War Behind The Wire

Australian Prisoners of War

Edited by Michael Caulfield

Published by Hachette Australia

Updated edition 2010

What happens when a battle goes wrong and a soldier is captured? They have not been prepared for such an event and the effects on the individual vary widely. Michael Caulfield has used the memoirs of Australian POWs stored by the Australians at War Film Archive to build a picture, in their own words, of what captivity was like for ordinary soldiers.

The first part of the book looks at just how they were captured. The usual problems of incompetent commanders, little or inadequate equipment and an overwhelming enemy are covered by Caulfield. He also includes the stories of non-combatants – nurses, nuns, priests, wives and children who also endured captivity. Among the soldiers there was initially a feeling that they had been let down by their superiors. This seems to have applied to all soldiers generally in the early part of the War, whether captured in Malaya or the eastern Mediterranean.

In later parts of the book we see how they handled captivity. There was a constant struggle for more food especially in the Asian camps. The doctors who went into captivity with their troops had to deal with diseases of malnutrition like beri-beri and amoebic dysentery with whatever resources they could scrounge or recover from local plants. They learnt quickly and some of the improvisations to keep up a barely adequate diet were a testament to their abilities.

Many prisoners note the poor leadership of some officers, especially the British, who appeared stuck in their old-world notions of rank and privilege. Discipline, so vital under these conditions, often broke down through lack of leadership. Officers did not have to work and in at least one camp that left them free to grow their own vegetables. “Bandicooting” or stealing any part of the vegetable that grew below ground seems to have been an acceptable practice for the troops. Even decades later when these interviews were being recorded there is a lot of ill feeling towards those officers. It was often left to the camp doctors and NCOs to fill the leadership void and names like Doctor Weary Dunlop have now become a part of Australian history.

Unfortunately there were also examples of men stealing food from their mates. If found out their treatment by the men was harsh. Being ostracised by your mates was a cruel punishment.

Fraternising with the enemy was often necessary to obtain basic food. In Germany, where the civilians didn’t seem too rabidly anti-Ally, the diet was generally better than in the Asian camps. It was helped by the Red Cross parcels, which never seem to have made it through the Japanese into the hands of the POWs. The diet was still inadequate by Australian standards, though, and the prisoners of the Germans suffered the same debilitating conditions as the prisoners of the Japanese, just to a lesser extent.

Bored soldiers soon found ways to keep their minds active. Courses could be run on almost any subject in a large camp full of men with a wide range of talents. Theatre was a popular entertainment and one camp in Germany actually published its own weekly newspaper. One camp arranged to teach soldiers to the equivalent of the old High School Leaving Certificate and sit for a Matriculation Exam run for them by the University of Cambridge. The talents were not all academic. To kids from the Australian bush the arts of “scrounging” and “making do” seemed to come naturally. Even the women scrounged the old rice bags and made hats from them for sale or trade to the local people.

“They were constantly interested and obsessed with food or the lack of it and some of them had the most amazing collection of recipes, obviously Dutch to start off with, and then with the British …”

The nuns, who kept their religious observances going through captivity, found time to teach classes and arrange schools for the children. One interesting comment from a Japanese officer was “You Christians, you praying too much, we are losing the war”.

The attitude of the guards is also interesting. Most were too old for combat duties or had been injured and were put in charge of prisoners and camps. For the Germans this was a comfortable way to sit out the war. For the Italians it didn’t seem to matter. For the Japanese it was a disgrace both to be put in charge of prisoners and to be regarded as unfit for combat. This goes a long way to explaining the different attitudes. The POWs remember many of their guards and wrote about them. Some guards, particularly brutal, were singled out at liberation and dealt with. When a Sherman tank broke down the gates of a German camp one German guard received retribution:

“…the little guard, the one who shot Arthur Russell on the march, one of our blokes, they handed him over to the Americans and they summarily shot him….they offered a friend of mine a gun , and they said “Would you?” And he said No. I couldn’t shoot him. So the Yanks shot him, ‘cause he was guilty of murder….”

Surprisingly there was not a lot of demand for revenge. Most prisoners were still coming to grips with their own survival. It was left to the post-war administration to track down and try the war criminals.

For all the sadistic guards there was sometimes one who had a bit of humanity. These were few and the charm appeared to be turned on and off at will, depending on whether a superior officer was watching them.

A hierarchy seemed to build up inside the Asian camps. The Australians regarded themselves as somewhat above the rest. The British came next but their soldiers had never been trained to take the risks or initiative as the Australians had to. Their death rate in the camps was far higher, films like The Great Escape notwithstanding. The few Yanks, mostly fliers, were regarded somewhere about the level of the Australians. Everyone hated the Dutch. Brought up in a life of privilege (one POW called it cultural arrogance) with servants to do everything, the Dutch were unprepared for imprisonment. They treated the natives with contempt and seemed to assume that things would go back to normal after the war. The local people had other ideas about that.

The stories include the occasional flash of grim humour, such as the working party that was disinterring German soldiers on an early battlefield and putting the bodies into coffins for a decent reburial. Many of the corpses were badly decomposed so body parts were just put into a coffin and the lid nailed on. Some corpses were reburied with three legs, some with one.

Overall, in camps in the Pacific, Europe and later in Korea, it seems to be the spirit of mateship that kept many going. Many prisoners comment on this in their stories. They also comment on how unprepared they and the authorities were to handle peace. Nobody “back home” recognised the psychological trauma suffered by the prisoners. Many just withdrew into themselves, some committed suicide. For some lucky ones their mates helped them through it once more. The doctors didn’t even have names for the range of problems we now call Post Traumatic Stress.

Prisoners of the Germans had one other problem to deal with. “The European war, later in life, was not Australia’s war, that was England’s war. Australia’s war was up here in the islands…”. The final indignity was being regarded by your own countrymen as not really part of the war.

Korean veterans had the same problem. Only 29 Australians were captured but they had to put up with the same conditions and in the bitter cold of Korean winters.

22,000 Australians went into captivity. One in three didn’t make it out again.

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