Faith in Stalag Luft III

 

Missed the talk? It's now online

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmeqkA8HcfY

Aviation Cultures Mark VII – Flying High: Aviation in Popular Culture 20–21 July 2023: ‘I wanted wings.’ Donald Duck, Pilot Officer Prune, and a motorbike: the popular culture of Stalag Luft III.

In July 2023, I zoomed into the Aviation Cultures Mark VII – Flying High: Aviation in Popular Culture conference.

 

My paper was: ‘I wanted wings.’ Donald Duck, Pilot Officer Prune, and a motorbike: the popular culture of Stalag Luft III.

The talk varied a little from the abstract (as they often do - well in my case anyway) but it gives you a fair idea of what I cover:

Captivity was an alien state. Stalag Luft III’s airmen prisoners of war (POWs) needed to accept their newly ‘wingless’ state, make sense of incarceration, and learn to cope with it. Donald Duck was one icon of popular culture which helped them do this. Although an American army draftee, Donald desperately wanted to fly. Following a series of misadventures, he had his chance but, after falling from an aeroplane, the hapless bird became, like the POWs themselves, a downed airman. Trapped behind bars in wartime logbook illustrations, wearing wings insignia and displaying the artist’s own POW number, Donald represented the fallen airmen. ‘I Wanted Wings!’, he wailed.

This paper highlights the significant place of popular culture in Stalag Luft III’s wartime history and post-war memory. It discusses how the airmen POWs appropriated Donald Duck and other cartoon icons such as Bugs Bunny and their very own Pilot Officer Percy Prune to make sense of their experience by reframing capture and captivity as a humorous interlude. But the airmen did not just embrace existing popular culture. They created their own as they negotiated life behind barbed wire. Ultimately, aided by Hollywood and Steve McQueen’s motorbike, they entered it.

Here's the link if you're interested in listening in:

https://echo360.net.au/media/ee5291dc-9070-4974-9b2f-8a744d8d10da/public

 

Podcast interview: Kriegies: the Australian Airmen of Stalag Luft III

My interview with Matthew Dahlitz, President of the AMAHA Inc http://www.australianmilitaryaviation.com.au/ is live! 

Forty-odd minutes discussion about my latest book, Kriegies: the Australian Airmen of Stalag Luft III. 

I had a blast: a good interviewer and a subject dear to my heart. What a combination! 

We've already had our first views and comment: 'Great interview on a fascinating topic'. Why not tune in and see/listen for yourself.

https://raafdocumentary.com/kriegies-australian-airmen-of-stalag-luft-iii-interview-with-kristen-alexander/

Or go straight to you tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuUeIGcd1xg

The Traumatic Legacy of the Dam Busters Raid: Tony Burcher

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Dam Busters Raid. Nineteen Lancaster bombers powered towards German targets. Eight crashed or were shot down. Fifty-three airmen were killed. Some were captured. It was an important raid and the survivors were lauded. A book was written about the raid; a film lionised them. But the raid left a traumatic legacy for some of its survivors including survivor guilt. A legacy we don’t often consider. As part of my PhD studies – and in my next book – I consider how the Dam Buster Raid affected one Australian survivor. 

*****

Twenty-one year old Anthony ‘Tony’ Burcher of 617 Squadron RAF was a gunner on one of the aircraft which bombed the Möhne Dam during Operation Chastise – the dam buster raid. The Lancaster was mortally damaged but its pilot, John Hopgood, aware that in effect he was committing suicide, continued to fly, gaining height to ensure his still living crew had the best chance of baling out. Just about to jump, Burcher saw John Minchin, the RAF wireless operator, crawling on hands and knees, dragging his leg, carrying his parachute. He ‘was in a hell of state’. And then Minchin stopped moving. Burcher thought, ‘there’s only one thing to do’. He pulled the parachute’s D-ring, shoved Minchin through the rear door, and followed him down. Minchin did not survive. ‘I don’t know to this day whether I did the right thing or not. I still do agonise about it.’ Burcher and bomb aimer John Fraser, the only other survivor of their aircraft, along with Frederick Tess who was downed during the same raid, were captured almost immediately. Burcher eventually found his way into Stalag Luft III.

In trying to understand why both men committed suicide in late life, Burcher indicated that it was linked to the ill-treatment after capture which both (he imagined) experienced at the hands of the Gestapo. Burcher implied his guilt at their fate, and perhaps vicarious culpability in their deaths, by highlighting the disparity between his friends’ treatment and his own. He had been taken to a hospital and received the best of care. ‘But if they were got hold of by the Gestapo, I think that might have worried them.’ Burcher was a prisoner of war for two years; he had enlisted while still an 18-year-old and was only 21 when captured. His reference in interview to his friends’ suicides, his anguish over Minchin’s death and Hopgood’s sacrifice, and his later contention that he had cheated death implies that at one point he suffered survivor guilt.

Burcher’s guilt was not complicated by any feelings of personal culpability regarding the human cost of the dams’ raids, which included at least 1650 German deaths in addition to those of 750 POWs and labourers, as well as the thousands of displaced persons whose homes were destroyed. It may, perhaps, have been exacerbated by the almost universal public acclaim the ‘dam busters’ received. His Distinguished Flying Medal (following rapidly on the heels of his commission) was one of twenty-four awards granted to Chastise’s eighty survivors; their leader, Guy Gibson, was honoured with a Victoria Cross. RAAF historian John Herington acclaimed the Australian survivors as ‘Homeric figures’. Their actions were further lauded in 1951’s The Dam Busters by fellow former kriegie Paul Brickhill, the 1955 film-of-the-book (which Burcher described as ‘quite authentic’, and in ‘The Dam Busters March’, the film’s theme music by Eric Coates. In popular culture, Burcher and all of the Chastise airmen have become the Dam Busters.

