THE FORGOTTEN PRISONERS: The untold stories of Allied captives in WW2

BEHIND THE WIRE, THE WAR NEVER STOPPED.

‘ Touching but often amusing stories .’ The Sunday Times

‘ A valuable record [written] with verve and scholarship .’ Daily Telegraph

‘ Comprehensive and worthwhile .’ Daily Mail

‘ Spellbinding and overdue .’ Western Daily Press

Nearly 300,000 British and American servicemen were taken prisoner by Germany and Italy during the Second World War. What happened to them has been buried ever since under the gloss of the plucky escape story.

Adrian D. Gilbert goes back to the diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs of the men themselves.

The tunnels and the forged papers are all here. Colditz. Stalag Luft III. The RAF sergeant who walked out of the gate in a stolen uniform and ran an escape line to the Baltic ports. The murders that followed the Great Escape.

But escapers were only ever a handful. For most men captivity meant hunger, monotony and years with no release date in sight. So they made something out of nothing. Orchestras and theatres. Libraries. Degree examinations sat behind barbed wire and marked back home. Elected leaders and open argument, a scrap of democracy inside a totalitarian state.

Then the long march west in the winter of 1945, and a homecoming almost nobody found easy.

Humane, definitive and grounded throughout in first-hand testimony, THE FORGOTTEN PRISONERS is the story of ordinary men who held on to their dignity when everything else had been taken from them.

Originally published as P.O.W.: Allied Prisoners in Europe, 1939–1945