Curating Community behind Barbed Wire: Canadian Prisoner of War Art from the Second World War

Abstract

Though often under-represented in the official and national narratives and in Canadian military historiography more broadly, the intimate and personal lived experiences of Canadian prisoners of war (POW) during the Second World War can be found in archives, photography collections, and collections of war art. In an attempt to see past the mythologised versions of POWs that appear in Hollywood films, best-selling monographs, and other forms of popular culture, it is through bits of ephemera—including wartime log books and the drawings carefully kept and sent home to loved ones along with handwritten letters—that the stories of non-combatant men and women who spent their war as POWs, can be told. Together, Canadian POWs created and curated community and fostered unconventional family ties, sometimes called “emotional communities”, through the collection and accumulation of drawings, illustrations, paintings, and other examples of war art on the pages of their wartime log books while living behind barbed wire. This article uncovers some of these stories, buried in the thousands of boxes in the George Metcalf Archival Collection—the textual archives—at the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

1. Introduction

Though often under-represented in the official and national narratives—and in Canadian military historiography more broadly—the intimate and personal lived experiences of Canadian prisoners of war (POW) during the Second World War can be found in archives, photography collections, and collections of war art. In an attempt to see past the mythologised versions of POWs that appear in Hollywood films, best-selling monographs, and other forms of popular culture, it is through their ephemera—including wartime log books, and the drawings carefully kept and sent home to loved ones, along with handwritten letters or diaries—that the stories of non-combatant men and women who spent their war as POWs, can be told.

Together, Canadian POWs created and curated community and fostered unconventional family ties, sometimes called “emotional communities”, through the collection and curation of drawings, illustrations, paintings, and other examples of war art on the pages of their wartime log books while living behind barbed wire. This article uncovers some of these stories, buried in the thousands of boxes in the George Metcalf Archival Collection—the textual archives—at the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Much of the scholarship written on the Canadian experience of the Second World War tends to focus on the battles, strategy and tactics, secret military campaigns, decisions made by military and government leadership, and debates regarding whether those decisions were worthwhile or disastrous, or in some cases, both. There have been some dedicated studies on the collective experiences of Canadian prisoners of war, though this did not occur until well after the social history turn of the 1960s—keeping in mind that this scholarship arrived decades late to Canadian military historiography. The histories of POWs and their collective experiences are usually only tangentially included in broader military histories of Canadian involvement in the Second World War (see, for example, Stacey 1940; Cook 2015a, 2015b; Roy et al. 1990; Giesler 1981; Granatstein 2015; Cuthbertson 2020; Fussell 1989; Glassford and Shaw 2012; and Granatstein and Morton 1989, among others).

According to Bob Moore, prisoner of war histories themselves “have remained a separate and sometimes isolated element in the wider national chronicles of the conflict constructed in the post-war era. Put bluntly, their individual and collective narratives of defeat and captivity do not fit easily into either the military or social histories of the countries they served” (Moore 2022, p. 1). For the memory of an experience to become part of public memory, it must be compatible with the social, cultural, and/or political objectives of any group in positions of national and social leadership (McKay 2012, p. 119).

POW experiences, therefore, are often “refracted through a national prism… the narrative of POW captivity has been transformed over time from a story of humiliation and suffering into a celebration of national identity which—by emphasising the qualities of individual courage, resourcefulness, and comradeship demonstrated by POWs—fits into the pre-existing triumphalist mythology” (Pattinson et al. 2014, p. 183). It was an uncomfortable truth for mid-twentieth century Canadians that so many of their brave soldiers, sailors, and airmen ended up in prisoner of war camps—many for years at a time.

There were some former POWs who refused to speak of their experiences ever again. For many, including that first generation or two of Canadianists writing the official Second World War histories, it was easier to discuss the victories, rather than the losses and hardships, of Canadians who served in “the necessary war.” Academic scholarship about the individual lived experiences of the “ordinary” prisoner of war, the experiences of the men of the “rank and file” as opposed to the officers who were not forced to work in labour camps or on railroads or in mines, and who were more likely to write and publish post-war memoirs, have only really emerged since the late 1980s.