Ethics and ethical behaviour may also be compromised if someone is morally troubled. Criminal behaviour is one possible outcome. Philosopher and ethicist Ned Dobos recognises as moral pain USAAF pilot Claude Eatherly’s conscience-stricken anguish after flying a reconnaissance mission over Hiroshima before the atomic bomb was dropped. Despite having no role in the destruction of Hiroshima, Eatherly was consumed by an all-encompassing guilt for which he could not atone. Reflecting intense moral troubling – perhaps moral injury – Eatherly expressed his pain in a number of ways, including by committing petty crimes for no gain which, in his mind, proved his guilt. Like many former POWs, Tony Burcher had difficulty adjusting to post-captivity life. Different work, marriage within weeks of liberation (he was then 23 years old), and the birth of a daughter fourteen months later, contributed to his unsettledness. His air force career was blighted by personal and domestic problems and he resigned his commission in 1952 (the year after publication of The Dam Busters) following a series of negative assessments. Eleven years later, still living in Britain, he was gaoled for conspiracy to defraud a hire purchase company. Recognising the former airman’s wartime valour, the judge considered his case ‘tragic’. Burcher’s reflections on his war experiences suggests that he suffered more than moral troubling. Was his crime, like Eatherly’s, an expression of his moral troubling or injury emanating from his survivor guilt which revealed his sense of moral culpability? Or an indication of his inability to live up to the lionisation accorded the dam busters?

Such complex moral emotions, however, appear to have been assuaged by Burcher’s belief that the dam buster raids were worthwhile. They were, he believed more than simply a morale boost for the allies, they significantly disrupted German industry and war effort by creating floods and ensuring electricity loss. He appreciated the psychological value of the raiding force: ‘it must have really shocked the Germans to see 19 bombers flying out of the moonlight that evening’. That martial achievement gave meaning to his friends’ deaths and he felt it terribly when the provocative, holocaust-denying historian – that ‘controversial creature’ – David Irving claimed the dam buster raid was unsuccessful. ‘It’s very upsetting when someone talks about your mates dying in vain like that.’ That Burcher launched his ‘salvo’ on Irving five days after speaking about his involvement in Chastise, his last, fateful, operational flight and his feelings about the loss of his friends, reveals the acute state of his psychological pain and moral distress.

*****

Try as he might, Tony Burcher could find no motives for why his friends took their own lives. ‘We can’t understand why they both should commit suicide’. As I have already suggested, Burcher’s crime may have reflected his survivor guilt. It may also indicate moral injury. The legal process may, in some way, have allowed him to assuage his vicarious culpability. His late-life assessment – two years before his death – that he ‘came out mentally okay’ suggests that he was able to put aside his guilt and achieve a degree of moral serenity.

New article about the Great Escape

My latest article has been published in the Australian War Memorial's Wartime magazine. It is a great honour to be included in their 100th issue. If you want to buy a copy of the magazine, which includes some other great articles, you can purchase it at https://www.awm.gov.au/shop/category/featured

Australian War Memorial History Webinar Series 26 July 2022

 

Australian War Memorial History Webinar Series 26 July 2022

Graphic courtesy of the Australian War Memorial. Sketch by Tim Mayo, courtesy of Mayo Family Archive  

View the webinar at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnuKX4Oo28Y

For over a decade I’d written about Australian pilots. Biography was my genre of choice, and in imagination I flew through the Battle of Britain and Darwin’s skies; over the Western Desert; the Southwest Pacific Area; and the fjords of Norway. Those airmen were imbued with the sheer joy of flying. Recognising their deep, visceral connection to flight, I wondered how they would have coped if they could not fly – if they had been grounded not through war’s end, choice, or death, but because of captivity.

I thought Stalag Luft III would be a good setting for a group biography of Australia’s ‘wingless’. After all, approximately a quarter of all Australian airmen prisoners in Europe had been incarcerated in the camp made famous – or infamous – by the Great Escape. Who hasn’t read the book, or seen the 1963 film? Who can forget Steve McQueen and his motorbike, the film’s iconic theme music, and James Coburn’s appalling Australian accent? Who hasn’t shed tears as brave men fell to German bullets? But other than Coburn’s fictional Australian we know little about the Australian Great Escapers let alone any of Stalag Luft III’s other Australians. And this is despite the fact that Paul Brickhill, the author of the Great Escape book, was himself Australian.

I was set. A group biography of the Australians of the Great Escape – not just the airmen killed in the post-escape reprisals, but encompassing those who supported the grand venture in so many ways. But the more I researched the more I realised the Great Escape was not representative of life in Stalag Luft III. The evidence suggested that an analytical account of the broader Australian experience was warranted. But I didn’t have the skills for that. I was a biographer. I didn’t know what to do.

In October 2014, I attended a book launch. Chatting after the formalities, historian Michael McKernan asked me what I was doing with myself. I told him about the problems I was facing; how desolate I felt that I would have to put the project aside because I didn’t have the ability to do it properly. Michael then asked one of those life-changing questions: had I ever considered doing a PhD? I hadn’t. But by the time I arrived home, I had. I emailed Professor Peter Stanley, recently installed at UNSW Canberra, and he agreed to sponsor my PhD application and supervise me. Michael was ‘volunteered’ to be my co-supervisor. Six months later, I was at UNSW Canberra ready to discover how 351 Australian airmen – fondly referred to as ‘the cohort’ – coped with captivity. In 2020, I submitted the thesis which brought me here today – ‘Emotions of Captivity: Australian Airmen Prisoners of Stalag Luft III and their Families’.

*****

‘Emotions of Captivity’ presents the cohort as military operatives and emotional beings. I explore their emotions, feelings, motivation, sense-making, and memory. I foreground the affective aspects of agency, community, altruism, duty, identity, masculinity, prison camp domesticity, faith, grief, and death. Wartime incarceration greatly affected the cohort’s physical and mental health. For many, it was traumatic. The memory of it lingered and permeated their post-war lives. As such, I also highlight the emotions and legacy of captivity trauma.

In ‘Emotions of Captivity’, I explicate three central arguments.

The first is that the cohort did not passively accept captivity. They exerted considerable personal and group agency to manage and mitigate the residue of battle trauma; the shock of captivity; and the inevitable strains of wartime imprisonment. By consciously declining to succumb to the ‘futility of existence’ as one man termed it, they remained potent military operatives, albeit behind barbed wire.

