Kate Ariotti, Captive Anzacs

History Australia ISSN: 1449-0854 (Print) 1833-4881 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raha20 Kate Ariotti, Captive Anzacs Joan Beaumont To cite this article: Joan Beaumont (2019) Kate Ariotti, Captive�Anzacs, History Australia, 16:2, 415-416, DOI: 10.1080/14490854.2019.1588757 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2019.1588757 Published online: 11 Jun 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 17 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=raha20 HISTORY AUSTRALIA 2019, VOL. 16, NO. 2, 415–416 BOOK REVIEW Kate Ariotti, Captive Anzacs Joan Beaumont Australian National University Captive Anzacs: Australian POWs of the Ottomans during the First World War, by Kate Ariotti, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 222 pp., Illus., Index., $A59.95, ISBN 9781107198647 Prisoners of war rarely have a prominent place in national memories of war. There are exceptions, for example the prisoners of the Japanese who worked and died on the Thai–Burma railway in 1942–43, and the escapees from German camps during World War II. But, more commonly, captivity has been marginalised by more traditional narratives of battles and strategy. The history of 198 Australians captured by the Ottoman forces during World War I therefore has been relatively unexplored. In part, this was because the Sinai and Palestine campaigns, in which most of them were captured, were marginal when compared to the Western Front; in part, it was because so few Australians became prisoners in these campaigns. In the century since the war, their captivity has generated a few memoirs, some amateur histories and, in 2015, Jennifer Lawless’s Kismet: The Story of the Gallipoli Prisoners of War. Kate Ariotti’s Captive Anzacs builds on these but will surely establish itself as the definitive account. It is meticulously researched, skilfully anchored within broader international scholarship, and written with assurance and style. Given the comprehensiveness of this admirable book, this review can highlight only some of its more important findings. The first is the range of conditions experienced by Australian POWs. Popular memory, as so often, tends to remember the atrocities: the forced march after the fall of the Kut-el-Amara garrison in Mesopotamia in April 1916, which only two of nine Australians survived; and the extreme hardships suffered during the construction of the Baghdad–Berlin railway. It has often been assumed, then, that Australian prisoners were, as T.W. White’s 1932 memoir put it, Guests of the Unspeakable. But Ariotti’s close study shows that this needs qualification, especially as far as the treatment of Australian officers was concerned. While conditions were often difficult, even dangerous, the POWs had as much to fear from the epidemics of disease that swept through the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1918. Some 33 Australian prisoners died from diseases, including malaria, pneumonia, typhus and dysentery. That said, there were particular challenges for prisoners interned in a culture as alien as the Ottoman Empire, but the responses of Australians to captivity, Ariotti shows, were similar to those of POWs elsewhere and in other times. They improved their physical environment, asserted a sense of superiority over their captors, mitigated their stress through humour, kept communications open with home through letter writing, and filled their CONTACT Joan Beaumont Joan.Beaumont@anu.edu.au ß 2019 Australian Historical Association 416 J. BEAUMONT time, if they were not required to do manual labour, with improvised debating clubs and educational activities. One of the more intriguing aspects of captivity in the Ottoman Empire was the support the prisoners received from outside sources. Ariotti details the remarkable way in which the Australian Red Cross worked with the British War Office, international humanitarian organisations and neutral states, including US officials, to send relief supplies to the prisoners. Medical repatriation was even arranged for two wounded Australians. These efforts to raise funds for POWs reflected the deep anxiety on the part of families at home, an anxiety that was compounded by mistrust of the ‘Turks’, by a lack of accurate and regular information about the POWs, and by sometimes alarming press reports of prisoners being maltreated, reports that some Australian politicians exploited for recruitment purposes. One of the most original sections of this book is its discussion of the aftermath of captivity. Much of the story Ariotti gleans from the Repatriation files is a familiar one, of veterans struggling to prove the link between their wartime suffering and later illness. But Ariotti concludes that there is no evidence that ex-POWs were subject to more scrutiny, or suffered more rejection, by authorities than did other returning soldiers. For many ex-prisoners, the struggle was often with their own sense of inadequacy in the face of the celebratory narrative of Anzac. As Ariotti concludes, the irony is that, while the prisoners of the Ottomans remained, even during the recent memory boom, on the margins of Australians’ memory of war, their captors were increasingly constructed as an honourable enemy. Thanks to the imperatives of memorial diplomacy, it was the Ottoman commander and leader, Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk), not the prisoners of the Ottomans, who came to occupy the prime piece of ‘memory real estate’ in Canberra, at the head of the Anzac Parade.