- Hachette Australia
- 9780733621116
- $35.00
- Paperback - C Format
- November 2008
- 400 pages
- History
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War Behind the Wire
Michael Caulfield presents stories of Australian Prisoners of War. He captures that Aussie spirit that managed to endure through all.
Australia has a long history of private sadness and quiet courage arising from her men and women being taken as prisoners of war. More than 34 000 have so far ended up in captivity; over 100 in the Boer War, more than 4 000 in WWI, just 30 during the Korean War, none in Vietnam - and the biggest of them all, WWII, when 30 560 Australian men and women were taken prisoner - that s more than all the Australians killed in action during the entire six years of the war. The total number of Australian deaths during WWII, nearly thirty per cent, one in every three, were prisoners. Many of these men and women lost years of their lives, wasting away behind the wire. They endured a world where only the basics mattered - food, discipline, some small skerrick of hope...and survival. In WAR BEHIND THE WIRE, Michael Caulfield presents stories from the Australians at War Film Archive that follows the stories of the POWs from capture to eventual liberation. The book ranges across all the wars, from the men and women trapped under the ruthless Japanese regime, to the forgotten POWs of the Germans and the Italians, captured in Greece, or Crete, or Libya or Syria, or those who simply fell from the skies somewhere over occupied Europe. It ventures into the experiences of those who were taken by ambush in the scrubby hills and ranges of Korea and even encompasses the tales of civilian prisoners, caught up in war by tragic accident. WAR BEHIND THE WIRE is a powerful and compelling insight into lives not often revealed.
