POW: Allied Prisoners in Europe 1939-1945
By Adrian Gilbert
Published by John Murray, 2007

A summation of the prisoner-of-war experience in Europe in World War II evokes amazement as well as empathy. My review for The Nation, published on October 28.

All the books you’ve ever read about the World War II prisoner-of-war experience get an eloquent summing up in this comprehensive overview by British military historian Adrian Gilbert. It’s compassionate without ever becoming maudlin, thorough without getting weighed down by statistics.

Numbers there are. I had no idea that a PoW camp could swell to 90,000 men. Another surprise is that, among the many pastimes the prisoners cultivated to while away the weeks and fend off boredom and madness, football was not only popular, it blossomed into a full-blown World Cup at Stalag IVB, with 48 nationalities represented. (British internees beat the German guards in the final.)

Add to soccer the other sporting outlets, up to and including golf courses, the incessant gambling (on anything that moved, although raucous casinos in the barracks were not unknown), the theatrical productions (Denholm Elliott was among the cast members who went on to greater things), and even the newspapers they printed, and you have a truly broad tapestry of activities.

There were all kinds of musical combos, and one camp actually evolved an acclaimed and enduring music festival for which seats were hot tickets, even for the German officer corps. Many of the prisoners were, Gilbert writes, “able to transform what might have been wasted years into journeys of self-discovery and artistic enrichment”.

Readers can be amazed all they want, but he makes sure that none thinks for a minute the prisoners had it soft. In the end, the book’s cover photo seems a cheat: two men reading in their bunks, looking quite cosy and healthy. The truth strayed far from that.

Quite apart from the physical restraints, the awful food, the abominable sanitary conditions, the scant medical facilities and the not-infrequent outbreaks of brutality, there was the sheer mental torture of lengthy confinement, which broke some men and infected many others with tics from which they never fully recovered.

If escape from the camp wasn’t immediately practical, there was escape from the madding crowd of fellow prisoners – to solitary confinement. It was far less physically comfortable, of course, but at least you got temporary relief from the inanity and insanity of a crowded cell or barrack hut. At the infamous fortress prison Colditz the inmates kept a roster to show whose turn it was to insult a German and thus get a sent to solitary.

Another pastime that understandably caught on in the camps for a while was spiritualism, though the “mediums” soon fell out of favour after forecasts of the war’s end proved dependably undependable.

Another aberration was imaginary friends. Gilbert quotes one prisoner’s recollection:

“A whole room of 24 men would agree to pretend that they were going on a day’s outing, say, to Bournemouth [on England’s sunny south coast]. One man would be the engine driver, another the guard [conductor] and so on. They would make a noise like a train; the guard would whistle and wave his flag; and the lot of them would form a line, each holding on to the one in front of him, and ‘Choo-choo-choo!’ all around the camp. The guards would stare in astonishment and grunt to each other, ‘Alles verruckt’ (‘All mad!’). But, if we were, it was only that sort of madness that kept us sane.”

It’s no wonder, of course, that the PoWs were constantly trying to get loose from their cages, quite apart from the fact that it was their duty to try. Gilbert offers an array of impressive examples, underscoring the fact that there were many mass breakouts, of which the Great Escape was the biggest, though not the most imaginative by far.

Other chapters hold their own fascinations, including the fluctuations in prison-camp economy, the trading and bartering that was part of daily life, and the inventive ways they found to get drunk (the martini-generating still in TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes” comes to mind).

Gilbert doesn’t shy away from documenting how officer PoWs struggled to maintain discipline behind barbed wire and the kinds of crimes that demanded punishment-within-punishment. Collaboration with the enemy was dealt with severely, to be sure, but there were thieves, cheats and even Mafia-style gangs to sort out as well.

More than anything else, the book is about a selection of individuals whose recollections in oral and written form have been archived in their home countries or retold in their own memoirs.

There are Day and Dodge and Jimmy James of Great Escape fame, but just as compelling are the stories of a handful of lesser-known men who Gilbert follows right through the war, from capture to processing to internment to camp experiences to liberation and repatriation. These engaging characters are kept neatly sorted among the slew of other names that come and go, and there’s no sense of duplication or repetition.

One lower-ranked soldier who keeps popping up, named Witte, is always interesting even when he’s showing his less admirable traits. It’s true that officers had it relatively easy in their own camps, but Witte’s complaints about them are almost comical given that he was such an opportunist himself, and a boastful one at that. He was one of the PoWs who learned early on how to trade up, swapping his meagre supplies for successively greater prizes until he cornered the market in some goods. He did his share of suffering, but for the most part Witte had it made in the Nazi shade.

There is one aspect of the book that struck me above all, and it comes at the beginning: the surprise of being captive. Capture isn’t something they dwell on in escape movies, so there’s a palpable poignancy in the recollections of the soldiers who didn’t see it coming.

They didn’t see an enemy battalion closing in, and they didn’t crash their planes behind enemy lines. They were in position, engaged in combat, and suddenly turned around to find that a squad of Germans had the drop on them. They realised that resistance was futile and, laying down their arms, fumed at the predicament. And then, amid a wave of worries over their own fate or for their loved ones back home, they sank into shock at the recognition that, as their captors invariably insisted on saying, for them the war was over.

Within hours they would understand that the military life was not going to be the same anymore. Within years, many would be forced to realise that life itself had changed forever.