Behind the wire
Apparently, history is written by the winners. Usually. I’m sure that there are a few stories to be found in remote libraries, where we hear about how it was “on the other side”. Not the point. I just watched yet another POW story (in this case, Hart’s War), with lots of plot twists and substandard housing and people wearing incomplete uniforms. And after all was done, I wondered… how many prisoners weren’t American?
Think about The Great Escape. I liked the movie. I liked the book. I knew that in the real story (once in a while, there actually is a grain of truth in a tale that takes on mythological proportions), the prisoners weren’t American. Commonwealth folk, actually.
Sometimes, historical accuracy did come through the grease paint. In the movie The Colditz Story, we received a tale that was retold several times. The star? A glider, constructed in the attic of the castle. Or consider The Wooden Horse. Again, a good book and a reasonable movie. Now, they were a little too close in time to the actual story, so the British colouration (complete with the requisite “u”) was historically accurate.
According to IMDB, there are other movies that I haven’t seen. Add them to the growing bucket list.
I prefer some of the local POW stories. On the Island, the section of the railway between Port Borden and Emerald Junction had labour provided by people who couldn’t get home due to a war that they weren’t winning. Yes, even Canada had some compounds defined by barbed wire and armed guards. Relying on Wiki, there were forty detainment camps in Canada. Makes sense; keeping your own camps on enemy soil is tricky.