When Canadian soldiers became prisoners of war, they were no longer active soldiers, nor were they civilians. They occupied a liminal space somewhere in the in-between: “once he has laid down his arms, the soldier is no longer the enemy and becomes the responsibility of the state that has captured him, which, following a principle of reciprocity, is under a duty to provide humanitarian treatment” (Horne 2016, p. 14). It is in this “in-between” space and identity as non-combatants that led to the creation of some of the most fascinating and, at times heart-wrenching, Canadian war art. Among the pages of their wartime log books and the loose-leaf drawings sent home with handwritten letters are significant artworks that can tell a story of wartime captivity that works in the official Canadian war art collection simply cannot.

Since the late 1980s, studies have been published that focus on the experiences of Allied POWs, though usually in the British context, including the treatment of POWs in the camps, escape attempts, and, to a lesser extent, comparative analyses of the daily lives of POWs and their individual experiences (see for example, Moore 2022; Vance 1994; Barker and Noakes 2021; Ion 2006, 2011; Guise 2022; Pattinson et al. 2014; Crossland 2009; Turcotte 2020; Makepeace 2017; Wylie 2010a, 2010b; Carr and Mytum 2012; Pathé and Théofilakis 2016; Roy et al. 1990; Greenfield 2010; Gillies 2011; Smith 2011; Rolf 1996; Lloydlangston and Lo 2008; Cook and Braaten 2020; Springer 2010; Schwarzkopf 2019; and Moore and Fedorowich 1996). Stories about Canadian women who became prisoners of war during the Second World War are even more invisible in the scholarship if they are mentioned at all (with the notable exceptions of Archer 1997; Wickiewicz 2012; Dickson et al. 2012). Though women’s prisoner of war narratives are few and far between, they do exist. This article ends with one particularly fascinating example of POW art created by a Canadian woman imprisoned at Ravensbrück from 1943 until she was liberated in 1945.

The sensationalism of the POW experience, coupled with the fascination of the male protagonists and their valiant efforts of escape attempts, skews the POW experience and makes it seem as though the only thing on the minds of any self-respecting POW was the desire and effort to physically escape (see Crossland 2009). The “right to escape” was codified in the 1929 version of the Geneva Convention, so it was, in fact, something on the minds of many POWs (Hata 1996, p. 253–54). But, of course, the possibility of escape was rare, nor was it feasible, if the soldier wanted to stay alive. Indeed, “contrary to the popular myth, most men were too weak from hunger and work to escape. Those who did get beyond the wire ran the very real risk of being shot” (“What Life Was Like”, Imperial War Museum Online 2024). Instead, this article looks to the other kinds of “escape attempts” made by Canadian POWs who were confined to their imaginations—to escape mentally, intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. The physical, visual, and material manifestations of this kind of “escape attempt” are the POW wartime log books sent to Allied POWs in Europe from the Red Cross and the YMCA, which came to resemble the Victorian autograph books kept by young women and scholarly men decades earlier.1

Where war art historians have discussed artistic production during the Second World War, they have largely focused on officially commissioned artworks created by professional artists for the official war art schemes (in Canada, it was the Canadian War Records) and rarely on the unofficial art production occurring on and behind the front lines. This occurred mainly because the official art collection was produced for posterity, commemoration, and history documentation purposes (Brandon and Oliver 2000; Robertson 1977; Bourke 2017; Brandon 2021; Sillars 1991; Bohm-Duchen 2013; and Foss 2007, among others). Rarely do studies on war art created by Canadian POWs enter the official narratives, with a few notable exceptions (Barker and Noakes 2021; Vance 1994; and Cook 2018).

