For British and American prisoners, Stalag IX B was one of the worst camps in Germany. Conditions were appalling from the start and continued to deteriorate as the war progressed. The first transport of American prisoners arrived in late December 1944. By January 24, the camp had 4,075 Americans, held in 16 barracks.
At 1:50am on the 5th of August 1944, over 1000 Japanese prisoners launched a mass escape from the Cowra Prisoner of War Camp. It was the largest prisoner of war breakout in modern military history.
13,000 of the 45,000 Union soldiers imprisoned here died, making Andersonville the worst prison in the Civil War. The site is now the National POW Museum. To relieve some of the conditions at Andersonville, a larger prison was constructed in the summer of 1864 near the Lawton Depot in the town of Millen, Georgia.
During World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (towards Soviet POWs and Western Allied commandos) were notorious for atrocities against prisoners of war.
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.
Of the 22,376 Australian prisoners of war captured by the Japanese, some 8,031 died while in captivity. After the end of the war, War Crimes Trials were held to investigate reports of atrocities, massacres and other causes of death.
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.
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.
The estimated number of living POWs decreased from nearly 32,550 to about 29,350, caused mainly by estimated deaths among WW II and Korean POWs.
The earliest known purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp was established by the Kingdom of Great Britain at Norman Cross, in 1797 to house the increasing number of prisoners from the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars.
The reasons for the Japanese behaving as they did were complex. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) indoctrinated its soldiers to believe that surrender was dishonourable. POWs were therefore thought to be unworthy of respect. The IJA also relied on physical punishment to discipline its own troops.
The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
Indeed, they endured years of not only malnutrition and starvation, disease and general neglect -- resisting all the while -- but also torture, slave labor and other war crimes. Many POWs were murdered outright by their captors. In fact, only a little more than half of them ever saw home again.
A typical meal was a thin broth of rice and vegetables. The prisoners were paid a small wage with which they supplemented this diet.
Others, often starved and treated brutally, worked for months under shellfire close behind German lines. In camps in Germany conditions were better, but prisoners suffered increasingly from shortages caused by the British blockade. Many survived only because of regular Red Cross parcels.
Many men, women and children interned in the camps were classed as 'enemy aliens'. This term meant they had ancestral or citizen links to countries at war with Australia. About 7000 people were imprisoned by 1918, including 4500 'enemy aliens'. Most of the internees were Germans.
The Great Papago Escape was the largest Axis prisoner-of-war escape to occur from an American facility during World War II. On the night of December 23, 1944, twenty-five Germans tunneled out of Camp Papago Park, near Phoenix, Arizona, and fled into the surrounding desert.
The POWs suffered frequent beatings and mistreatment from their Japanese guards, food was the barest minimum, and disease and injuries went untreated. Although the POWs finally received Red Cross packages in January 1944, the Japanese had removed all the drugs and medical supplies.
Most of the Australians (14,972) were captured in Singapore; other principal Australian prisoner-of-war groups were captured in Java (2,736), Timor (1,137), Ambon (1,075), and New Britain (1,049).
Chinese prisoners are buried alive by their Japanese captors outside the city of Nanjing.
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.
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.