HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-10-06T08:59:00.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The Stalingrad of Africa: the story of the battle for Tunis
items: Ben McIntyre on Colditz: "The reality of Colditz is much more interesting than the black-and-white moral fable"
items: The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war
items: Prisoners of war in Britain during WW2: where were they held?
items: 5 myths of the Second World War's Great Escape
items: The Sumatran Railway: the forgotten death railway
items: Prisoners of war
items: The British soldiers who fought for Germany in the world wars
items: Death camp Britons
items: "How I fell captive to the Germans": the experience of First World War PoWs

The Stalingrad of Africa: the story of the battle for Tunis
type: item
date: 2025-10-03T08:00:29.000Z
creator: Saul David
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical events
subject: POWs
description: In 1943, Allied and Axis troops contested one of the most decisive campaigns of the Second World War. Saul David tells the story of the battle for Tunis – as hard-fought as the struggle for the Soviet city
encoded: Early on 8 November 1942, Adolf Hitler’s special train was en route from Berlin to Munich when it was stopped at a small station in the Thuringian Forest to receive an urgent message from the Foreign Office. A day earlier, Hitler’s HQ staff had received a “very disturbing signal” from German agents in Gibraltar, informing them that a large Allied troop convoy had passed heading in an easterly direction. Most on the train assumed the convoy was bound for Libya, a colony of Germany’s ally Italy since 1912. But its true destination was revealed by the Foreign Office communiqué: “A US expeditionary corps is disembarking in Algiers and Oran,” ports in French-controlled Algeria. Hitler was aghast. Aware that French North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy regime) was an area of the “greatest political and strategic importance”, he asked his advisors what resources were available to meet the threat. The answer was: none. Farther down the line, Joachim von Ribbentrop boarded the train. So concerned was the German foreign minister about the news coming from the Mediterranean that he urged Hitler to put out peace feelers to Stalin, hoping to free up German men and materials to be rushed to north Africa. The Führer refused: “a moment of weakness is not the proper time to negotiate with an enemy.” Instead, Hitler ordered General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations staff of his high command, to “organise the Wehrmacht for the defence of Tunis”, the capital of French Tunisia, which was a short flight or sea journey from Sicily. By securing Tunisia, Hitler hoped to stymie Allied plans to trap Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel’s Italo-German Panzer Army in Libya between General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army, advancing from Egypt in the east, and the forces just landed in Algeria and Morocco to the west. Such was indeed the Allies’ plan – and the subsequent ‘Race for Tunis’ would set the scene for one of the decisive campaigns of the war. …

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Ben McIntyre on Colditz: "The reality of Colditz is much more interesting than the black-and-white moral fable"
type: item
date: 2022-11-21T16:24:37.000Z
creator: Rob Attar
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: POWs
description: For his new book, bestselling author Ben Macintyre has set his sights on the most infamous PoW camp of the Second World War. He reveals how the legendary escape attempts are only part of a complex, darker history
encoded: Colditz: in context Early in the Second World War, the medieval Colditz Castle was converted into a prisoner of war camp, intended to hold those Allied officers deemed most likely to escape or cause trouble for their German army captors. Colditz remained in use until its liberation by US forces in April 1945 and at its peak held more than 800 PoWs, composed of many different nationalities and including famous names such as SAS founder David Stirling, future politician Airey Neave and RAF hero Douglas Bader. Although the castle was said to be “escape-proof”, more escape attempts took place at Colditz than any other PoW camp. Altogether more than 130 men broke out of the castle, though little more than 30 successfully made it all the way across the German border. These often ingenious escape attempts – popularised in books, TV and a highly successful 1973 board game – are what Colditz is best known for today. But there were many darker aspects of the camp’s history including racism, class divisions and mental breakdowns. In your new book you discuss a myth of Colditz that needs to be challenged. What is this myth and how did it come about? Those of us of a certain age grew up with the great BBC TV series about Colditz and, also, in my case, the board game Escape from Colditz. So Colditz was steeped into our childhoods, but often the story followed a very particular pattern. It was brave British men outwitting the Germans and tunnelling out of this vast Gothic castle in a way that continued the war by other means. It dignified the whole prisoner-of-war experience as an extension of a gallant, rather old-fashioned war. And of course, that is true of Colditz, but only partly so. Like all myths, the reality is much more complicated and much more interesting than the black-and-white moral fable we’ve inherited. There were acts of extraordinary courage and resilience. But there was also a whole other set of behaviours. Colditz was a crucible for the most amazing variety of …