This article contributes to Canadian historiography because it focuses on the individual lived experiences of “ordinary” Canadian prisoners of war, those men (and one woman) who did not professionally publish post-war memoirs and whose names are not known in the collective national narratives—either in Canadian military historiography or in Canadian war art history. I draw from the George Metcalf Archival Collection—the textual archives—at the CWM, specifically from the Personal Ephemera Category (classified as 58A 1).2 Within this collection, there is a near-complete provenance for each document or piece of war art. Rich, well-rounded sources such as these can speak eloquently about the lived experiences and the memory-making practices of early and mid-twentieth-century Canadians at war. The quieter, personal stories that describe the private lives of Canadian POWs during the Second World War can be found among the pages of their wartime log books or in the drawings and sketches that accompanied their letters home. This article also makes an effort to cull the distortion of the popular image of Canadian POWs by examining their wartime artworks and personal ephemera in an effort to glean something of their daily lives in captivity and their metaphorical, rather than literal, escape attempts. It also speaks to the creation and curation of a community in Allied POW camps through war art as it was created, collected and curated by the POWs themselves.

The Historial de la Grande Guerre, an international museum and research centre located in Péronne, near the Somme, and its founders, has been groundbreaking in its use of material culture, war art and other examples of wartime ephemera to describe and exhibit the lesser-known and under-represented histories of the First World War. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau is particularly interested in objects as sources and how they can both challenge and enhance textual sources as well as established and entrenched methodologies and historiographies. He challenges his students and readers to consider what the object says on its own before any historical context is uncovered and presented. His methodology brings to mind the work of American art historian Jules David Prown and his successor, Michael Yonan, who both advocated for the “fusion” of traditional art history methods with material culture studies (Audoin-Rouzeau 2017; Prown 1982; and Yonan 2011). Prown advocates for the adoption of methodologies from anthropology and archaeology to better integrate material culture considerations into their analyses (Prown 1982). Importantly, Yonan argues that art historians have fallen into a trap of believing that their discipline “is one of images, when it has always, in fact, been a discipline of materiality” (Yonan 2011, p. 240). It is a combination of these methodologies that I use in my own work, and which is particularly useful when transposed to other conflicts, including the Second World War.

This article, and the broader research project from which it is derived, therefore, is informed by art history, cultural history, military history, nationalism studies, memory and commemoration studies and, to an extent, gender studies, studies on grief and mourning, affect and emotion, community and family studies, as well as the best practices of museums and archives for acquiring, collecting, arranging, describing and exhibiting materials in a national institution. Finally, it contributes to the historiography of Canadian POW experiences during the Second World War by lifting the individual narratives from the archives and mitigating their under-representation in the literature.

2. Wartime Log Books from “The Geneva Man” and the Creation of Emotional Communities

The fact that wartime log books made it into POW camps in Western Europe is tied to the developments in international law that both predated and followed the First World War during the inter-war period, aimed at guaranteeing what was deemed the “appropriate and humane treatment” of prisoners of war. The consolidation of international rules and regulations concerning the humane treatment of prisoners of war was, of course, the 1929 Geneva Convention. This convention and its resulting document were the culmination of six decades of international discussion, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1929 Convention also expanded the humanitarian role of the International Committee of the Red Cross and established Protecting Powers who were chosen from ‘neutral’ countries, appointing inspectors, colloquially referred to as the “Geneva Men”, to visit POW camps and the prisoners held there, at least two to three times a year to “help monitor compliance [to the Geneva Convention] in order to prevent the escalation of reprisals due to inaccurate information” (Scheipers 2010, p. 14).

