“I’m awfully fed up with being a prisoner” Australian POWs of the Turks and the Strain of Surrender

Abstract

ABSTRACTNearly 200 Australians were captured and held as prisoners of war (POWs) by Ottoman Turkish forces during the First World War. They have largely been overlooked in Australian history and memory of the conflict with the result that little is known of their time in captivity or of its wider ramifications. In examining the emotional impact of their capture and imprisonment, this article offers intimate insights into how these Australian POWs felt about their captivity, from the moment of surrender until long after the war had ended. The humiliation of capture and confinement at the hands of a culturally, religiously and linguistically different enemy and the restrictions imposed by wartime imprisonment exacerbated the prisoners’ private feelings of shame and failure, feelings that were publicly reinforced in the aftermath of the war as the two dominant narratives of the conflict—the heroic Anzac fighter and the Turks as the honourable enemy—excluded or, at best, marginalised their experiences. Such analysis tells us much about the psychological dimension of wartime captivity, and adds to our understanding of the legacy of this POW experience.