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The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war
type: item
date: 2021-06-22T06:50:30.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: POWs
description: Some 75,000 Indian soldiers were captured by Axis powers during the Second World War. Diya Gupta explores how their experiences change their view of the Raj, and why have their stories been overlooked?
encoded: Life in New Britain, off the north-east coast of New Guinea, during the Second World War was gruelling – and agonisingly so for Allied prisoners of war (PoWs) interned by the Japanese. “There on the ground I lay, shivering, helpless,” recalled one soldier of his captivity after he had caught malaria in July 1943, describing in visceral detail the torrential rain, wet clothes and mosquitoes. “The thin cotton blanket given to me being inadequate to protect me from the cold, I waited for the sun to warm me. I would shiver like a leaf. Then, seized by fever, my body would turn as hot as fire – I would become unconscious, then awake only to find myself perspiring. There was not a soul who could give [me] a sip of even cold water.” On the other side of the world, a doctor – also a captured Allied soldier, brought to Colditz Castle at the heart of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in 1943 – experienced a similar sense of acute loneliness. After hearing the sound of the key turning as the door was closed behind him, the doctor asked the sentry in German where he was; putting fingers to his ears, the sentry remained silent, leaving the prisoner in complete darkness in his cell. Confined within the forbidding walls of the castle, this was as much a psychological incarceration as a physical imprisonment. Sickness, hunger, cold, solitude: these would have been sensations familiar to many of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers held as PoWs during the Second World War. What makes the stories of these two men – John Baptist Crasta in south-east Asia, and Captain Birendranath Mazumdar in Germany – special is that both were Indian soldiers with the British army, and that both left accounts providing rare insights into the testing experiences of Indian PoWs. Some 2.5 million men from pre-independent India served the British empire during the Second World War. Yet this was the period during which India’s struggle for freedom from British rule was at its most incendiary – so what was it lik…

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Prisoners of war in Britain during WW2: where were they held?
type: item
date: 2021-05-17T08:25:00.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: POWs
description: Richard Smyth and Professor Bob Moore visit Eden Camp in North Yorkshire, where captured German and Italian soldiers were held prisoner during the Second World War
encoded: It’s not much to look at: a cluster of 34 tin-roofed one-storey huts, hunkered down on the agricultural flatlands of Ryedale, halfway between York and the coast. The flags surmounting a redbrick tower in the middle of the complex snap in the wind beneath a blustery blue sky. Eden Camp is an award-winning museum of the Second World War – ‘the people’s war’, as the museum calls it. There are exhibits here covering everything from Bomber Command and the U-boat menace to George Formby and ‘Dig For Victory’. Vintage military hardware and signposts in army stencil crowd the footpaths. But the camp is more than just a museum: as an original, surviving prisoner of war camp it’s a piece of history in its own right. PoWs first arrived at Eden Camp in 1942. They were Italians, captured in action; their first task was to finish the construction of their new home. When they had finished, the camp would have looked much as it does now (minus the gift shop and adventure playground). “Eden was one of 487 PoW camps hastily thrown up across Britain to house more than 400,000 incoming prisoners during the Second World War,” says Bob Moore, professor of 20th-century European history at the University of Sheffield. “At first, these were almost all Italians, seized in northeast Africa as the allies gained ground in Egypt, Eritrea, Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland. Initially, the vast majority of captured Germans were shipped out directly to Canada; many Italians, too, were dispatched to Britain’s former dominions, to India or South Africa. But those who were taken to Eden and the other British camps weren’t here to see out the rest of the war behind barbed wire; they were here to work.” The war had created a crippling labour shortage on the home front. Britain’s farms were crying out for more manpower, and the strong young men of the Italian army more than fitted the bill. The PoW camps, initially designed as internment pens, quickly evolved into central hubs from which prisoners could b…

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5 myths of the Second World War's Great Escape
type: item
date: 2019-03-22T13:00:00.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: POWs
subject: TV interest
description: One night in late March 1944, 76 Allied airmen escaped through a tunnel from their prisoner of war camp deep in occupied Poland. Their aim was not only to get back to Britain and rejoin the war, but also to cause as much inconvenience for the German war machine as possible. Guy Walters, author of a book on the famous breakout from Stulag Luft III, dispels some popular misconceptions about the events
encoded: One night in late March 1944, 76 Allied airmen escaped through a tunnel from their prisoner of war camp deep in occupied Poland. Their aim was not only to get back to Britain and rejoin the war, but also to cause as much inconvenience for the German war machine as possible. Within a few days, all but three of the escapees were recaptured, having been hampered by incorrect papers, bad weather and bad luck. The escape so infuriated Hitler that he ordered 50 of them to be shot. Memorably depicted in the famous 1963 movie The Great Escape (itself based on former PoW Paul Brickhill’s 1950 book), the breakout from Stalag Luft III has become an iconic event of the Second World War, enshrining both Allied bravery and Nazi evil. But how much of what we know is true? Myth: Allied airmen had a duty to escape from their PoW camps One of the most enduring myths about the Great Escape is that the PoWs had a duty to escape. Indeed, the myth is so persistent that even some former prisoners maintain they had an obligation to break out of their camps. The short answer is that there was none. When they were shot down, Allied airmen were indeed expected to avoid being captured, but once they were in the hands of the enemy, there was no formal expectation that they should try to escape. Instead, as one former PoW has said: “There was a kind of corporate policy of intent that it was part of our duty to play a part in escape arrangements.” Read more: British PoW camps The British soldiers who fought for Germany in the world wars In other words, the duty to escape was an expectation of how airmen should behave – rather like the expectation that they should be brave – and there was nothing in the King’s Regulations that stipulated that the men had to escape. Indeed, surprisingly, two-thirds of PoWs had little or no interest in breaking out, and regarded escape activities with wariness – an attitude that is certainly at odds with the common celluloid depiction of Allied PoWs all being desper…

