World War 1-1914-1918

Length of War:1914--1919
Numbers of Australians involved in the war: 416,809 troops
Numbers of Australian troops who died:60,000
Numbers taken prisoner: 4,149 approximately
Prime Ministers:
Joseph Cook (Commonwealth Liberal Party) 1913-1914
Andrew Fisher (Labor) 1914--1915
William Hughes (Labor) 1915-1923

First World War
In 1914 hardly any Australians knew what being a prisoner of
war meant. In the Boer War a few dozen Australians had been
captured and quickly released.
During the First World War over 4,000 Australians became
prisoners. Captured by the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East
and by the Germans in Europe, they were the first Australians
to learn about humiliation, ill-treatment, hunger and sickness
in captivity. But they also learnt that they were not forgotten
and that defiance, and even escape, was possible.
The 4,000 prisoners of the Great War were very few compared
to the 60,000 killed and 150,000 wounded, and they remained
overlooked for generations.

Prisoners of the Germans

One slice of bread in the morning
Nearly 4,000 Australians were captured by the Germans on the
Western Front, in France and Belgium between 1916 and 1918.
The conditions they endured varied greatly. In 1917 many were held
in appalling conditions in Fort MacDonald near Lille, in Belgium,
despite the Hague Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
Others, often starved and treated brutally, worked for months under
shellfire close behind German lines.
In camps in Germany conditions were better, but prisoners suffered
increasingly from shortages caused by the British blockade. Many
survived only because of regular Red Cross parcels.
Of the 3,853 Australians captured by the Germans, 310 about one
in 12 died in captivity.



Wounded Australians waiting to be treated by the Germans after the
disastrous attack at Fromelles, July 1916.
Forced labour behind the
lines

The Germans put us in a fort at Lille. They
never gave us anything. We may have had a slice
of bread a day, nothing else. We were building
dugouts, huts, carrying and loading shells. We
had one slice of bread in the morning and at
lunchtime a pot of soup, which was more or less
like water.
Private Horace Ganson, 16th Battalion, AIF,
captured at Bullecourt
Australian and British troops captured on the Somme in 1916. Many of these
men were forced to work close to the German trenches, sometimes under
artillery fire, in contravention of the Hague Convention on the treatment of
prisoners of war. An Australian soldier found this photograph in a German trench
later in the war.
Holzminden
Officer camp, Gustrow, Germany, 1918: The Bing Boys, a theatrical troupe. The
Germans were highly delighted with our entertaining and always insisted on us
getting them photographed.
Officer camp, Karlsruhe, Germany, 1917: The officers dining hall.
Officer camp, Karlsruhe, Germany, 1917: The home of two Australian
officers and a Belgian fellow prisoner.
Officer camp, Karlsruhe, Germany, 1917: The officers barracks where eight
men, attended by French soldier-servants, shared a room.
Red Cross

Dear Miss Chomley

Elizabeth Chomley, an Australian living in London, ran the Red
Cross prisoner-of-war office in London that supported Australian
prisoners in Europe. For thousands of Australians in German
camps, Miss Chomleys parcels reminded them that they had
not been forgotten. Her album and the Red Cross records in the
Memorial contain hundreds of letters and cards thanking her for
her work.


It has been a matter of great wonder that the Germans, when in straits for
food, allowed these parcels to reach us. Prisoners unloading Red Cross
parcels at Scheidemhl camp, near Posen in eastern Germany, December
1917.
British women volunteers packing Red Cross comforts parcels in London, in 1918,
for Australian prisoners in Germany. A prisoner later wrote, You Red Cross workers
the contents of your parcels saved many a prisoners life.
Douglas Grant An
unmistakable figure

Douglas Grant had been adopted by a white family at the age of two
in 1881. He enlisted in 1916 but was discharged because Aboriginal
people were not allowed to serve. He later succeeded in enlisting,
joined the 13th Battalion, AIF, and was captured at Bullecourt in
April 1917.
He enjoyed unusual freedom. In Berlin, German anthropologists
were more interested in studying him than in imprisoning him. A
talented artist, he impressed his captors with his intellect. A German
scientist described Grant as an unmistakable figure, recalling how
prisoners appointed him to take charge of relief parcels because of
his honesty, his quick mind, and because he was so aggressively
Australian.
After returning to Australia, though, Douglas Grant could not find
work to match his skills. He died in 1951, depressed and frustrated,
unable to fit easily into either white or black society.