The dream of home and the prospect of homecoming is central to military experience. Familial bonds are vital for survival. Accordingly, ‘Emotions of Captivity’ secondly argues that captivity extended beyond the confines of the prison camp to home, embracing the airmen’s families and supportive networks. But family members were not simply helpmeets. Their own affective responses, including anxiety, anguish, and grief, are a significant part of the captivity experience, as is their agency.

My third argument builds on co-supervisor Michael McKernan’s contention that ‘this war never ends’, for either POWs or their loved ones. Recognising, then, that the effects of captivity did not cease at liberation or homecoming, I examine the emotional, psychological, and moral consequences of wartime imprisonment which infiltrated and, in many cases, dominated, the former prisoners’ post-war lives, and those of the hidden casualties of captivity – the airmen’s families.

Before moving on, I want to quote the Australian War Memorial’s Bryan Gandevia Prize judging panel. I’m not just blowing my own trumpet: there is a point to this. ‘Richly researched and well written, [Emotions of Captivity’s] descriptions of life in captivity – and its impact – is wide-ranging and comprehensive. As well as tackling taboo subjects such as sexuality and suicide, the post-war experience of prisoners is followed to address contemporary understandings of ongoing trauma.’

That traumatic residue of European captivity, especially among airmen prisoners, has been little recognised. It’s an important story but who on earth ever reads a thesis beyond your supervisors, family, examiners and, in my case, a judging panel? Through the Bryan Gandevia Prize I hope to highlight the wartime, life-long, and intergenerational challenges of captivity. I’m grateful to the Australian War Memorial for providing me the opportunity to do that today. Given my original motivation for embarking on a PhD, I’ve been busy rewriting for a broader readership! I’ve thrown away the academic scaffolding, restructured, inserted new chapters on the Great Escape, and included more illuminating stories. In time, I hope others will read about Australia’s airmen prisoners of Stalag Luft III and their families, and discover their experience of captivity and its legacy.

*****

‘Emotions of Captivity’ draws on a considerable distributed archive of autobiographical, visual, and material evidence. All, including letters; diaries; photographs and art works; poetry; oral history interviews; and even objects such as brooches, sand, spoons, and bits of tiles, express and reflect emotional lives.

One of the most important sources of affective evidence is the wartime log book, a personal narrative unique to the European captivity experience. Containing photographic and artistic images; poems and recipes; news clippings; and lists of recordings listened to, books read, and films watched wartime log books are similar to commonplace books. Some POWs used them as diaries. As well as being personal records of captivity, many include contributions by fellow prisoners. Accordingly, they serve as communal as well as personal records of captive life and affect.

Wives, fiancées, and sweethearts were integral to the captivity experience. While we can discern their responses through the cohort’s correspondence and diaries, their own voices are crucial. As such, I also drew extensively on women’s writings and memory. Of particular note are two collections of reciprocal correspondences. Those between Beryl Smith and her fiancé Charles Fry exist because Beryl made carbon copies of all of her letters and kept them with those she received from Charles. Doug Hutchinson carried the letters he had received from his wife, Lola, on the forced march. They took up precious space in his pack which could have been used for food but he couldn’t bear to part with them. Later, Doug gathered Lola’s letters with those he’d written to her during their years apart, and lovingly preserved them.

Memories are also important sources. Many family members shared details of their lives with former POWs, and I thank them for this. I also spoke with some of those former airmen themselves. One series of interviews in particular greatly influenced the direction of my thesis.

During the course of nine detailed conversations, Alec Arnel kept returning to the distress he felt at putting aside his religious convictions to join the air force; the act of killing; becoming a POW; and losing his faith. I suspected the source of that distress was deep moral troubling. I discussed this with Alec who agreed that it was likely. He then bravely agreed to speak to me in another interview dedicated to his moral dilemmas. That prompted me to reappraise other written and medical evidence – to speak with family members about the possibility that their former POW had also experienced some degree of moral troubling. Chapter eleven, which I will tell you about soon, owes its existence to Alec.

My most important source of experience and affect, is testimony contained in medical records compiled by the Repatriation Department, and, after its name change in 1976, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Although they were not yet in the public domain, DVA graciously granted me special access to almost a hundred files.

Those records proved game-changing for my thesis. They revealed that many of the cohort had experienced some degree of temporary; long-term; or permanent psychological damage – including captivity trauma. They also indicated that a significant proportion of men suffering decades of trauma were morally troubled – some had moral injury. In addition, DVA files highlighted that women and other family members were victims of captivity trauma: they had suffered domestic abuse and violence at the hands of the psychologically distressed. That evidence sent me direct to the divorce archive where I found harrowing accounts of captivity-related violence in the home.

*****

‘Emotions of Captivity’ is a thematic thesis, divided into four parts. Family archivists allowed me to copy their photographs and records –  and I made full use of them as both sources of experience and affect. You’ll see many of them as I survey each chapter.

Part one contains the introduction as well as chapter one in which I overview the cohort’s social and military backgrounds, and discuss their motivations for enlisting. I outline the German and Italian captivity infrastructures; Stalag Luft III’s history and organisation; and the arc of the cohort’s experience. I also establish the framework of resilience which was central to successful coping behind barbed wire and which later underpinned the cohort’s ability to live with captivity’s aftermath.

Part two focuses on how the cohort as air men – active servicemen behind barbed wire – and men of emotions drew on their specific service culture and affective bonds to implement strategies to mitigate and ameliorate the strains of their internment.

Starting with capture and interrogation, then moving onto incarceration in Stalag Luft III, in chapter two I examine the cohort’s personal and collective agency in the early stages of captivity. I focus on their morale-raising strategies based on humour – laughing at how they were captured; their living conditions; their plights as POWs; and their seemingly interminable confinement. I discuss their inspirational leadership and the service discipline they entrenched by constructing a de facto RAF station – which I call ‘RAF Station Sagan’. This chapter also examines the POWs’ new martial identity. Like most servicemen, they abhorred the shameful connotations surrounding the word ‘prisoner’ and the constant reminder of it – their POW tag. The German Kriegsgefangener – war prisoner – emphasised the sense of emasculation and powerlessness airmen felt when removed from aerial operations. Instead, they dubbed themselves Kriegies which reflected their continuing fighting spirit. Linguistically and emotionally, they remained men of war.

