More than 30,000 Australians became prisoners of war (POWs) between 1940 and 1945.
Over 22,000 Australians became prisoners of war of the Japanese in south-east Asia. The wave of Japanese victories, ending with the capture of the Netherlands East Indies in March 1942, left in its wake a mass of Allied prisoners of war, including many Australians.
In all, 3,850 Australians were captured by the Germans on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918. Nine per cent of these prisoners died in captivity. A total of 395 Australians died during captivity in the First World War.
At the peak of the war, Australia held more than 12,000 people in internment camps. Over the course of the war, internees included: 7000 Australian residents, including 1500 British nationals. 8000 people from overseas.
Over 22,000 Australians became prisoners of war of the Japanese in south-east Asia : Army (about 21,000); RAN (354); and RAAF (373). The Army prisoners were largely from the 8th Division captured at the fall of Singapore .
About 8,600 Australians became prisoners of the Germans. They included 7,115 Australian soldiers captured in North Africa or Greece; 1,476 airmen, mostly bomber aircrew shot down over Germany in 1943–45; and a few sailors.
Many of the women and children were held in prison camps in terrible conditions and forced on death marches. Some women were killed on sight and others were raped, beaten, and forced to become sex slaves. Much of the book showcases the words of the people who lived through this period.
Members of RAAF aircrews, who had bailed out during operations over Germany, occupied Europe or North Africa, also became POWs. Of the 8,000 Australians taken prisoner by the Germans and Italians, 265 died during their captivity.
Convict transport peaks
In 1833 convict transportation peaked when 7,000 prisoners arrived in Australia but, by this time, public support for the system was already in decline. However, it wasn't until 1868 that convict transportation to Australia came to an end.
The most common form of punishment was face-slapping, often done with a hard instrument, such as a bamboo stick or a shovel. More severe beatings were also common.
In 1917 a further 76,836 Australians became casualties in battles such Bullecourt, Messines, and the four-month campaign around Ypres known as the battle of Passchendaele. Australian wounded infantrymen at the first battle of Passchendaele, near Zonnebeke railway station.
More than 170,000 British prisoners of war (POWs) were taken by German and Italian forces during the Second World War. Most were captured in a string of defeats in France, North Africa and the Balkans between 1940 and 1942. They were held in a network of POW camps stretching from Nazi-occupied Poland to Italy.
More than 1000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples served in the First World War, and more than 4000 in the Second World War.
United States Army Colonel Floyd “Jim” Thompson, the longest held prisoner of war (POW) in American history, and his wife, Alyce, were products of the idealism of post-World War II America. When Thompson was shot down and captured, they began a journey that changed them forever.
The longest-held enlisted POW is Bill Robinson from East Tennessee. Don Dare spoke with the retired Air Force Captain about his years in captivity and a pilot who is still MIA. Shortly after being captured, a North Vietnamese militia woman escorted Robinson, in what he learned years later was a propaganda photo.
Thompson spent the next nine years (3,278 days) as a prisoner of war, first at the hands of the Viet Cong in the South Vietnam forests, until he was moved in 1967 to the Hanoi prison system. During his captivity, he was tortured, starved, and isolated from other American POWs.
Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to various penal colonies in Australia.
The women would be employed in 'factories' (equivalent of the English workhouse) but often had to find their own accommodation, and would be under great pressure to pay for it with sexual services. In this way, all the women convicts tended to be regarded as prostitutes.
During World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (towards Soviet POWs and Western Allied commandos) were notorious for atrocities against prisoners of war.
Over this decade there was an average of five homicides in prison each year (µ=4.6). Most recently, in the period from 2000 to 2011, both the number and frequency of homicides in prison decreased to between none and three each year, with an average of one homicide per year (µ=1.2; see Figure 1).
There are 1,582 Americans still unaccounted for, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Veterans, surviving family members and others dispute that number, however.
Chinese prisoners are buried alive by their Japanese captors outside the city of Nanjing.
Miraculously, the nurses all survived the long imprisonment from May 1942 to February 1945, but after liberation, received little recognition as military prisoners of war. But most of the nurses said that they didn't do anything extraordinary, they were just doing their jobs.
Crucifixion was a form of punishment, torture and/or execution that the Japanese military sometimes used against prisoners during the war. Edwards and the others were initially bound at the wrists with fencing wire, suspended from a tree and beaten with a baseball bat.