Memory, methodology, and myth: some of the challenges of writing Australian prisoner of war history.

One day in 1999, I found myself in northern New South Wales, interviewing a former Australian Second World War prisoner of the Japanese--a lovely man who was anxious to help and who congratulated me for wanting to write about the experience of Australian prisoners of war. After a three-hour interview, I asked him what he thought about a young person such as myself wanting to write about this topic. He leaned towards me and said very gently, 'Girly, you'll never get it right!'

His words echoed in my head many times throughout the rest of my PhD. There are various challenges that are common to all military historians but this paper will explore a few of the particular ones of prisoner-of-war history. I will also examine some of the iconic representations of the Australian Second World War prisoner-of-war experience in the public domain, and identify some areas that could be further developed to give a more balanced view of this important and interesting part of the Australian military story.

As Joan Beaumont has commented, it is only in recent years that Australian prisoners of war of Second World War have become a focus of serious research by Australian historians. [1] Operational history has remained at the forefront--the events, strategies, and personalities that shaped the course of the war and ultimately affected its outcome. This early relative absence of interest in prisoner-of-war history implies that captivity represented a situation of stasis--men were imprisoned and nothing changed except that some lived and some died. Nothing could be further from the truth. Constant change and flux characterised the prisoner-of-war experience--from locations, supplies of food, and medications to ever-changing captors. Quality of leadership and morale depended on how long men had been in captivity and the kinds of conditions in which they were forced to live.

Many Australian ex-prisoners of war have felt a sense of neglect by the military history community, enhancing their common feelings of isolation from other Second World War veterans. Yet, as Hank Nelson has pointed out, there is a significant difference between the expectations of prisoners of war and the reality of their representation in postwar Australia. [2] Drama, human suffering, and survival in extreme situations have wide appeal, and many Australian prisoner-of-war stories have become best sellers. [3] Even so, today the vast majority of books written about the Australian prisoner-of-war experience, however, continue to be written by ex-prisoners themselves.

Methodological challenges

For the historian who wants to engage with prisoner of war-related research, there are some significant methodological challenges. The first relates to memory. Australian prisoners of the Japanese found themselves in diverse locations and climates and with varying groups of captors, scattered throughout South-east Asia and Japan. Some moved frequently from camp to camp, and sometimes between different countries. Recollections of captivity can therefore become a blur of different camps and captors.

As well, on a practical level, due to the circumstances of captivity, much documentation did not survive. For the most part, the Japanese forbade all prisoners from keeping written records, conducted constant searches, and severely punished the offenders. [4] As a result, if memories are contradictory, there may be few corroborating records made at the time. For example, this lack of access to paper and writing implements had significant ramifications for prisoner-of-war doctors in recording medical notes, which they of course wanted to retain for postwar evidence of Japanese mistreatment. In light of these restrictions, Major A.L. Dunlop, RAMC, described the necessary short cuts taken in medical records: "Each patient is shown as suffering from the disease which was considered to be the most important. For this reason these statistics give a very conservative view of the number of cases of any one particular disease occurring." [5] Some doctors only held medical notes for a short time, before erasing them all and starting again on the same paper.