In chapter three I analyse the development of escape-mindedness; the duty to escape; and active disruption. I describe the ‘X’ – or escape – organisation, a viable, endorsed scheme which enabled the kriegies to both manage their captivity and contribute to RAF Station Sagan’s communal life. Escape work and other disruptive acts helped relieve boredom; increased morale and self-esteem; and provided a sense of adventure. They were also expressions of martial identity – the active air man, on duty, in the barbed-wire battleground.

The kriegies’ strong service-based fraternal bonds – their version of the brotherhood of airmen – helped abate the strains of incarceration. I describe those ties in chapter four, as well as the threats to them including homosexuality (real or imagined) and self-interest. I also consider the cohort’s familial ties; their concept of ‘home’; and how they sought to replicate it – including by embracing domestic chores. In doing so, they created a supportive foundation for camp harmony and their all-important escape work, as well as an emotional link to their pre-service lives and loved ones.

Some kriegies drew on religious beliefs, practices, and the prevailing Christian ethos to help manage and make sense of their captivity. As such, I explore the emotional dimensions of faith. As well as outlining their relationships with God, I consider the importance of Christmas and Anzac Day. I also describe how the kriegies gained comfort as they mourned those killed in the post-Great Escape reprisals by composing their deaths as Christian sacrifices.

The kriegies missed sex and, in chapter six, I consider how they managed that physical need. They also missed the warmth of loving, supportive relationships. As such, I analyse the strong emotional connections of partnered kriegies to their wives, fiancées, and sweethearts, paying particular attention to how the airmen actively maintained their long-distance relationships. They wrote letters; planned their romantic futures; and imaginatively brought their loved ones into camp in image, memory, and synchronicity. A vibrant theatre created the presence of women. Faux females stalked the stage and mingled with the crowds. In this chapter, I also describe how the cohort actively constructed what I dub, a ‘fit and well’ composure which reinforced a cheery masculine martial identity. They declared to loved ones – and the world through publication of letters and photographs in newspapers and POW magazines – that they were happy, in good spirits, healthy and well, fit and active, and above all, virile.

Prisoners of war were fully aware that captivity affected their states of mind; that it contributed to what Ronald Baines called, ‘Those Kriegie Blues’ and others termed ‘going round the bend’. Chapter seven examines the cohort’s mental health, including kriegie attitudes towards barbed-wire suicide. The emotional turmoil experienced in the lead-up to the Great Escape and the impact of the post-escape reprisals all took their toll on individual and collective psychological states. I show that, as much as possible, the cohort actively managed threats to their personal and group well-being. They also supported those in psychological extremis. As a consequence of their emotional resilience, the majority of the Australian cohort remained ‘mentally strong’ in Stalag Luft III.

Affective responses of family and fictive kin are a vital part of the captivity experience. In chapter eight I focus on the emotional and practical support provided by air force; community groups; and close and extended family – particularly wives, fiancées, and sweethearts – to ensure kriegies were neither neglected nor forgotten. In exploring the emotional and sexual strains of separation, I highlight female agency in relieving both their own suffering and that of their captive loved ones. Anticipatory and actual grief was also a feature of captivity’s home front experience and I discuss how six Australian families, including the loved ones of the Great Escapers, mourned those of the cohort who never returned.

Part three turns to post-war lives and the long legacy of captivity.

Homecoming was a time of great joy, but also a period of uncertainty; psychological discomposure; and social awkwardness as the former kriegies faced the challenges of return and resettlement in a world very different from the one they had left. In chapter nine I consider the loss of air force and captivity bonds, as well as their service identity; employment difficulties; and compromised physical and mental health. I also discuss domestic unrest, abuse, and violence. Despite myriad social and psychological challenges, most of the cohort chose to ‘get on with life’. They didn’t talk about their experiences – they put captivity behind them and actively ‘forgot’ about it. They tamped down any traumatic residue that bubbled to the surface. Their silence was endorsed; wives, families, and society also wanted to forget the difficult past.

The mental resilience which underpinned successful management of captivity broke down in many cases, leading to psychological vulnerability. In chapter ten I explore long-term psychological disturbance; post-traumatic symptoms; and captivity trauma as well as the health consequences of long-term anxiety and stress, including early death. This chapter also highlights those men whose psychological distress was so great that they contemplated, attempted, or committed suicide.

Chapter eleven examines the moral dimension of war and captivity trauma. I discuss the triggers of moral troubling: survivor and captain’s guilt; the duty to kill; and witnessing or suffering inhumane acts. I show that those who allayed their moral troubles did so largely through their own agency and resilience; the help of loved ones; or through faith.

It’s a natural human response to seek meaning in difficult or traumatic experiences – to make sense of what has happened. This final chapter reveals that constructing meaning is fundamental to resilience and an ultimate coping with captivity’s residue. In it, I explore the transformative aspects of captivity and its legacy: the blessings and benefits of wartime imprisonment; personal growth; and, for the morally troubled, attainment of moral health. I highlight how some wives gained composure through love and accommodation. I examine the efforts of intergenerationals – the cohort’s children; nephews and nieces; great nephews and great nieces; and grandchildren – to create ‘memories’ of captivity. I consider how they forged connections with their family’s former kriegie through objects, artistic expression, and pilgrimage.

Part four – the conclusion – wraps up ‘Emotions of Captivity. It also reveals two unexpected findings.

The dominant Australian captivity narrative focuses on the greater physical and mental trauma of former prisoners of Japan. In contrast, the received wisdom is that those incarcerated by Germany and Italy enjoyed a relatively benign captivity with few, if any, hardships. The cohort’s medical evidence, however, contradicts the perception of an easy captivity with no psychological residue. Almost two-thirds of my medical sample experienced post-war mental disturbance. Many suffered PTSD-like symptoms; captivity trauma; or moral troubling. ‘Emotions of Captivity’ demonstrates that Australia’s prevailing trope of a benign captivity experienced by prisoners of Europe is a myth.

