During Childeric's siege and blockade of Paris in 464, the nun Geneviève (later canonized as the city's patron saint) pleaded to Childeric for the welfare of prisoners-of-war, and met with a favorable response. Later, Clovis I liberated captives after Genevieve urged him to do so.
In 1201, Francis of Assisi joined an Assisi military expedition against Perugia and was taken captive. He spent a year as a prisoner of war in a Perugian fortress.
Geoffrey Chaucer acquired a taste for French poems of courtly love whilst a prisoner of war in France. It was said he had a "downlook due to his habit of constant reading."
When the Spanish conquistadors invaded the Aztec Empire in 1519, they murdered many Aztec Prisoners Of War and made others into slaves.
The word 'Deadline' was originally used much more literally. During the American Civil War, prisoner of wars were confined and surrounded by a deadline, so called because if a prisoner were to cross it, he could be rightfully shot dead.
After Winston Churchill escaped from a prisoner of war camp during the Boer War in 1899, he had a £25 reward dead or alive placed on his head.
Maurice Chevalier, the French star of Gigi, was sent to the front line in 1914, where he was wounded and captured. While in a prisoner of war camp, he learned to speak English from British cellmates.
Joseph Stalin refused a German request to swap prisoners in World War II. His son, who was captured during the war, died in a prison camp as a result.
In the ‘Great Escape’ of 1944, 76 Allied prisoners of wars escaped from Stalag Luft III camp through a 336ft long tunnel they’d secretly dug. Only three prisoners made it to safety. The two Norwegians and a Dutch man made it to Sweden and England respectively. The remaining prisoners were swiftly recaptured.
Alfie Fripp, the longest-serving and oldest-surviving British prisoner of war of World War II, "liberated" tools used in the excavation of the Great Escape tunnel.
For every 1,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers held prisoner by the Germans in World War II, 35 would die before hostilities ended. By contrast, for every 1,000 held by the Japanese, the figure was a savage 248.
During World War II British spies posed as fake charity groups to hand out special Monopoly games to allied prisoners of war. These games had compasses, maps, real money, and other useful tools for escaping.
In 1941 the senior German officer at Colditz Castle was Major English. At the same time the highest ranking prisoner was Colonel German.
 |
| St Geneviève |
In 1201, Francis of Assisi joined an Assisi military expedition against Perugia and was taken captive. He spent a year as a prisoner of war in a Perugian fortress.
Geoffrey Chaucer acquired a taste for French poems of courtly love whilst a prisoner of war in France. It was said he had a "downlook due to his habit of constant reading."
When the Spanish conquistadors invaded the Aztec Empire in 1519, they murdered many Aztec Prisoners Of War and made others into slaves.
The word 'Deadline' was originally used much more literally. During the American Civil War, prisoner of wars were confined and surrounded by a deadline, so called because if a prisoner were to cross it, he could be rightfully shot dead.
After Winston Churchill escaped from a prisoner of war camp during the Boer War in 1899, he had a £25 reward dead or alive placed on his head.
Maurice Chevalier, the French star of Gigi, was sent to the front line in 1914, where he was wounded and captured. While in a prisoner of war camp, he learned to speak English from British cellmates.
Joseph Stalin refused a German request to swap prisoners in World War II. His son, who was captured during the war, died in a prison camp as a result.
In the ‘Great Escape’ of 1944, 76 Allied prisoners of wars escaped from Stalag Luft III camp through a 336ft long tunnel they’d secretly dug. Only three prisoners made it to safety. The two Norwegians and a Dutch man made it to Sweden and England respectively. The remaining prisoners were swiftly recaptured.
Alfie Fripp, the longest-serving and oldest-surviving British prisoner of war of World War II, "liberated" tools used in the excavation of the Great Escape tunnel.
For every 1,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers held prisoner by the Germans in World War II, 35 would die before hostilities ended. By contrast, for every 1,000 held by the Japanese, the figure was a savage 248.
During World War II British spies posed as fake charity groups to hand out special Monopoly games to allied prisoners of war. These games had compasses, maps, real money, and other useful tools for escaping.
 |
| American prisoners captured in Ardennes in December 1944 |
In 1941 the senior German officer at Colditz Castle was Major English. At the same time the highest ranking prisoner was Colonel German.
French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote his avant garde masterpiece "Quartet For The End Of Time" in Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany. Inspired by Book Of Revelation and birdsong, he composed it on the available instruments. An audience of approximately 400 prisoners and German officers attended its premiere there on the evening of January 15, 1941.
Polish intelligence officer Witold Pilecki volunteered for a resistance operation to be imprisoned in Auschwitz in order to gather intelligence about the camp. He organized a resistance movement in the camp, sent information to the Allies about what was happening there, and escaped in 1943.
An English pointer named Judy was the only dog registered as a prisoner of war in the Second World War. She was captured by the Japanese in 1944.
Captured German generals were sent to Trent Park near Cockfosters in north London as Prisoners Of War during World War II. While held in the stately home, they were allowed to keep personal servants, drink wine and eat good food in order to make them feel relaxed. However, the generals were being listened to by 100 ‘listeners’. They revealed secrets about the holocaust, events in Berlin, Hitler's madness and V2 rocket bases.
During World War II, American POWs in Japan had a 40% chance of dying compared to American POWs in Germany who had a 1% chance of dying.
Canada was so nice to their German prisoners of war during World War II that almost 20% of them requested to stay after the fighting had ended. One of them said that the time in Canadian prison was "the best thing that happened to me."
Many of the sadistic details of Room 101 were developed from George Orwell's conversations with an ex Japanese prisoner of war neighbor.
When Kurt Vonnegut served in World War II, he was captured by Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden and survived the bombing of the city by hiding in a meat locker in a slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. This inspired him to write the anti-war novel Slaughter-House Five.
The last prisoner of war from World War II to be repatriated was a Hungarian soldier named Andras Toma, who was taken prisoner by the Red Army in 1944. He was discovered living in a Russian psychiatric hospital in 2000. Since he only spoke Hungarian, he was trapped there for over 50 years. He died a few years later.
Admiral J.Stockdale was shot down in Vietnam and held prisoner for seven-and-a-half years, four of them in solitary. He endured captivity by drawing inspiration from Epictetus, a stoic and former slave who who shrugged off even his own state of slavery as a natural inconvenience that should not concern him.
Seaman Apprentice (E-2) Doug Hegdahl pretended to be stupid to his Vietnamese captors and was released by them as a propaganda move. Upon his return to the US, he provided the names of over 200 prisoners of war, which he had memorized to the tune of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm."
American captives in the Vietnam war would authenticate a new prisoner's American identity by tapping the first five notes of "Shave and a Haircut", against a cell wall, and waiting for the appropriate response.
In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which gave $20,000 reparations to every Japanese-American (and their descendants) who got sent to internment camps in World War II.
Doug Hegdahl, a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, memorized the names, dates of capture, method of capture and personal details of 256 fellow POWs to the tune of "Old MacDonald Had A Farm." He can still recite it to this day.
No comments:
Post a Comment