The Ethics of Escape: British Officer POWs in the First World War

Abstract

In the absence of official guidance, British officers taken prisoner in the First World War had to decide for themselves whether or not attempts at escape were justified. Their decisions varied according to individual perceptions of duty, but it was those who chose to escape who saw their memoirs published in the interwar years. There was still little official direction concerning behaviour in captivity in the first years of the Second World War, yet officers who found themselves in enemy hands early on could draw on what their Great War counterparts had written about the ethics of escape.