Surprisingly, I found that the cohort unwittingly – but actively – created that myth during the war by constructing and promoting their fit and well composure. Their post-war protective silence did nothing to contradict it. Their personal accounts embedded and perpetuated it. Comparing themselves to former prisoners of Japan, many believed that they had had a better, less traumatic experience. The consequence was that there was no place within the Australian captivity narrative for their own wartime suffering and post-war trauma.

More recently, the trauma of POWs other than those incarcerated by the Japanese has been recognised by scholars and government. ‘Emotions of Captivity’, however, foregrounds the cohort’s own testimony, their own medical evidence, to rebut their own fit and well composure. ‘Emotions of Captivity’ privileges their words to shatter their diligent post-war silence. In doing so, it demonstrates that they did suffer; that the traumatic legacy of captivity for many Australian airmen – and their families – lasted a lifetime and beyond. ‘Emotions of Captivity’ reveals that the former airmen have an incontrovertible place in Australia’s narrative of war trauma.

*****

I have a few final words before I conclude. Evelyn Johnston’s fiancé Eric had been tortured in Buchenwald concentration camp before he was transferred to Stalag Luft III. Evelyn waited anxiously after Eric went missing from aerial operations and was overjoyed when he came home. Like many, Eric did not settle back into civilian life. He suffered unremitting PTSD and the vivid nightmares that go with it – but Evelyn supported him unstintingly. Eric wouldn’t talk about what had happened to him; he refused to describe the nightmares. ‘It was all part of life that I didn’t particularly want to remember’, he said later. He told Evelyn that he ‘didn’t want to worry my relatives and you in particular – about what I’d been through … I didn’t want to tell you about it, didn’t want you upset’. Despite Eric’s continuing traumatic memories fracturing their lives, theirs was the happiest of marriages. Their love never faltered. They sat beside each other in their bedroom and cried together when Eric broke the news that, after fifty-seven years of marriage, he only had six months to live. Reflecting over those years, Evelyn unhesitatingly told me that ‘I’ve had a very good life. A brilliant life’. ‘[W]hen I look back on my whole life I’m very lucky.’ Eric shared her attitude. His life was happy, fulfilled – though difficult. It hadn’t been ruined by captivity. Many other former kriegies and their wives echoed Evelyn’s words. Only a handful considered that captivity had ruined their lives.

I discovered much about the power of love such as Evelyn’s and Eric’s; community; agency; and resilience. I also learned many lessons from the cohort and their womenfolk about how to cope with the challenges I encountered in my own life over the five years of my PhD candidacy. ‘Emotions of Captivity’ enriches our understanding of the human condition. It reveals much about wartime and post-war coping and resilience. That resilience, along with the pre-eminence of personal, communal, and familial agency – despite adversity and trauma – is perhaps the defining legacy of captivity for the Australian airmen of Stalag Luft III and their families. It is a significant affective lesson that remains relevant today. Thank you.

Dr Kristen Alexander | Adjunct Associate Lecturer

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

UNSW Conflict + Society Research Group

UNSW Canberra

kristen.alexander@adfa.edu.au

 

www.kristenalexander.com.au

https://www.facebook.com/KristenAlexanderAuthor

Twitter: Kristen Alexander @kristenauthor

 

https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/newsroom/news/dr-kristen-alexanders-phd-thesis-awarded-bryan-gandevia-prize

https://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/entities/publication/f9d80f12-2031-4f23-abf6-40e70987ef8a

 

‘He “assaulted me at the matrimonial home”: captivity trauma and domestic abuse.’

 

Conflict and Society Webinar: 28 September 2021

School of Humanities & Social Sciences

UNSW Canberra

For recording, click here (and scroll down) https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/events/conflict-society-seminar-6

‘He “assaulted me at the matrimonial home”: captivity trauma and domestic abuse.’

Introduction: captivity trauma and domestic abuse

‘Twice my husband attempted to kill me’, Madeline Reed stated. ‘The first time he held a carving knife against my throat and was stopped from going any further by our son [Peter] … coming into the room. The second time, without any argument or quarrel, he knocked me over and kicked me about the face and head.’ He ‘assaulted me at the matrimonial home’, Hayley Myatt attested about her husband, ‘grabbing me by the hair, shaking me and banging my head against the wall’.

Blake Reed and Marcus Myatt were former airmen prisoners of Stalag Luft III, a Second World War German prisoner of war camp. Both experienced captivity trauma. Both perpetrated domestic abuse against their wives, in front of their children.

In the years following the Second World War, violence in the home was often ‘subsumed and silenced by the broader question of domestic readjustment’ after homecoming. It was viewed as just one of a number of social ills arising from resettlement. With little concrete evidence collated in the immediate post-Second World War decades about violence arising from war service generally, it probably isn’t even possible, as Christina Twomey has noted, to determine the extent to which captivity contributed to family unrest. But it is perhaps easier to highlight historical domestic abuse by examining a small cohort.

*****

This webinar draws on my PhD thesis ‘Emotions of Captivity: Australian Airmen Prisoners of Stalag Luft III and their Families’ in which I studied the captivity experience of 351 Australian airmen and their loved ones – from capture until death. A condition of use of some records is anonymity. As such, I have used pseudonyms, and these are written in italics. And a content warning: I will be quoting graphic testimony of domestic abuse which some may find distressing, or potentially triggering.

For my thesis, I compiled a medical sample of 128 of Stalag Luft III’s former Australian POWs. This is based on evidence from Prisoner of War Trust Fund records, divorce cases, coroners’ reports, family members, and other sources. The majority came from repatriation files held by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, most of which had been created by the former Repatriation Department. I found that eighty-five former POWs had experienced some degree of psychological damage during confinement, after liberation and homecoming, in the immediate post-war years, and in later life. Domestic abuse figured in the lives of at least 10 per cent of that psychological sample. All had been experiencing mental disturbance when perpetrating abuse. I found that, while some domestic abuse arose from a ‘crisis of masculinity’, it was also an expression of captivity trauma. As such, I positioned abuse as a psychological issue. But domestic abuse is also a gender issue. It is an emotional and sensory experience. It has a moral dimension. It also ‘lingers on in … memories’; it has an intergenerational legacy. These broader contexts are what I will highlight this evening.

