'This landmark and compelling book follows the stories of 15,000 Australian prisoners of war from the moment they were released by the Japanese at the end of World War II. Their struggle to rehabilitate themselves and to win compensation and acknowledgement from their own country was just beginning. This moving book shows that the battle within was both a personal and a national one.
'Prize-winning historian Christina Twomey finds that official policies and attitudes towards these men were equivocal and arbitrary for almost forty years. The image of a defeated and emaciated soldier held prisoner by people of a different race did not sit well with the mythology of Anzac. Drawing on the records of the Prisoner of War Trust Fund for the first time, this book presents the struggles of returned prisoners in their own words. It also shows that memories of captivity forged new connections with people of the Asia-Pacific region, as former POWs sought to reconcile with their captors and honour those who had helped them. A grateful nation ultimately lauded and commemorated POWs as worthy veterans from the 1980s, but the real story of the fight to get there has not been told until now.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'During the Second World War, some 30,000 Australians became POWs. Of the more than 22,000 prisoners held by the Japanese, around 8000 died. This equated to a death toll of 36 per cent, an extraordinary figure when compared with the much lower death toll of 3 per cent suffered by those taken prisoner in the European and North African theatres. The wartime suffering of these men and their experiences of captivity has been the subject of much scholarship. But in The Battle Within: POWs in Post-war Australia, Christina Twomey takes up the narrative of POWs of the Japanese after the ‘camp gates were thrown open’ (5). She eloquently traces both the individual and collective responses of these men and small number of women to the effect of captivity on their lives in the decades following liberation.' (Introduction)
Tracks Were Buckled and Warped : Charging Attitudes to Martially Denuded POWs
2018
14223791
2018
single work
essay
Tracks Were Buckled and Warped : Charging Attitudes to Martially Denuded POWs
2018
14223791
2018
single work
essay
Tracks Were Buckled and Warped : Charging Attitudes to Martially Denuded POWs
2018
14223791
2018
single work
essay
'During the Second World War, some 30,000 Australians became POWs. Of the more than 22,000 prisoners held by the Japanese, around 8000 died. This equated to a death toll of 36 per cent, an extraordinary figure when compared with the much lower death toll of 3 per cent suffered by those taken prisoner in the European and North African theatres. The wartime suffering of these men and their experiences of captivity has been the subject of much scholarship. But in The Battle Within: POWs in Post-war Australia, Christina Twomey takes up the narrative of POWs of the Japanese after the ‘camp gates were thrown open’ (5). She eloquently traces both the individual and collective responses of these men and small number of women to the effect of captivity on their lives in the decades following liberation.' (Introduction)
Tracks Were Buckled and Warped : Charging Attitudes to Martially Denuded POWs
2018
14223791
2018
single work
essay
