Abstract
This chapter explores the cross-cultural encounters and experiences of Australian prisoners of war in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Transportation away from the battlefield, the ad hoc nature of the Ottoman prison camp system and the multinational population in the camps meant the Australians came into extended close contact with their captors, with fellow POWs of varied backgrounds, and with Ottoman civilians during their imprisonment. The chapter argues that the Australians interacted with those they encountered in captivity according to their pre-war conceptions of different racial and cultural groups. In doing so, the chapter offers insights into Australian attitudes towards ‘others’ before and during the war, and contributes to an understanding of captivity as representative of the global nature of the First World War.
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- 1.
For a detailed listing of every Australian POW in the Ottoman Empire, including those who died in captivity, see Kate Ariotti, “Coping with Captivity: Australian POWs of the Turks and the Impact of Imprisonment During the First World War” (PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2014).
- 2.
Ariotti, “Coping with Captivity”; Jennifer Lawless, Kismet: The Story of the Gallipoli Prisoners of War (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015). The Water Diviner, released in Australia and New Zealand in late 2014 and directed by Russell Crowe, was written by Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios. A book of the same name, based on the screenplay, was written by Anastasios and Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios and was published by Pan Macmillan in 2014.
- 3.
See David Coombes, Crossing the Wire: The Untold Stories of Australian POWs in Battle and Captivity during WWI (Sydney: Big Sky Publishing, 2011) and William Cull, Both Sides of the Wire: The Memoir of an Australian Officer Captured During the Great War, ed. Aaron Pegram (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011).
- 4.
Recent publications include Alon Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford: Berg, 2002), Heather Jones, Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Yucel Yanikdag, Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey 1914–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and Brian K. Feltman, The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors and Manhood in the Great War and Beyond (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
- 5.
See, for example, Mahon Murphy, “Brucken, Beethoven und Baumkuchen: German and Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War and the Japanese Home Front,” in Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, eds. Gunda Barth-Scalmani, Joachim Burgschwentner and Matthias Egger (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 125–45, and Yanikdag, “Imagining Community and Identity in Russia and Egypt: A Comparison,” in Healing the Nation, 46–76.
- 6.
A protecting power is a neutral state that assumes responsibility for the interests of belligerents (including POWs) during times of war. The Americans, and later the Dutch, took on the role of protecting power for the British in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. See Richard B. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War: A Study in the Diplomacy of Captivity (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).
- 7.
Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Melbourne: Penguin, 1974).
- 8.
Suzanne Brugger, Australians and Egypt 1914–1919 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980); Richard White, “The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War,” War & Society 5, no. 1 (1987): 63–77.
- 9.
Peter Stanley, “‘He Was Black, He Was a White Man, and a Dinkum Aussie’: Race and Empire in Revisiting the Anzac Legend,” in Race, Empire, and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 213–30.
- 10.
Repatriation Statement of Claude Vautin, AWM30 B3.3, Australian War Memorial, Canberra (hereafter cited as AWM); Letters of Laurence Henry Smith, No. 67 Sqdn. AFC, AWM PR83/100, AWM. See also Michael Molkentin, Fire in the Sky: The Australian Flying Corps in the First World War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 100–5.
- 11.
Marilyn Lake, “British World or New World?,” History Australia 10, no. 3 (2013): 36–8.
- 12.
This reflects the fact that the majority of POW camp commandants and guards were indeed Turkish. Moreover, as several scholars of the Ottoman Army note, the vast majority of those who fought in Ottoman infantry battalions, and thus who Australian troops came into contact with the most, were Turks. See Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001), xvi, and Yanikdag, Healing the Nation, 17–18.
- 13.
Jeremy Salt, “Johnny Turk Before Gallipoli: 19th Century Images of the Turks,” in Before and After Gallipoli: A Collection of Australian and Turkish Writings, ed. Rahmi Akcelik (Melbourne: Australian-Turkish Friendship Society Publications, 1986), 15–27.
- 14.
Repatriation Statement of Ronald T.A. McDonald, AWM30 B1.22.
- 15.
Reginald Lushington, A Prisoner with the Turks 1915–1918 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Kent & Co, 1923), 9.
- 16.
Wheat, “Unpublished Manuscript,” 14, John Harrison Wheat Papers, OM64-31/2, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland (hereafter cited as SLQ); Repatriation Statement of John Beattie, AWM30 B1.3, AWM.
- 17.
Wheat, “Unpublished Manuscript,” 14; Repatriation Statement of Ernest Ingram, AWM30 B2.14, AWM.
- 18.
Heather Jones, “Encountering the Enemy: Prisoner of War Transport and the Development of War Cultures in 1914,” in Warfare and Belligerence: Perspectives in First World War Studies, ed. Pierre Purseigle (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 133–62.
- 19.
John Halpin, Blood in the Mists (Sydney: Halstead Press, 1934), 154.
- 20.
The Ottoman Army lost more troops to disease than combat during the First World War. See Hikmet Ozdemir, Ottoman Army 1914–1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield, trans. Saban Kardas (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008).
- 21.
Repatriation Statement of Patrick O’Connor, AWM30 B1.27, AWM.
- 22.
