Surviving the Great War
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Surviving the Great War Australian Prisoners of War on the Western Front, 1916-18 Aaron Pegram BA (Hons) A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University Research School of Humanities & Arts ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences 24 July 2017 © Copyright by Aaron Pegram 2017 All Rights Reserved 1 CERTIFICATION I, Aaron Pegram, declare that this thesis, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Research School of Humanities and Arts, ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University, is wholly my work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The thesis has not been submitted for a qualification at any other academic institution. Aaron Pegram 24 July 2017 2 Acknowledgements ________________ This thesis would not be completed without the assistance of a good many people. First, I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Bill Gammage at ANU, and Professor Peter Stanley of UNSW Canberra, who both gave endless advice on drafts, did their best to rid the verbosity from my writing, and were exceptionally patient while I completed this thesis part-time. I am eternally grateful to Bill, Peter and Professor Paul Pickering at ANU for their mentoring and overall efforts in making me a better historian. I would also like to recognise the assistance of Dr Roger Lee, Dr Andrew Richardson, Nick Anderson and the Australian Army History Unit for a research grant that allowed me to study the Western Front battlefields and carry out research in Germany in 2011. I have drawn on years of encouragement from my friends and colleagues in the Military History Section at the Australian War Memorial. I am particularly indebted to Ashley Ekins for his support in mentoring early career historians and his enthusiasm for this, my magnum opus. Dr Karl James and Dr Lachlan Grant read drafts and made sensible suggestions over many steins of Schöfferhofer, and in Lachlan’s case, hotly contested games of Escape from Colditz with Amanda Wescombe championing from the sideline. Thank you to Dr Meleah Hampton, Peter Burness, Emma Campbell, Christina Zissis, Mick Kelly, Andrew McDonald, Dr Duncan Beard, Michael Bell and Juliet Schyvens for their tolerance whenever I free-associated about my research over our morning and afternoon brews. Thank you to all staff in the Memorial’s Research Centre for fulfilling my requests (and sometimes letting me run loose in the stacks), and to those at the Bayerisches Kriegsarchiv and the Baden- Württemberg Haupstaatsarchiv for making my visits such rewarding ones. My good friends Dr Michael Molkentin, Dr Rhys Crawley, Dr Kate Ariotti and Colin Garnett shared the PhD journey with me and made it all seem less daunting. A big thank you to Brett Butterworth for his friendship and allowing me to use a small portion of his remarkable private collection of German photographs, and to Dr Laura Cook for lending a hand during a trip to the United Kingdom. To Dr Immanuel 3 Voigt, Peter Barton, Jack Sheldon, Barbara Schäfer, Amelia Hartney, Annerose Scholz and Adrian Henham, vielen Dank, for they helped me uncover a view of Australian captivity from the other side of No Man’s Land. I was privileged to have the assistance of Martial Delebarre, Thierry Wiart, Dr Jacques Desbarbieux and Association Eugénies for their hospitality and interest in my search for the Australian experience of captivity in the towns and villages of occupied France. Christine Webb, Murray Harris, Ian Chalk, Michael Sherrington, Allison Rackett, Maxine Taylor, Wes Olson and Neville Badcock were exceptionally kind in sharing their privately held letters, diaries, photographs and manuscripts. I would not have been able to complete this thesis without the love and support of my family. Thank you to my father, Ray, for instilling in me his passion for the past, and to my stepmother, Ingrid, for sharing her home while I was focused on writing. My grandmother, Mary, did more to help me craft my approach to this thesis than she knows, and despite our competing AFL loyalties, Steve and Janine Scott continue to help in ways too numerous to mention. My beautiful wife, Erin, gave infinite amounts of love, support and encouragement over the past five years. She remains incredibly forgiving whenever my mind is out ‘on commando’ or in the trenches of the Western Front instead of at home where it should be. Thank you for everything you do. Finally, I dedicate this work to my mother, Carol, who died before I could show her what her Poppy did in the Great War. 4 This thesis contains names and images of Indigenous members of the AIF now deceased. It contains graphic images of the aftermath of combat that some readers may find upsetting. 