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The Sumatran Railway: the forgotten death railway
type: item
date: 2018-08-09T04:19:08.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Second World War
subject: Period
subject: POWs
description: Forced marches, savage guards, skeletal PoWs, and a death toll in the tens of thousands. The construction of the Sumatran Railway from 1943–45 may live in the shadow of its notorious counterpart in Thailand and Burma. But, says Lizzie Oliver, that doesn't stop it being one of the darkest episodes of the Pacific War
encoded: At 4.15pm on 18 September 1944, the British submarine HMS Tradewind torpedoed a Japanese steamship off the western coast of Sumatra. To a crew commissioned with destroying cargo ships in the waters surrounding the Dutch East Indies, the Junyo Maru – a 400ft, 5,000-ton steamer – appeared a valuable target. But what the Tradewind's captain did not know was that Junyo Maru's cargo consisted of more than 6,000 captives of the Imperial Japanese Army: 4,200 Javanese slave labourers (known as romusha) and 2,300 Allied prisoners of war. The ship sank within an hour of being hit, and more than 5,000 of its passengers were lost to the waves. It was one of the deadliest maritime disasters of the Second World War. Conditions on board the Junyo Maru, which had set off from Batavia (today's Jakarta) two days before it was torpedoed, had been dire. Prisoners were crammed into the hold without food or water, and they found themselves gasping for air without room to move. "The fetid, stifling hold was like a black stinking oven," wrote Willem Wanrooy, a Dutch survivor of the sinking. Only 200 romusha are thought to have survived the Tradewind's attack; eyewitness accounts relate how, unable to swim, most of the Javanese captives huddled in groups on the ship's deck and sang together as it plunged into the water. The Japanese plucked 680 military PoWs from the sea the following day but they gave these survivors no time to rest or recuperate. The Junyo Maru had been carrying the PoWs to a series of camps nestled deep in the Sumatran jungle – and the Japanese were determined that the journey should continue without delay. Once they arrived in Sumatra, the PoWs joined a vast railway construction project that lasted until Japan's surrender almost a year later. That project would expose them to beatings, starvation, a cocktail of diseases and, all too often, death. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/08/download-2_cmyk_State-Library-of-Victoria-9a171a…

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Prisoners of war
type: item
date: 2018-01-15T16:55:13.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: POWs
subject: Second World War battles
description: Clare Makepeace explores the experiences of British soldiers who spent time in POW camps in World War Two
encoded: Historian Clare Makepeace joins us to discuss her new book Captives of War, which draws on first-hand testimonies to examine the experiences of British soldiers who were confined in POW camps in World War Two.

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The British soldiers who fought for Germany in the world wars
type: item
date: 2017-11-29T10:36:46.000Z
subject: First World War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: POWs
subject: Second World War battles
description: Not all British soldiers fought for their home cause in the two world wars of the 20th century. Here, Jem Duducu explores the ways in which German forces sought to exploit unrest in both conflicts, and shares the varied stories of men from around the British empire who joined the Germans to fight…
encoded: British fascist John Amery (right) was given access to PoW camps to recruit British soldiers for the British Free Corps during the Second World War. Photographed here c1936, arriving at Palais de Justice, Paris. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images) In Jem Duducu’s first historical novel Silent Crossroads, the main protagonist is Harry Woods, the only British soldier to serve on both sides in both world wars. While Harry Woods is fictional, there were rare instances in both world wars of British soldiers siding with the Germans after they were captured. Here, Jem explores this aspect of the wars that is seldom discussed… In both world wars, the German forces were always short of men and looked for ways to recruit others to their cause. During the First World War, they developed plans to spread unrest in the wider world, a strategy designed to distract the Allied forces from their efforts on the western front and to (hopefully) win recruits in the process. To that end, the Ottoman empire, which was then a German ally, declared a military jihad (holy war), intended to cause all the Muslims under British rule to rise up in a move that would paralyse the British empire. Unfortunately for the Axis powers, except for a minor uprising in Singapore, nobody in the Muslim world paid any attention. 10 surprising facts about First World War uniforms How was Germany able to afford the astronomical cost of rearmament in the 1930s? King George V at war (podcast) In a deliberate move to mix nationalism with the wider war, German forces next targeted Irish soldiers, approximately 200,000 of whom fought in the war. Sir Roger Casement, who had been knighted by George V for his humanitarian work, was also an ardent Irish nationalist and, in a bid for Irish independence, Casement conceived the idea of asking the Germans to help him incite an uprising against the British empire in Ireland. The Germans saw a chance to sow dissent in the empire and allowed Casement to meet Irish prisoners of wa…