“Usera Hakkinda Talimatname Mat-baa-I (Manual Regarding Prisoners of War),” in Lawless, Kismet, 233–37. POW officers at Afyon were accommodated in the vacant homes of Armenian victims of the 1915 genocide. See Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley, Australia, Armenia and the Great War (Sydney: NewSouth, 2016), 84–101.
- 23.
Lushington, A Prisoner with the Turks, 21.
- 24.
Foster, Two and a Half Years a Prisoner of War in Turkey, 37.
- 25.
G.H. Knibbs, “Census of the Commonwealth of Australia Taken for the Night between the 2nd and 3rd April, 1911: Part IV—Religions,” 769, on Australian Bureau of Statistics website, accessed 7 November 2016, http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/free.nsf/0/B8982A23D75F18B6CA2578390013015D/$File/1911%20Census%20-%20Volume%20II%20-%20Part%20VI%20Religions.pdf. Australia does have a long history of contact with the Muslim world, from Indonesian fisherman to Malayan pearlers and so-called ‘Afghan’ cameleers. But the cameleers’ cultural practices, religious beliefs and different appearance made them the objects of ridicule and derision and, as Christine Stevens writes, “the term Afghan began to embody a notion of contempt, of racial inferiority, of uncleanliness, brutality, strangeness and fear.” For the connections between Australia and Islam, see Peta Stephenson, Islam Dreaming: Indigenous Muslims in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010) and Christine Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns: A History of Afghan Cameldrivers in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1989).
- 26.
Repatriation Statement of Stanley Jordan, AWM30 B1.17, AWM.
- 27.
Thomas White, Guests of the Unspeakable: The Odyssey of an Australian Airman (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1932), 133.
- 28.
L.H. Luscombe, The Story of Harold Earl—Australian (Brisbane: W.R. Smith & Paterson, 1970), 69–70.
- 29.
M. Delpratt to E. White, 6 July 1917, Maurice George Delpratt Correspondence (hereafter cited as MGDC), John Oxley Library, SLQ.
- 30.
Boris Christa, “Great Bear and Southern Cross: The Russian Presence in Australia,” in Russia and the Fifth Continent: Aspects of Russian–Australian Relations, ed. John McNair and Thomas Poole (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992), 81–109.
- 31.
Alexander Massov, “War Scares and Growing Russophobia in Australia, 1853–1903,” in Encounters Under the Southern Cross: Two Centuries of Russian–Australian Relations 1807–2007, ed. Alexander Massov, John McNair and Thomas Poole (Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, 2007), 53–5.
- 32.
See Elena Govor, Russian Anzacs in Australian History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005), 144–73.
- 33.
Yucel Yanikdag writes that “most Ottomans of all ranks viewed the Russians as the principal enemy” during the First World War while, for the Russians, “Ottomans ranked third on their traditional enemies list.” See Yanikdag, Healing the Nation, 51, 53.
- 34.
Foster, Two and a Half Years a Prisoner of War in Turkey, 33.
- 35.
Sergeant Niven Neyland wrote after the war that a group of British POWs had suffered terribly from typhus after they had been made to share cattle trucks with “a lot of Russian prisoners who were sick and dying of typhus and crawling with lice” while en route to a work camp. See Repatriation Statement of Niven Neyland, AWM30 B1.26, AWM. Heather Jones notes that the Germans, in keeping with their racialised ideas about peoples from ‘the East,’ believed Russian POWs caused the typhus epidemics that swept through several of the German POW camps early in the war. See Jones, Violence Against Prisoners of War, 103–5.
- 36.
H.J.E. Kinder, “Unpublished Manuscript,” 41, Papers of Kinder, H.J.E (Stoker, Petty Officer), PR01466, AWM.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Delpratt to White, 5 January 1918, MGDC.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
Heather Jones, “A Missing Paradigm? Military Captivity and the Prisoner of War, 1914–18,” Immigrants and Minorities 26, no. 1–2 (2008): 28–9.
- 42.
Sean McMeekin, The Berlin–Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power 1898–1918 (London: Allen Lane, 2010), 241.
- 43.
Greg Kerr, Lost Anzacs: The Story of Two Brothers (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997), 161, 163.
- 44.
Delpratt to White, 16 September 1916, MGDC.
- 45.
Lushington, A Prisoner with the Turks, 38.
- 46.
Ibid., 38.
- 47.
For more on sport and captivity in the Ottoman Empire, see Kate Ariotti and Martin Crotty, “The Role of Sport for Australian POWs of the Turks during the First World War,” International Journal of the History of Sport 31, no. 18 (2014): 2362–74.
- 48.
See, for example, Luscombe, The Story of Harold Earl, 70.
- 49.
Ibid., 66.
- 50.
Kerr, Lost Anzacs, 141.
- 51.
Ibid., 204.
- 52.
Delpratt to White, 5 January 1918, MGDC.
- 53.
Kate Ariotti, “Australian Prisoners of the Turks: Negotiating Culture Clash in Captivity,” in Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, 164–5.
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Ariotti, K. (2017). International Encounters in Captivity: The Cross-Cultural Experiences of Australian POWs in the Ottoman Empire. In: Ariotti, K., Bennett, J. (eds) Australians and the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51520-5_4
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