Monteath (who teaches History at Flinders University) gives the first words to Winston Churchill, who was briefly a POW in Pretoria during the Boer War. He wrote that ‘You are in the power of your enemy. You owe your life to his humanity, and your daily bread to his compassion. You must obey his orders, go where he tells you, stay where you are bid, await his pleasure, possess your soul in patience.’ It is an eloquent account of the prisoner-of-war condition, though not one that Churchill, then a war correspondent, endured for long. He escaped, then participated in the relief of Ladysmith. Most POWs, in whichever war, were content to be passive and to survive. Herein lies an aesthetic problem, apart from the moral and emotional issues involved. Captivity narratives are essentially static and, as such, a challenge to the storyteller’s art. There is a preliminary flurry of action and then (the title of Monteath’s first part) ‘Capture’. Years of incarceration may follow without much event (‘one long boredom from dawn to slumber’ Churchill added) until ‘Freedom’, which for some would have perils that they had hardly thought to expect or to deserve.

Monteath gives a brief and elegant summary of the long history of the state of prisoners of war: ‘All of those options from the ancient world – execution, enslavement, exchange … and enlistment in the enemy’s forces – were bequeathed to the centuries that followed.’ But what should the status of the captive be? Rousseau contended that – since wars were between states, rather than individuals – on capture a soldier’s status ‘should automatically default to that of the citizen’. Echoes of that reasoning may be found in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, followed by the Geneva Convention of 1929. For most of the war it would give safeguards to prisoners of war, whether through the agency of the Protecting Power (the United States then Switzerland for the ‘British’, including Australian forces), and by food parcels and inspections from the Red Cross. The increase in Himmler’s power and Germany’s declining military fortunes from 1943 sorely tried this system.

By comparison with the thirty-five million who spent some of World War II in captivity (of some 100 million who had taken up arms), the Australian component was tiny. Monteath illustrates this starkly: ‘5.5 million Soviet soldiers fell into German hands; of them 3.3 million were murdered or perished.’ Further, one-third of the three million Germans taken by the Soviets never came home. That is not Monteath’s story, nor is the ghastly one of the concentration camps (although, towards the end of the war, some Australian POWs were moved to Buchenwald). Instead, he weaves the case studies of numerous individual prisoners (and escapees) into an Australian story of that experience, one integrated into a skilful, deeply informed history of the world war in Europe.

Many prisoners were airmen (a fate ‘statistically less likely than death’ for them), some of whom were incarcerated for much of the war. Others were naval and merchant seamen, seized as far away as the Pacific by German raiders. The desert war in North Africa claimed others (though, by comparison, 130,000 Italians fell into Allied hands), as did the botched missions to Greece and Cyprus, as well as the fight against the Vichy French in Syria. The Crete campaign, for instance, yielded four times as many captive Australians (3102) as dead (781). Often they heard this grim, formulaic sentence: ‘For you the war is over.’ Monteath spices his narrative with vignettes: of Reg Saunders, the first Aboriginal officer in the AIF, who got away from Greece; Ted Spriggs, who spent thirty-four months in a Cretan cave before being betrayed; Charles Jager, who recorded his adventures in a fine memoir, Escape from Crete (2004).

Besides these brief portraits, Monteath introduces surprising, scantly known stories, as well as fresh takes on old ones. Here, then, is ‘The Great Escape’, which ended lamentably for several Australians, none of whom made it to safety (as James Coburn – hardly bothering with the national impersonation – did in the film). Here, too, is the bizarre story of ‘Holidaying for Hitler’: the tale of the Genshagen camp twenty kilometres south-east of Berlin, where some prisoners were sent with the view to turning them to the Nazi cause. Several did. Monteath writes of the Shackling Crisis of 1942 (the dark side of ‘the reciprocity principle’) and of the Bullet Decree that doomed fifty of the great escapers from Stalag Luft III at Sagan, in Silesia. The camp was located so far east because of ‘the importance the Germans attached to keeping the most feared of their enemies, the airmen, as far as possible from home and a renewed chance of wreaking havoc on the Reich’.

Monteath maintains control over his dense narrative throughout (if, perhaps, at a quarter more of the length than was needed). He is both deft in his general comments – ‘hunger was the POW’s permanent, despised companion’ – and in hunting down particulars. Thus we learn that there were forty-seven Australian women civilians in the Reich at the outbreak of war. Only four of them were interned. Another was given a fictional life as the wife of the eponymous hero of Stephen Conte’s PM’s prize-winning novel, The Zookeeper’s War (2007). In miniature, this is a story of remarkable resilience. Of the general POWs’ condition, Monteath comments that ‘survival in the camps was only possible through some form of tenacious, forgiving and enduring solidarity’. Of that often-posed question about sex behind the wire, he contends that deprivation dulled sexual appetites, and that homosexual behaviour did occur but that – perhaps more important – ‘the absence of women was not just a sexual but also a social deprivation’.

He quotes a medical report on ‘the fear of becoming a forgotten man’, but does not spend much time on the postwar lives of POWs (recently explored in several books). Hypertension, alcohol and tobacco addiction, impotence and diarrhoea, the loss of the art of working for a living, were – Monteath contends – nearly as likely to afflict those who had been prisoners of the Germans as of the Japanese. Some suffered from a ‘tormenting restiveness’; others preferred ‘the silent world of retreat into their memories’. Monteath concludes P.O.W. with a salute to the few hundred of them still alive. His book has already paid them a nuanced, richly detailed tribute.