Evidentiary challenges: subsumed and normalised

In the immediate post-Second World War decades violence in the home was still portrayed as ‘wife-beating’ or ‘wife bashing’ and women were considered to be ‘battered wives’. There was nothing as wide-ranging as current definitions of abuse which include physical, sexual, emotional, economic, and verbal abuse. Not all of these behaviours involve violence. As such, I favour the broader term of ‘domestic abuse’ with the understanding that it encompasses acts against intimate partners and other family members.

I found evidence of abuse enacted by Stalag Luft III’s former POWs against their parents, spouses, siblings, and children. Unfortunately, time does not allow me to go into all of them here, so I will focus on the former POWs, their wives, and their children.

My main source of domestic abuse in Stalag Luft III’s distributed archive comes from women’s testimony created in the immediate post-war decades, before the advent of second-wave feminism, and before the term ‘domestic violence’ was coined in the late 1970s. Children’s testimony was uttered more recently. Evidence of domestic abuse falls into two categories: empathetic veteran-centric narratives from the medical archive and lived experience, and combative statements from divorce records. I refer to those who responded compassionately to domestic abuse as ‘helpmeets’. Those who assertively decided to take no more I dub ‘combatants’.

Some accounts must be treated with care. Coded language appears in more recent narratives to either protect the suffering veteran or to create a barrier against the memory of abuse. Anything created for financial or personal benefit, such as to support pension claims and medical expenses, or, in the case of divorce proceedings, to elicit maintenance settlements or favourable custody decisions, could have been heightened to facilitate the best outcome. Some evidence has been recast by legal or medical practitioners to emphasise facts; they have been rendered devoid of emotion.

I encountered other evidentiary challenges. In describing their captivity trauma as part of the repatriation process, former POWs rarely articulated narratives of perpetration. Where domestic abuse was admitted, the causes were seldom explored: medicos and repatriation bureaucrats considered abuse as symptomatic of a psychological condition. Men were not treated as perpetrators of abuse. They were ill. Family members, particularly wives, were not viewed as victims of abusive behaviour. They were valued witnesses to traumatic responses. They were carers of the psychologically damaged and had a significant place in the repatriation system.

There is much silence in the distributed archive. In a post-war society where domestic abuse was subsumed and normalised, abuse was usually kept within the home. The law did not acknowledge some behaviours: rape within marriage was not illegal. Women did not perceive some acts as abusive because they had yet to be defined. Keeping a wife on a tight budget – limiting her financial independence – would have been usual in many households dominated by a male breadwinner. Also unrecognised at the time was what we now know as coercive control where an abuser deliberately and systematically tries to restrictively manage all aspects of a person’s life; and gas-lighting, where the victim is forced to doubt her memory or perception of events.

Despite the evidentiary challenges and silences, testimony from the medical and divorce archives – and lived experience – is important. When examining narratives of abuse, therefore, we need to deploy two lenses. A contemporary one which allows us to see how women and men viewed themselves and behaviours within their specific culture and time, and a modern one so we can look beyond what men and women said or wrote (or didn’t say or write) to what we can infer – or label – in light of more modern definitions and understandings.

Edric Parr’s actions, for example, appear coercive. He ‘became very controlling …  the insecurities behind those behaviours’, his daughter Angela told me, ‘in their own way[,] held my mother “captive” to the emotional bind’. But Edric ‘was not physically abusive’. As such, his family did not see his controlling behaviour as a form of abuse. His obsessive compulsive disorder was a diagnosed psychological condition, arising from the ‘trauma and emotional damage [resulting from] his POW experiences’.

When I asked Bethany Lane if she had witnessed or experienced domestic abuse, she told me that her father’s moods were erratic and he could turn suddenly. Bethany was only three when her mother was hospitalised after a ‘scene’ during which Gerard ‘was furious’. She was ‘often terrified but didn’t know why’. The young girl also ‘endured a lot of verbal abuse’. ‘Loud shouting that made me very fearful’. Bethany also confirmed that she had lived with coercive behaviour. ‘Dad’ was ‘very controlling [in] what we did or said’. ‘If visitors came we were to be seen and not heard except if we recited something.’ He had high expectations and ‘the pressure from him stifled me’.

Petronella Barrie also suffered emotional abuse and coercive control. Her husband Hugo restricted her social life, forbidding her to accompany him when they were both invited out because he was ‘ashamed of her’. He undermined her self-esteem, Petronella attested, and ‘incessantly criticised’ her – using ‘expressions of the most offensive and insulting nature’. He stressed that he considered her to be ‘quite worthless’.

Hayley Myatt described an occasion where her husband gas-lighted her. Marcus viciously twisted her nose, still painful and healing after surgery. ‘[A]s he was doing it’, she claimed, ‘he said “you are just imagining it, I am not touching your nose or hurting you at all”’. Given much of her abuse took place at night in their bedroom, Hayley may also have been sexually assaulted. ‘[W]hile in bed’, she stated in her divorce testimony, Marcus [‘struck] me on a number of occasions … forcing my arms into a position which caused me great pain’.

Helpmeets and Combatants: collateral damage

Woman today are recognised as victims of abuse, but with urgent calls to replace ‘victim’ with the more affirming ‘survivor’. Men are uncompromisingly categorised as perpetrators. Helpmeets, however, did not see their husbands as perpetrators. Their presentation of evidence to the repatriation bureaucracy was entirely veteran-centric: it emphasised male victimhood not their own. They were witnesses to masculine fragility.

