Captives of War. British Prisoners of War in Europe in the Second World War by Clare Makepeace (review)

In a landmark review article written over a decade ago, Joan Beaumont challenged historians writing about prisoners of war (POWs) to go "beyond treating oral histories of captivity as empirical sources', and instead see them as "elements of an ongoing dialogue between personal memory, popular cultural representation of war and national commemorative practice." Given the rather unique experience of prolonged captivity in wartime, one might have expected the subject of prisoners of war to appeal to those social and cultural historians interested in the impact of war on individuals and the way societies have dealt with captivity—and the concomitant issue of surrender—over the years. While it would be wrong to argue that the subject has been overlooked (Christina Twomey's work on civilian internees in the Far East stands out), it remains the case that POWs are still largely absent from the corpus of social and cultural histories, despite the recent impetus given to the study of war by the centenary of the 1^st World War. The absence is particularly marked for the case of British POWs in the 2^nd World War, where the POW experience remains firmly associated with what S.P. Mackenzie dubbed the "Colditz myth"—a depiction of imprisonment that foregrounds the role of escape, and paints POWs as little more than plucky amateur sportsmen bent on scoring a "home run" and out-foxing the "Goons." In uncovering the complexity and diversity of the British POW experience between 1939 and 1945, Clare Makepeace's Captives of War not only offers a much-needed corrective to this view, but also demonstrates what can be achieved by applying the social historian's tool kit to the study of POWs.

Makepeace grounds her work on the letters, diaries and logbooks of seventy-five British POWs who spent time in German—and in a handful of cases, Italian—POW camps during the war. These sources allow her to explore a number of facets of the prisoners' experiences: their attitudes towards their capture and incarceration, the social bonds they forged with other prisoners and the ties they maintained with their loved ones at home, the impact of captivity on their psychological wellbeing, their liberation and resettlement at the end of the war. Ever careful to distinguish the types of sources used to drive her analysis, Makepeace is less interested in the day to day realities of prisoner life, so much as the way the prisoners responded to their circumstances and made sense of them. Her sources are mined to provide insights into the prisoners' emotions, anxieties and assumptions. The results of the research are startlingly fresh and go a long way to challenging some long-held assumptions about the impact of captivity on servicemen. One of the most interesting conclusions concerns the extent to which prisoners remained connected with their families at home, and responded to their enforced captivity from the perspectives of fathers, sons, bread-winners, rather than those of the disarmed combatant. What concerned prisoners was not how the act of surrender besmirched their masculinity and identity as warriors, but rather how it prevented them from meeting their domestic responsibilities as protectors, providers and procreators. Their sense of masculinity was still connected with conceptions of capacity and agency, but what pained them was the thought of letting down their families, not their comrades at the front. This had important implications for how they imagined their condition. While their physical environments remained heavily constrained, their thoughts and emotions kept them connected to a world beyond the barbed wire and watch-towers, allowing them to create and inhabit a mental world that effectively reconfigured the spatial and temporal dimensions of their captivity.

Captives of Captivity is a deeply personal book. It was written very much with the author's grandfather—who spent five years as prisoner of the Reich—peering over her shoulder; his presence animates...