographs from interested individuals. Amongst his finds was a box holding scores of fascinating letters sent home by an administration clerk while he was working at the camp. During his investigations, Richard also learned of attempted murders and escapes (including the only escapee to make it back to Germany), deaths, thefts - and a fatal scandal. The letters, documents and diaries reveal how the prisoners coped with incarceration, as well as their treatment, both in terms of camp conditions and their medical needs. He has also established a definitive answer to the 'myth' that some of the prisoners assisted in building the nearby Messines terrain model. The model was a post-battle training tool to instruct newly-arrived New Zealand troops, which also provided a visual explanation of how they had defeated the Germans in the Battle of Messines in June 1917. The result is a unique insight into what life was like inside a British Prisoner of War camp during the First World War.

Allied victory in the Pacific celebrates its sixtieth anniversary in August. Among the celebrants will be a small, largely forgotten group reliving nightmares of captivity. Dutch, English, Australian and American prisoners of war worked among more than a quarter of a million Asians--so called romushas--forced by the Japanese to build railways in Burma and Sumatra. Conditions were desperate: between 50 and 80 per cent of the romushas did not survive, not least because many were torpedoed in transit. The sinking of just the Junyo Maru resulted in the deaths of 4000 Asian workers and 1500 POWs. In Traces of War Jan Banning has interviewed and photographed 24 Dutch and Indonesian survivors. His haunting images show them as they worked, naked from the waist up. Their words elicit, with a matter-of-fact disinterest, the misery of their constant understanding of death. Unsurprisingly, they have hitherto been loath to discuss their ordeals.

The Trauma of Captivity seeks to shed new light on a forgotten aspect of what it meant to be a prisoner of war: their homecoming. With primary source archive content and interviews with family members of prisoners of war from the Second World War, as well as the diary entries of a prisoner of war from the First World War, this book asks the question: what happened to prisoners of war when they returned home? Sons and daughters of returned prisoners of war share their harrowing stories of having a POW for a parent. The Trauma of Captivity also features a lengthy interview with modern-day prisoner of war John Peters, the RAF fast jet pilot who was captured when his Tornado plane crashed in the desert during the Gulf War. The Trauma of Captivity focuses on what help and support was made available to returning prisoners of war and how they fought to rediscover their roles in society.

'Endlessly fascinating. Cram's story sizzles with adventure.' Giles Milton, Sunday Times

A genuinely new Second World War story, The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram is a riveting account of the wartime exploits of Alastair Cram, brilliantly told by the American author, David Guss. Cram was taken prisoner in North Africa in November 1941, which began a long odyssey through twelve different POW camps, three Gestapo prisons and one asylum. He became a serial escapee – fleeing his captors no fewer than twenty-one times, including his final, and finally successful, escape from a POW column in April 1945.

Perhaps the most dramatic of his attempts was from Gavi, the ‘Italian Colditz’. Gavi was a maximum-security prison near Genoa for the pericolosi, the ‘most dangerous’ inmates because of their perpetual hunger to escape. It was here that Alastair met David Stirling, the legendary founder of the SAS, and cooked up the plan for what would become the ‘Cistern Tunnel’ escape, one of the most audacious but hitherto little-known mass escape attempts of the entire war.

A story of courage in the face of extraordinary odds, it is a testament to one man's dogged determination never to give up.

In January of 1965, twenty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border. He believed his action would get him back to the States and a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for forty years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick), takes the reader behind the North Korean curtain and reveals the inner workings of its isolated society while offering a powerful testament to the human spirit.