Douglas Grant with a British
soldier and an Australian, Harry
Avery, who was also captured in
France and who died of wounds
in a German field hospital in July
1918.
Prisoners of Turkey We had
to fight hard to keep alive

Three groups of Australians became prisoners
of the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East.
Soldiers were captured on Gallipoli and in
Sinai-Palestine. Sailors from the submarine AE2
were captured in the Sea of Marmara.
Australian airmen, members of the Half-
Flight of the Australian Flying Corps, were
captured in Mesopotamia (now Iraq).
These men suffered more from neglect and
inefficiency than deliberate ill-treatment. Food
was poor, medical care primitive, and all
experienced a casual brutality. Many laboured
to build the Taurus railway in southern Turkey
in extremes of heat and cold. It was hell, an
Australian recalled, we had to fight hard to
keep alive.
Of the 217 Australians captured by the Turks,
62 men - nearly one man in four - died in
captivity.
Honoured guests

On 25 April 1915, while Australian and New Zealand troops
landed on Gallipoli, the Australian submarine AE2 entered the
Dardanelles to attack Turkish shipping. Five days later it was
attacked and scuttled, its 32 crew becoming prisoners of the
Turks.
Though their captors at first treated them as honoured
guests, the submariners were sent to work on the railway
being built through the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey.
In that harsh climate, they suffered from malnutrition,
overwork, disease and brutality. Four died, of typhus, malaria
or meningitis.
The last of the AE2 men, Stoker Charles Suckling, who died in
1983, recalled: I dont think, if we had known what was
ahead of us, that one of us would have left the boat.

The crew of the Australian submarine AE2 leaving Portsmouth, England, for
the voyage to Australia in 1914.
The crew of the AE2 in captivity in Turkey
Graves of prisoners of war at Belmedik, Turkey. On the left, the
grave of Petty Officer Charles Varcoe of the AE2
Australian and British prisoners of war at Belmedik, Turkey. Belmedik was a good
camp, with good food and easy work, but at others men died of disease and
overwork aggravated by malnutrition.
Australian prisoners of war who worked on the Taurus railway.
Men of Kut

Driven along like beasts
Air-Mechanic Snell was a mere shadow, footsore and sick. He
informed me that thirty-nine NCOs [had been captured]. Of these
thirty-nine . . . all but six died on the march [from Kut].
T. W. White, Guests of the Unspeakable (1928)
British and Indian troops in Kut, on the Tigris River in Mesopotamia
withstood a five-month siege but were finally forced to surrender in
April 1916. Over 13,000 British and Indian troops were marched
1,100 kilometres across the desert.
The garrison included nine mechanics of the Australian Flying Corps.
Only two would survive the nightmare march. We were driven
along like beasts, one of the survivors recalled, to drop out was to
die. Three-quarters of those who left Kut died in captivity, many
while building a railway through the Taurus Mountains.

An Australian signaller looks over the Mesopotamian desert around Kut.
Remembrance card for David Curran
David Curran, an Irish-born Melbourne carpenter, was an air mechanic in the
Australian Flying Corps. Captured at Kut in April 1916, he survived the
nightmare desert march into Turkey but died what his mates described as a
horrible death as a prisoner in June 1917. His mother in Ireland had
desperately but vainly written to the Red Cross in search of him. At last told
that he was dead, she sent this card to friends and family to remember her
son, in a grave we may never see.
References
https://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/pow/ww1/
http://www.powmemorialballarat.com.au/index.php/war-
history/wars/world-war-1
http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/stolenyears/ww1/turkey/
http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/stolenyears/ww1/germa
ny/