Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

P.O.W.: Australian Prisoners of War in Hitler’s Reich by Peter Monteath

by
July–August 2011, no. 333

P.O.W.: Australian Prisoners of War in Hitler’s Reich by Peter Monteath

Macmillan, $34.99 pb, 429 pp, 9781742610085

P.O.W.: Australian Prisoners of War in Hitler’s Reich by Peter Monteath

by
July–August 2011, no. 333

Of the fate of Australian prisoners of war in the hands of the Japanese during World War II, the literature – memoir, fiction, history – is voluminous. There were 21,652 of them, of whom thirty-five per cent, or 7780, perished. A good deal has also been written of enemy prisoners – Japanese, German, Italian – who were held in camps in this country, and in particular of the mass breakout at Cowra on 5 August 1944, when 231 Japanese and four Australians died. Less attention has been given to the 8500 who returned to Australia after having been prisoners of the Germans or Italians, or of the 242 of them who died in Europe. These ‘Australian prisoners of war in Hitler’s Reich’ are the subject of Peter Monteath’s vivid and expansive study P.O.W..

From the New Issue

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.