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The Journal of Military History 68.2 (2004) 630-631



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Footprints on the Sands of Time: RAF Bomber Command Prisoners-of-War in Germany, 1939-1945. By Oliver Clutton-Brock. London: Grub Street Press, 2003. ISBN 1-9-0401-035-0. Photographs. Illustrations. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 528. $64.95.

The popular image of life in a German POW camp in the Second World War is one of tunnelling, concert parties, and "goon-baiting," the inmates gleefully driving the Hun crazy before their eventual and successful escape to England, Home, and Beauty. This image was created and fostered by such best-selling postwar epics as The Wooden Horse and The Great Escape, both of which were eventually filmed, so spreading the rather agreeable myth of prison life in Germany still wider.

The reality was somewhat different. POW life has been accurately described as "a sentence with no release date and no hope of remission" and a closer reading of the above accounts, and other tales of POW life, reveal that the prisoners endured hunger, cold, deprivation, and not a little danger during their years in captivity.

Fun it certainly was not; one in every twenty of the RAF airmen who fell into German hands was murdered. By 1944, the German authorities were warning their RAF prisoners that escaping "should not be regarded as a sport," a point bloodily underlined by the shooting of fifty of the seventy-six RAF prisoners who made the 'Great Escape' from Stalag Luft III in March, 1944.

The reality of POW life is fully explored and revealed in Oliver Clutton-Brock's new book, an exhaustive account of the trials suffered by the Bomber Command POWs confined in Luftwaffe camps. The Luftwaffe stalags were considered somewhat more benign than many German POW camps but the detail crammed into this excellent book shows just how hard life in a prison camp could be, even if the shot-down airmen survived long enough to reach one.

Clutton-Brock also uses a great deal of personal and oral history to flesh out the details of what happened to these men from the moment they baled out of their stricken aircraft somewhere over Germany and some of the [End Page 630] accounts make very hard reading. Consider the fate of Flying Officer Paddy Houston, who was beaten senseless by civilians while still in his parachute and regained his senses to find a rope around his neck and the mob debating where they should hang him. The police saved Paddy Houston but he was lucky; all too often the police shot their RAF prisoners out of hand or stood by while they were lynched.

Clutton-Brock leaves no base uncovered, no aspect of POW life unexplored. The book carries full details of the various camps and such subjects as Traitors and Collaborators and War Crimes are explored in detail. There are fourteen appendixes, including a list of all 10,999 Bomber Command aircrew imprisoned by the Germans between 1939 and 1945, beginning with Sergeant Booth and Aircraftsman Slattery, shot down and captured on 4 September 1939, just one day into the war.

This is a timely book about one aspect of the air war over Europe, but one that anyone interested in that struggle and every academic institution will want to have on the shelf. It combines deep scholarship with considerable research and—most usefully—is also a very good read.



Robin H. Neillands
Marlborough, Wiltshire
United Kingdom


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