5 ABSTRACT ________________ Between 1916 and 1918, 3,848 members of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) surrendered to German forces in the fighting on the Western Front. Their experiences are little known because of their relatively small numbers and because all but 327 survived. Australians captured in France and Flanders did not easily integrate into public narratives of Australia in the First World War and its emerging commemorative rituals. Captivity was a story of surrender and inaction, at odds with the Anzac legend and a triumphant national memory that gave prominence to the AIF’s victories over its defeats. This thesis challenges the dominant narrative of victimhood and trauma in Australian prisoner of war studies by arguing that Australians captured on the Western Front were active agents in their survival and strove to overcome privations and hardships endured in German captivity. It uses prosopographic analysis to quantify aspects of the prisoner of war experience to show the extremes of their captivity in German hands. It puts the hardships of prisoners in a broader social and military context, comparing the Australian with other national prisoner of war experiences. It demonstrates that the German Army had much to gain by treating prisoners mostly as well as it could. When treated well, captured Australians could be used as intelligence sources, employed as a work force, and guarantee fair treatment of Germans in British and French captivity. No single Australian narrative emerged from captivity on the Western Front, but the way prisoners of war regarded survival as a personal triumph united their otherwise disparate array of experiences. Australians survived captivity not by virtue of nationality, or because they were fit young men with bush skills as the Anzac legend purports. In this thesis, the first detailed analysis of Australians in German captivity, and based on archival sources, the experience and memory of surrender on the Western Front adds a new dimension to the national wartime experience while challenging popular representations of Australia’s involvement in the First World War. 6 TERMS & ABBREVIATIONS _________________________________ Abt. IV/BayHStA Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (Abteilung IV, Kriegsarchiv) AFC Australian Flying Corps AIF Australian Imperial Force ARCS Australian Red Cross Society ARCS NO Australian Red Cross Society National Office AWM Australian War Memorial Bde Brigade Bn Battalion B-WürHStA Baden-Württemberg Hauptstaatsarchiv Capt Captain Div Division IWM Imperial War Museum Kriegsgefangene German for ‘prisoners of war’ LCpl Lance Corporal Lieut Lieutenant NAA National Archives of Australia NA UK The National Archives, United Kingdom NCO Non-Commissioned Officer Postern German for ‘sentry’ POW Prisoner of War Pte Private SARA NSW State Archives and Records Authority New South Wales SBO Senior British Officer Sgt Sergeant SLNSW State Library of New South Wales SLSA State Library of South Australia SLVIC State Library of Victoria SROWA State Records Office Western Australia Strafe German for ‘punishment’ Vergeltungsgefangene German for ‘reprisal prisoners’ WMB Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau A NOTE ON CASUALTY STATISTICS _________________________________ Statistics of wartime casualties are notoriously variable, and differ between sources, the period under examination and research methodologies. Figures on the total number of Australians lost as prisoners of war have been drawn from Arthur Butler, Problems and Services, Vol. 3, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1943. 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS ________________ Acknowledgements Page 3 Abstract Page 6 Terms & Abbreviations Page 7 A Note on Casualty Statistics Page 7 Table of Contents Page 8 Introduction Page 9 Chapter One Brutal or Benign? Rethinking Captivity on the Western Front Page 20 Chapter Two No Alternative But Surrender: The Capture of Australian Troops on the Western Front Page 36 Chapter Three The Reciprocity Principle: Respecting and Abrogating Wartime Agreements Page 63 Chapter Four Giving the Game Away: The Intelligence Value of Prisoners of War Page 94 Chapter Five Saving Lives: Patriotic Women, Prisoners of War and the Australian Red Cross Society Page 119 Chapter Six Challenging the Holzminden Illusion: Myth and Reality of Escape in the Great War Page 144 Chapter Seven Well Fed and Plenty of Freedom: Autonomy and Independence in German Captivity Page 170 Conclusion ‘Those Poor Beggars’? Surviving the Great War in German Captivity Page 198 Appendix 1: Australians who died in German captivity, 1916-18 Page 208 Appendix 2: Australian escapes from German captivity, 1916-18 Page 228 Bibliography Page 233 8 INTRODUCTION _______________________ Towards the end of Somme Mud, Edward Lynch’s fictionalised memoir of fighting on the Western Front, the protagonist, Nulla, encounters a group of British and French soldiers who had spent the previous three years as prisoners of war. Among them is a ‘tall, gaunt figure’ who sways up to Nulla and introduces himself as an Australian who ‘got knocked’ and taken prisoner at Fleurbaix in July 1916. ‘Can you spare a couple of tins of bully beef?’ he asks. Nulla looks pitifully on the ‘poor, half-starved wretches. All dirty yellow skin, hollow cheeks and sunken, hopeless eyes’.