This book was recommended to me by a former German prisoner of war who had been captured in Normandy just after D-Day, and then spent about three years in both American and British captivity. The book is a highly-detailed, well-written work by Matthew Barry Sullivan, who was involved in the interrogation of German prisoners of war during the Second World War. He therefore has an 'inside track' on this subject.
Descriptions of people, places and events are vivid enough for us to gain a good impression of those times, the following being a brief example:
'Camp 18 was at Featherstone Park, near Haltwhistle, and lay on the Tyne, just south of Hadrian's Wall and halfway between the east and west coast. The Americans for whom the camp had originally been erected called the place Death Valley because of its, to them, unfriendly remoteness. ... The Nissen huts were crowded up closely and for exercise the prisoners were taken on route marches with armed guards at the front, rear, and the sides. Ill-feeling was rife: if the officer taking the roll-call offered a cigarette to the German in charge and he accepted it, that man was regarded as a semi-traitor.'
When researching my own book,
Hitler's Last Army: German POWs in Britain
, I found Mr. Sullivan's work to be an indispensable source of information. It extends to around 400 pages, and is a detailed and comprehensive study of the topic. One limitation is that it only deals with the period from 1944 to 1948. This was indeed the only time when substantial numbers of German POWs were held in the United Kingdom, but smaller numbers of German prisoners were captured right from the start of the war. (Most of these were initially sent to camps in Canada at first and, later, to the United States. Some 127,000 of these POWs were subsequently transferred to Britain in the first few months of 1946, some of them remaining until late 1948).
The only real drawback is that this volume is now something of a rarity. With new copies advertised at sky-high prices, and used ones around the eighty-pound mark.
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