Some helpmeets unconditionally loved their husbands. Cassie and Edric Parr were a ‘devoted couple’ for sixty-nine years, with ‘an adoring love and affection for each other that was a soul journey of its own’, their daughter Angela recounted. Others may have felt obliged to remain within difficult marriages because of children, religion, economic dependence, or because a society which condoned domestic abuse did not provide a place for those who wished to escape it. There was also a societal imperative to stay and support. As so many of their grandmothers and mothers had done in the wake of the Great War, these women accepted society’s and the repatriation department’s expectation to care for a new generation of ‘shattered Anzacs’ or, in this context, ‘fragile flyers’.

Even in the most challenging relationships, helpmeets recognised the pain of captivity trauma. Accordingly, they chose to stay, to make a home, to support their husbands, and to protect their children. They found ways to accommodate the fragile flyers’ behaviour. But their compassion exposed them  to abuse.

Madeleine Reed, who felt cold steel against her throat, separated from Blake shortly after the knife attack. Six years later, she was close to destitution so allowed him to come back. It was a financial necessity but empathy intermingled with pragmatism. She knew how much Blake loved their son; saw what a good relationship they had. She also pitied her husband who ‘had deteriorated greatly. … he drank more than ever and would sit … staring into space. … Sometimes for hours he would talk in a low voice about [the] POW camp. I was frightened, but did not like to leave him when he was so troubled’.

Cynthia Lane inured herself to abuse. She ‘was used to dealing with trauma’ inside her marriage and often told her daughter, Bethany, ‘just allow the pain to wash over you like water off a duck’s back’. As a consequence of her husband’s treatment, Cynthia ‘suffered incredibly emotionally’. She had no other family to turn to and ‘in those days you never divorced’. Cynthia put her children first, protecting them from Gerard’s behaviour by trying to create a ‘safe place’. ‘In her quiet way’, Bethany recalled, ‘Mum built … a small spark of hope in us by reading the Bible’.

Bethany is also a helpmeet. Despite a difficult childhood and a period of estrangement in her early twenties, she never stopped loving and supporting her father. She has spent much of her adult life actively trying to fathom Gerard’s trauma and, before his death, reconciling with him. By trying to accommodate her father’s behaviour and to forgive him, she has composed a narrative of acceptance which attributes domestic abuse mainly to ‘the war’, but to other life experiences as well. She knew he was ‘so damaged’ and in pain but ‘without … understanding what it was all about’. She later considered that ‘what Dad had been through’ during the Depression, war, and captivity, stimulated him to ‘make us ready for anything we might meet up with in life’. She also realised that ‘Dad usually eventually came through with compassion [to] those he inflicted with emotional pain’.

In her attempts to comprehend Gerard’s experiences and the root cause of his trauma, Bethany has exerted loving, empathetic agency. So, too, did her mother and other women who embraced a helpmeet role to fragile flyers shattered by captivity trauma. Some recognised the blessings despite unrelenting mental pain. Cassie and Edric Parr derived ‘genuine appreciation and benefit’ from their long, happy marriage.

*****

The divorce archive reveals no helpmeets. Plaintiffs did not present their husbands as fragile flyers. Hayley Myatt sued for divorce on the grounds of repeated assaults and cruel beatings. Petronella Barrie cited cruelty and desertion. They described their husbands as malicious wife-beaters. They provided no mitigating statements relating to psychological state.

Hayley and Petronella were combatants. Their weapons were searing accounts of physical and emotional brutality in matrimonial homes that had become war zones. Fronting the divorce court in an era before no-fault divorce took courage. Intimate and prurient details were often aired in the press. They had children to raise, with no income other than their husband’s and no home to go to unless, like Hayley, they could move in with parents, or like Petronella, had husbands rich enough to maintain two households. There would have been an element of shame in publicly projecting an image of helpless, battered wife, but it was necessary. In making the decision to leave for the sake of self and children, risking social stigma to argue cruelty, and positioning themselves as victims, combatants exerted pragmatic, protective, and survivalist agency.

Combatants and helpmeets both maintained a degree of personal power despite their abusive situations. They were women of agency. Although perpetrated against, they were not entirely victims. They were survivors. But they were also the collateral damage of captivity trauma.

The emotions of domestic abuse: emotionally, visually and aurally distressing

Domestic abuse has an emotional landscape. It is a profoundly affective and sensory experience, comprising both negative and positive emotions. Helpmeets are motivated by compassion. They feel pity. Love precipitates what Bethany Lane calls her ‘amazing journey’ to understand her father’s pain and reconcile with him. Love was also the prevailing emotion in the Parrs’ life. Negative emotions, however, predominate the experience of abuse.

Women lived in anxiety, awaiting the next physical attack or emotional blow. They endured cruelty from men they had once trusted. The visual evidence of bruises lasted beyond the beating. Some women suffered deep psychological pain; Petronella Barrie was often driven to hysterics by her husband’s violence.

Fear is perhaps the strongest emotion. Women dreaded what their husbands would do to them or their children. There were many occasions when Hugo forced Petronella ‘to the wall with his forearm across her throat and holding her with great force and vicious threats for long periods’. She would have been terrified, fearing for her life. And indeed, how close had she been to death? We now know that those who strangle their partners are eight times more likely to kill them.

*****

Children also experienced the negative emotions of domestic abuse. They learned to walk on eggshells around their fathers, apprehensively anticipating the next explosion. Bethany Lane was ‘often on ‘tenterhooks [with] a constant fear’ of how she would ‘cope with the next onslaught’. Without warning, and in front of Bethany, her father ‘was suddenly slapping Mum across the face’. The teen was ‘shocked and left the room crying’. Gerard’s behaviour precluded intimacy; Bethany lacked the warm, ‘safe, stable foundation’ she needed. ‘Hugs were not something we indulged in when we were young.’ She became withdrawn and alienated from her father.

The Myatt children were somewhere in the house every time Marcus attacked their mother, if not in the same room. They, and other youngsters, could not have blotted out the sounds of arguing, their fathers’ assaults, or the damage. During one tussle with his wife, Marcus Myatt smashed a frying pan on top of his six-year-old daughter’s birthday cake. Peter Reed came into the room while his father held a knife against his mother’s throat; he saw the glint of what was now a weapon, and perhaps imagined a bloody gash preceding his mother’s death.

