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Comradeship in the British Prisoner of War Experience in Europe in World War Two.” THESIS NOTES
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Comradeship in the British Prisoner of War Experience in Europe in World War Two.” THESIS NOTES
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Topic OutlinePreviously, I considered the topic “Are prisons an effective way of doing justice: A
focus on the Hull prison riot in 1976.” However, there are not enough available primary
sources on the Hull Prison riot from prisoners themselves and secondary literature debating
the Hull riot upon which I could write a strong History dissertation. Many primary sources
written by the prisoners are not publicly available and the newspaper cuttings reporting the
event are largely repetitive in scope and limited in number. Criminology contributed to much
of the secondary literature but the gap in the historical literature was too wide for me to
bridge when limited to 10,000 words.
Instead, subject to approval, I am assessing “Comradeship in the British Prisoner of
War Experience in Europe in World War Two.” After a preliminary navigation of the
primary and secondary literature, it seems that there is more historical evidence from
prisoner’s diaries which I could use to examine the common experience of British soldiers
captured by their enemy. Nearly half a million British soldiers were captured and sent to
Germany alone, and the National Archives hold German record cards for some 190,000 of
those captured. Significant in size, this group shouted into the void through their extensive
use of diaries and comments on note paper. Their voices were heard by their family
members. However, historians have often overlooked their wartime experiences, perhaps
because they do not fit nicely into the wartime experience as they left the battlefield through
capture.
Imprisonment has given many writers the opportunity to write great literary works
about their lives or about imprisonment itself. Many historical figures have written great
literary works or works which have had profound historical impact whilst imprisoned.
Imprisonment perhaps gave them ample time to reflect and write memoirs, books and poetry.
This includes famously Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Dante Aligerhi’s Divine Comedy
and more recently, Hilter’s Mein Kampf. However, British prisoners of war in World War
Two had very different experiences of imprisonment. Many had to work whilst famished and
so, burdened with exhaustion and despair, could not bring themselves to write. Instead, some
ex-prisoners wrote memoirs and books at later dates about their memories of imprisonment.
Those who could whilst captured, often wrote in the format of letters home to their
families and friends, through poetry noted on scraps of paper and in diaries. Diaries were
liable to seizure by the prison guards or other prisoners, so they too are haunted by a sense of
, public audience. However, the diaries offer some insight into the prisoners’ private feelings,
perhaps when the authors tried to rid themselves of overwhelming feelings by writing them
down. Many of the diaries, letters and poems reference the relationships between prisoners
that formed, both meaningful relationships and ones with tensions. Prisoners bonded over
sharing limited resources such as food and cigarettes, sharing a communal space, being able
to function as a single-gender society and a shared wistfulness for home. These same factors
also seemed enough to cause considerable friction between the prisoners.
The prisoners’ literature itself carefully deconstructs man’s patriotic proclivities,
ubiquitous in the cultural zeitgeist through powerful references to home and the unity
between prisoners. Commonly across the literature, the colloquial vernacular thinly veils the
shame prisoners felt for having surrendered to or been captured by the enemy. The
overriding objective is to examine the comradeship in the literature as a springboard to infer
camaraderie in the prisoners’ relationships. A whole swathe of questions distils the cogent
evidence: What united the prisoners of war’s societies whilst imprisoned? How did the
prisoners describe their friendships and what affected their relationships? To what extent was
there genuine comradeship, or was this a façade for selfishness with resources and hierarchy
to escape home, covert homosexuality and fear of indefinite confinement? If so, did
comradeship successfully provide a cloak of immunity to the prisoners for these adverse
inferences?
Historians have in some ways neglected this field. World War Two military
historians largely disregarded prisoners of war because of their displacement from the
battlefield. Having said this, historians have covered aspects of camaraderie in their research.
Most comprehensively, Clare Marketplace dedicated a chapter in her book Captives of War:
British Prisoners of War in the Second World War to exploring the activities that formed
prisoners’ bonds during their time in captivity. Marketplace outlined some letters and diaries
with quotes and images of the diaries to cement her analysis that the shared experiences of
communal living formed the basis of strong friendships. Similarly, in her chapter ‘Pinky
Smith Looks Gorgeous!’ Female Cross-Dressing and Male Bonding in Prisoner of War
Camps for British Servicemen in Europe Makepeace assessed how the absence of women in
society affected prisoners’ relationships and how they compensated for this using drag. This
examination was nuanced, despite the lack of reference to drag and homosexual relations in
the prisoners’ accounts.
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