The barbed-wire university : the real lives of Allied prisoners of war in the Second World War

"A moving and eye-opening account of the lives of second world war PoWs by the daughter of a man who was captured . . . a riveting collection of stories." — The Guardian Feature films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape have created the stereotype of the Second World War prisoner of war. But, as Midge Gillies shows in this groundbreaking work of social history, the true experiences of nearly half a million Allied servicemen held captive during the Second World War were nothing like the Hollywood myth—and infinitely more extraordinary. The real lives of POWs saw them respond to the tedium of a German stalag or the brutality of a Japanese camp with the most amazing ingenuity and creativity. They staged glittering shows, concerts and elaborate sporting fixtures, made exquisite ornaments—even, amid the terrible privations of the Thailand-Burma railway, improvised daring surgical techniques to save their fellow men's lives. Whatever skills or hobbies they took with them to captivity they managed to continue and adapt—to the extent of laying out a 9-hole golf course between the huts of one German camp. They took up crafts and pastimes using materials they found around them: even the string from a Red Cross food parcel was used to make cricket balls, football nets and wigs for theatrical performances. Men studied, attended lectures, learned languages, sat for qualifications and exams, on such a scale that one camp was nicknamed "The Barbed-Wire University." Drawing on letters home, diaries and interviews with redoubtable survivors now into their nineties, Midge Gillies recreates the daily lives of a truly remarkable group of men. "Astonishing tales of improvisation, ingenuity and courage." — The Spectator

Feature films have created the stereotype of the Second World War prisoner of war. He is the spruce, stiff-upper-lipped Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai, or Steve McQueen’s cunning and opportunist ‘Cooler King’ in The Great Escape, the all-American motorbike hero. If he is imprisoned in Europe it will have to be in the forbidding North German Schloss of Colditz or the tunnel-riddled Stalag Luft III. But, as Midge Gillies shows in this groundbreaking work of social history, the true experiences of nearly half a million Allied servicemen held captive during the Second World War were nothing like the Hollywood myth – and infinitely more extraordinary. The real lives of POWs saw them respond to the tedium of a German stalag or the brutality of a Japanese camp with the most amazing ingenuity and creativity. They staged glittering shows, concerts and elaborate sporting fixtures, made exquisite ornaments – even, amid the terrible privations of the Thailand-Burma railway, improvised daring surgical techniques to save their fellow men’s lives. Whatever skills or hobbies they took with them to captivity they managed to continue and adapt – to the extent of laying out a 9-hole golf course between the huts of one German camp. They took up crafts and pastimes using materials they found around them: even the string from a Red Cross food parcel was used to make cricket balls, football nets and wigs for theatrical performances. Men studied, attended lectures, learned languages, sat for qualifications and exams, on such a scale that one camp was nicknamed ‘The Barbed-Wire University’. A number of books written by POWs in captivity are still in print today. And often the years in captivity proved a turning-point in their lives, as the new interests and skills they took out of the camp enabled them to embark on a post-war career in which they would succeed at the highest level – whether actors like Clive Dunn and Denholm Elliott, artists like Sir Terry Frost and Ronald Searle, or the birdwatchers who studied rooks and jackdaws beyond the perimeter wire in distant parts of the German Reich and went on to run the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Drawing on letters home, diaries and interviews with redoubtable survivors now into their nineties, Midge Gillies recreates the daily lives of a truly remarkable group of men. It is a story by turns thrilling, funny, desperate and moving, but never less than inspirational.

The conventional picture of allied POWs in the World War II prisoner-of-war camps is of escape attempts (Colditz and The Great Escape) or terrible brutality (the Far Eastern camps and Bridge on the River Kwai). But what did the men really do all day...? In fact, as this extraordinary book shows, British prisoners showed the most amazing ingenuity and determination to turn their camp into a hive of every kind of activity. Whole golf courses were laid out in the exercise yard; hours and days spent watching the birds beyond the barbed-wire perimeter were turned after the war into definitive monographs on bird behaviour. Terry Frost turned himself into one of the finest postwar abstract artists after taking up painting as a POW with a brush made from horse's hair snatched from the animal that toiled at the latrine pump. Clive Dunn's theatrical career - like that of many postwar theatre names - began in extravagant drag costume in camp productions. When men went Stalag-happy they even recreated a whole hunt hurtling pell-mell through the camp. Midge Gillies - whose own father was a wartime POW - has done an amazing amount of research, and interviewed many surviving POWs to produce a work of social history which will genuinely redefine our picture of the POW camps and leave us with renewed admiration for the initiative, creativity and fortitude of men in wartime captivity. This extraordinary social history will redefine our picture of the POW camps and leave us with renewed admiration for the initiative, creativity and fortitude of men in wartime captivity, men whose whole lives and post-war careers were transformed by their time as POWs