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Death camp Britons
type: item
date: 2015-09-05T17:41:12.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: POWs
subject: Soldiers
description: Gavin Mortimer tells the story of three men who found themselves in the Second World War's equivalent of hell on Earth – a Nazi concentration camp...
encoded: This article was first published in the September 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine Bombardier Alf Jones was one of the ‘old sweats’ of the 23rd Field Regiment, Royal Artillery. He’d enlisted in 1931, aged 17, and served three years in India before joining the reserve list in 1938. Returning to his native Port Talbot, Jones worked in the tin mines but he re-enlisted on the outbreak of war. A few weeks later, at the end of September 1939, Jones and his regiment sailed for France and were ordered to dig-in close to the Maginot Line. When the Nazi war machine rolled through the Low Countries into France in May 1940, Jones was one of scores of artillerymen captured. But not for long. The enterprising Welshman made his escape in Belgium while being transported to Germany. It was the start of a flight that would eventually end more than four years later with his execution in Mauthausen concentration camp. History has, for the most part, overlooked those unfortunate few Britons who were sent to the Nazi death camps. Most were members of Special Operations Executive (SOE), captured on missions to occupied Europe. But there was also a handful of soldiers and civilians transported to places whose names have become bywords for wickedness, for no other reason than the Germans found them too hard to handle in ordinary camps. German wrath Anthony Faramus didn’t look like a trouble-maker. Charming, good-looking and a popular figure in Jersey, the 21-year-old was working in the island’s Miramar Hotel when the Germans invaded in July 1940. He didn’t take well to the occupation, incurring the wrath of the Germans to such an extent that in late 1941 he was deported to Fort de Romainville on the French mainland as ‘an undesirable’. Faramus spent the next two years incarcerated in Romainville prison. But by the winter of 1943/44 the Germans needed all the manpower they could muster to help in their war effort, so Faramus was sent to Buchenwald in central Germany. Gone was the relative …

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"How I fell captive to the Germans": the experience of First World War PoWs
type: item
date: 2015-02-26T15:17:10.000Z
subject: First World War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: POWs
description: British officers taken prisoner during the First World War were, on their repatriation, required to explain how and why they fell into enemy hands. Their testimonies, says AD Harvey, offer a fascinating insight into the brutality of trench warfare...
encoded: This article was first published in the February 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine “My platoon was put in an exposed position on a flank to prevent surprise. The enemy were in front and to our left. After a few minutes another machine gun opened on us from the right so that we were swept with fire on showing ourselves. I was hit by a sniper’s bullet through the back of the head and fail to remember anything further until I saw Germans standing over me telling me to march if I could.” This is how 2nd Lieutenant Frank Gordon Marsden, of the 9th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, describes being taken prisoner at Sebourg, near Valenciennes on 4 November 1918. Lieutenant Marsden was one of around 200,000 British military personnel to fall into German hands during the First World War. Thousands more Britons suffered this fate in 1914–18 than during the Second World War. Yet, as the millions who’ve thrilled to the sight of Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough defying the Nazis in 1963’s iconic blockbuster The Great Escape will testify, the experiences of Second World War prisoners are much more celebrated than those of the earlier war. Held to blame On repatriation at the end of the First World War, army officers (that is, those in authority, as opposed to the rank and file) who had been taken prisoner were required to submit a written explanation of the circumstances of their capture: these explanations were later added to their personal files. Around 70 per cent of these files survive in the National Archives, Kew – and the insights they give us into how the soldiers accounted for their capture are fascinating. Officers were not informed beforehand how far they would be held to blame for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. The three former brigade commanders assigned to process these statements sometimes summoned ex-PoWs to the War Office to clarify details in a face-to-face interrogation, or they wrote to former commanding officers for corroboration. On at lea…

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