Prisoners of War: A Story of Four American Soldiers (review)

The year 2005 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In Canada, 2005 was declared the Year of the Veteran and was publicly commemorated in symbolic forms such as monuments, specially minted currency, and the opening of the War Museum in Ottawa. Efforts in both Canada and the United States to record the history of the Second World War have escalated over the last five years. This is evidenced by an increase in publications of veterans' personal memoirs and collections of veterans' oral histories, a growth of Web sites and online databases dedicated to archiving veterans' narratives, and an expanding network of formal organizations focused on collecting and preserving veterans' oral accounts of their wartime experiences. Particularly characteristic of the recent rush to collect and preserve veterans' histories are the diverse media used for collecting, archiving, and transmitting their oral culture and the turn towards microhistorical representations of the war that function to add detail to a field of study commonly left to macrohistorical analyses.

The interviews documented in Prisoners of War: A Story of Four American Soldiers were collected by producers Erica Heilman and Gregory L. Sharrow, the former an independent radio producer and the latter the Vermont Folklife Center's director of education and folklorist. The collection of interviews and the production of the documentary occurred with support from the Vermont Folklife Center as part of the Library of Congress's ongoing Veterans History Project. The almost hour-long CD is divided into thirteen tracks that present the narratives of four Second World War veterans from the United States. These men are all from or have family roots in Vermont and were all held as prisoners of war in Germany from mid-December 1944 (the Battle of the Bulge) until April and May 1945. The recording is accompanied by a booklet whose cover bears the photographs of the veterans as young men proudly sporting their clean uniforms and newly enlisted in the armed forces (i.e., the U.S. Army, the Reserves, and the National Guard). The two pages of liner notes contain recent photographs of these men as octogenarians, accompanied by a description of each veteran's military biography.

The recent academic and popular emphasis on the oral histories of veterans has the potential to personalize the Second World War and to provide those with no direct experience of it with a more intimate familiarity with the experiences of those directly affected by it. Similarly, individual accounts from battlefield veterans have added details to otherwise generalized analyses based on the accounts of politicians and generals who often sat far removed from the front lines. The veterans' testimonies equally demonstrate the esoteric intricacies and day-to-day routines of military folklife in general and of Second World War veterans specifically. Clearly, individual accounts can be encapsulated within a shared framework of wartime experience, but distinct social groups form during wartime and share narrative characteristics that involve unique experiences. For example, military groups organized for the war, such as air force crews, engage the events of war in the sky, while infantry troops are exposed to close-proximity combat on the ground; likewise, they are distinct from nonmilitary organizations such as the merchant marine. These groups and others such as prisoners of war, war brides, and refugees are, to a degree, distinguishable by narrative characteristics. However, even a fairly distinct group, such as prisoners of war, exemplifies internal differences in terms of the narrative expression of wartime circumstances depending on the group member's geographic area of imprisonment, branch of the armed forces, and rank within that branch.

The interviews constituting Prisoners of War: A Story of Four American Soldiers have been edited and restructured thematically according to common experiences. The story is presented in a linear progression that recounts the POWs' ritual timeline of capture-imprisonment-liberation and that concludes with the veterans expressing their difficult integration into nonwartime society. The narrated...