Abstract
Veterans' associations after the Second World War have received very little attention from historians despite the insight they can provide into postwar societies. This article draws upon the literature published by national ex-prisoner of war (POW) associations formed in the aftermath of the Second World War, to examine the significance attached by different groups of British ex-POWs to their wartime incarceration. This literature shows how an early attempt to create one POW association for all who were captured failed. Associations subsequently founded for Far East ex-POWs successfully created an inclusive ‘fictive kinship group’ and their activities challenge recently established discourses that these prisoners were a ‘forgotten army’. By contrast, kinship groups that developed among ex-POWs held in Italy and Germany were fostered by certain criteria in addition to the common one of having been held in captivity. The article concludes by identifying the conditions conducive to the formation of fictive kinship groups among POWs.
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