Remembering the Great War in the Middle East by Hans-Lukas Kieser Thomas Schmutz Pearl Nunn

Author:Hans-Lukas Kieser, Thomas Schmutz, Pearl Nunn [Hans-Lukas Kieser, Thomas Schmutz, Pearl Nunn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Politics, History & Theory, International, History
ISBN: 9780755626489
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

Challenging the Narrative: Prisoners of War

Not all Australians agreed with the increasingly compassionate portrayal of the Turks that developed in the years after the war. 198 Australian servicemen had been captured and held as POWs in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Many of these POWs had been outraged at the circumstances of their captivity, and were subsequently offended by the positive way in which their former captors were portrayed in the post-war period.

The prisoners’ offence at the conditions and treatment they received in captivity stemmed in large part from an intense sense of culture clash. The ‘equal footing’ provision outlined in the 1899/1907 Hague Conventions that informed the behaviour of belligerents during the First World War stated that POWs were to receive the same treatment as troops of equivalent rank in the captor’s army.81 This presented an immediate issue for many Western POWs because standards of living in the wartime Ottoman Empire were significantly different from what they were used to, and because the ruling Young Turk government struggled to provide for their own people during the years of the war, let alone POWs. The prisoners attributed the constrained circumstances of their captivity to the character of their captors, sparking ideas of mistreatment and neglect.82

The suffering of the prisoners in the Ottoman Empire was one of the key narratives of captivity that the ex-prisoners and their families articulated in the aftermath of the war. There are several ways in which they attempted this – including calling for the punishment of former prison camp commandants and guards and through lobbying Repatriation Department officials – but the main way this message was conveyed in public was through the release of memoirs. Several Australian ex-prisoners published accounts of their time in captivity in the decades after the war, including: George Handsley’s Two-and-a-Half Years a Prisoner of War in Turkey, Reginald Lushington’s A Prisoner With the Turks and Ronald Austin’s My Experiences as a Prisoner in the 1920s; John Halpin’s Blood in the Mists in the mid-1930s; and James Brown’s Turkish Days and Ways in 1940.83 Perhaps the most well-known memoirist was Captain Thomas White, a former pilot with the Australian Flying Corps. White was captured just outside of Baghdad in November 1915, and lived as a POW in the Ottoman Empire for nearly three years before he effected an escape in mid-1918. In 1928, he published in England an account of his experiences under the title Guests of the Unspeakable: The Odyssey of an Australian Airman – Being a Record of Captivity and Escape in Turkey. The book went out of print, and was published for the first time in Australia in 1932.84

Robin Gerster argues that memoirs like White’s which ‘big-note’ the individual’s experience (as the term ‘odyssey’ in the title makes clear) and racially denigrate the enemy (White drew heavily on pre-war discourses of the Turks to vilify their treatment of the POWs) are one way in which ex-prisoners got back at their former captors.85 There is, as the

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