Abuse is emotionally, visually, and aurally distressing for anyone, but especially children. It was not seen as such at the time, but we now recognise that exposure to – witnessing – domestic abuse is a type of child abuse. And the memory of it intrudes into the present. In the week before this webinar, two children of Second World War POWs – including Peter Reed – told me they could not attend. Years after the deaths of their fathers, decades after its perpetration, domestic abuse is still too ‘fresh’ in their minds.

The moral dimension: unresolved moral troubling

Domestic abuse has a moral dimension. It is an assault on the recipient’s self-esteem, sense of self, and human dignity. The perpetrator betrays trust; subverts love; and destroys the family unit’s safety and security. He engenders psychological distress in intimate partners and defenceless children.

Perpetrators assailed their victims’ moral selves, but they were also morally afflicted; they suffered agonising moral emotions. I determined that at least forty-two of Stalag Luft III’s Australian airmen POWs – just over 12 per cent – were morally troubled to some degree about their service or captivity. The majority were also psychologically damaged. Family and medical evidence suggests that some, like Gerard Lane, Hugo Barrie, and Blake Reed suffered moral injury, that is the end point of extreme, distressful unresolved ethical troubling.

Given some morally troubled, like Blake, Hugo and Gerard, had also perpetrated domestic abuse, it is important to consider whether their behaviour was an expression of moral injury. Jonathan Shay, an American psychiatrist whose work has proved foundational to our recognition and understanding of moral injury, believes moral injury can give rise to domestic abuse.

Shame and guilt are two separate but linked moral emotions. POWs generally experienced deep shame when captured. Stalag Luft III’s airmen prisoners worked to overcome their shame in captivity. They embarked on a dedicated program of active disruption, which included harassing and hindering their captors, theft, sabotage, and escape. Their martial pride, however, took a blow when they arrived home: Australian society did not look kindly towards POWs of Europe who, they believed, had sat out the war in something akin to a holiday camp. Unlike those of former prisoners of Japan, their traumas of captivity, generally, were not recognised. But like those captured by the Japanese, they lived, until relatively recently, with the stigma of captivity in a society which revered the bronzed fighting Anzac.

Research now suggests that domestic abuse is an enactment of shame: as the perpetrator’s deep-seated humiliation is triggered he lashes out to gain a sense of power. It was unlikely that Hugo Barrie’s alcohol-fuelled abuse arose from a stalled career, because he was riding high on success when Petronella first endured ‘many bitter incidents’ during their early years of marriage, including ‘abuse and criticism’. We must ask then, was Hugo’s deep shame of not being able to participate in Stalag Luft III’s escape organisation a catalyst for his abusive behaviour? We must also ask if Gerard Lane’s and Blake Reed’s rage and abuse were unconscious displays arising from guilt over their powerlessness to protect and save the men for whom they, as bomber pilots, were responsible? And what part, if any, did Gerard’s deep moral guilt over his part in the civilian bombing campaign factor into his perpetration of abuse?

Power and choice: fragile flyer

Domestic abuse is now recognised as being about male power. It is seen by many as a deliberate choice to exert control and perpetrate violence. A considered decision. But some behaviour, as Angela Parr reveals, was not deliberate. It was symptomatic of a captivity-trauma related psychological condition. Bethany Lane sees Gerard’s controlling behaviour as deriving from love but also reflecting his mental pain and moral injury She recognises that her father had no control over his abuse. Gerard Lane, Blake Reed, and Edric Parr were powerless in the wake of their captivity trauma. Their perpetrations were not deliberate, calculating choices. They were consequences. Their experience indicates that contemporary models of male power and choice don’t necessarily apply to historical cases, particularly where the fragile flyer was also morally troubled.

Many fragile flyers suffered some degree of business or work stress; there was a disconnect between successful flying careers and the ability to thrive in post-war employment. Family and social tensions further compromised a traditional male identity as provider and loving husband and father. Some could not adjust to a changing gender dynamic.

Benedict Shaw, who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for ‘technical skill and courage’ was particularly thrown off kilter by his inability to adapt to post-war life. Violence in his first marriage was repeated in his second. After one tussle where he shoved a sideboard over, his second wife called the police and a few days later took out a summons against him. Did Benedict’s reliance on strong, economically independent wives trigger a violent retaliation in an attempt to overcome an overwhelming sense of masculine powerlessness? If so, it ultimately failed. The fragile flyer who had been in and out of psychiatric facilities for years, committed suicide on the day the summons was to be heard. Blake Reed also took his own life. While both men had experienced marital, work, and social crises, both suicides were attributed to captivity trauma, not masculine crises arising from post-war resettlement difficulties.

Conclusion: more to do

Historical domestic abuse is a gender issue with significant psychological, emotional, moral, and intergenerational dimensions. It has a place within medical, gender, and memory studies, as well as moral inquiry, and also should be considered within the history of emotions. My sample of abuse in the lives of former prisoners of Stalag Luft III and their families is small but it reveals that captivity trauma precipitated abusive behaviour. It suggests that domestic abuse arising from captivity trauma sits awkwardly with current models of power and choice. It indicates that women in the pre-feminism era were not necessarily victims; they were women of agency. The Stalag Luft III sample also highlights the emotions of captivity for perpetrator and survivor. Empathy and love prevailed in some lived experience, even as fear, terror, anxiety, shame, and guilt, predominated in others. It shows that the memory of abuse lingers. It may never fade.

Because of my findings, and because our knowledge of historical perpetrations is so limited, it is imperative to delve deeper into the archives to recover more traces of historical domestic abuse; and to emphasise abuse’s profound intergenerational legacy. I have raised many questions this evening which must be answered. There is much more to do.

Thank you.

My research into this subject continues. If a member of your family was an Australian airman imprisoned in Stalag Luft III, and your life has been touched by domestic abuse, please get in touch. 

 

Dr Kristen Alexander |Adjunct Associate Lecturer
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
UNSW Canberra
kristen.alexander@adfa.edu.au