Three wartime charities, including the Canadian Red Cross, the War Prisoners’ Aid of the World’s Committee of the YMCA, and the Canadian POW Relatives’ Association, sought to provide Canadian POWs with as much comfort as could be given under the circumstances (Vance 1994, p. 112). Conditions in German POW camps were better than those experienced by Canadian POWs in the Far East, and the access to Red Cross parcels was more frequent. The parcels provided the basic necessities such as food, blankets, medical care, and “luxury items” for entertainment and leisure. Most of the leisure activities that POWs engaged in to pass the time came through because of Canadian donations (Cook 2015b, p. 45). For most Canadian POWs, the Red Cross parcels were their “first tangible link with home” (Gillies 2011, p. 30). It was a reminder that they had not been forgotten that their loved ones were thinking of them and were trying to find ways to support, care for and feed them. Over the course of the six years of the war, the Red Cross sent over twenty million food parcels to POWs (Gillies 2011, p. 31). Inside these food parcels were sometimes other non-perishable items that were meant for passing the time.

Canadian POWs were sometimes delighted to find a small brown notebook with blank pages and a bright red maple leaf printed on the front cover with the words ‘A WARTIME LOG’ (see Figure 1). There is no exact figure on how many of these journals were printed, although the figure is thought to be somewhere around 21,000 volumes. The log books were printed in Geneva and distributed to Allied prisoners of war inside the coveted Red Cross parcels. The log books were also provided to American and British POWs, with a liberty bell or a lion adorning their covers, respectively (Guise 2022). The log books were only sent to POWs in captivity in Western Europe, as the Red Cross packages sent to POW camps in the Far East were few and far between if they arrived at all.

These log books occupied many long hours of those who were held in POW camps in Germany and in Western Europe. The log books served as sketchbooks, journals, autograph books, songbooks, scrapbooks, and photo albums. They were coveted, bartered and traded; they created a precious form in which to list frustrations and sketch out hopes and desires. The result is an amazing collective body of artwork, the extent of which is still unknown. Some of these journals have been deposited in collections around the world, but many are still in the hands of veterans and their families, as they are intensely personal objects (Guise 2022).

Some of the most thought-provoking and hauntingly beautiful examples of prisoner of war art from Canadian soldiers in captivity appear on the pages of the POW wartime logbooks. The kinds of illustrations preferred in many of the log books were caricatures and cartoons—they often resembled comic strips in newspapers or comic books back home. Other illustrations included landscapes, seascapes, and airscapes, and a few log books even had pencil portraits of individual soldiers, which captured their likenesses brilliantly. There are also the usual and typical drawings of military unit badges and crests, maple leaves, Christian imagery including crosses and doves, national symbols such as flags and other symbols associated with the Canadians and their allies. The photographs that appear on the pages are usually service portraits of individuals and/or their POW identification card snapshots, group shots of prisoners in the camp, or postcards they had on their person and managed to keep even after their moment of capture.

Eighty years later, these wartime log books are available to researchers (and the general public) interested in the lived experiences of prisoners of war during the Second World War and to those interested in their wartime art. They are a fascinating resource for scholars, especially because they can provide a glimpse into how Canadian POWs coped with their experiences of captivity, the relationships and “emotional communities” they formed with their fellow captives, how they felt about their captors, and the war more broadly, the food they ate, the work they were often forced to do, their spiritual and faith-based rituals, and the superstitions some picked up, the sports and games they played to pass the time, the course work they were given in POW schools, and, in some cases, their experiences in the days just before liberation. According to Carr and Mytum, “creativity can say more than could or would be spoken or written; it contains potential for more subtlety and nuance of approach” (Carr and Mytum 2012, p. 4).

Alexander and Ariotti focus on what medievalist Barbara Rosenwein coined in 2006 as “emotional communities” and apply it to the circumstances of captive airmen in the German Stalags. They describe the strong sense of family and community that underpinned air force life: “all squadrons developed family-like ties based on love of flying, duty to serve and fight, and air force discipline. Those sustaining relationships were transplanted into prison camps and new ones arising from previous school, civilian or training friendships were formed” (Alexander and Ariotti 2023, p. 2–3). Their work also builds on the works of historians of emotions, war and captivity—such as Jay Winter, Claire Makepeace, and Lucy Noakes among others—and “a growing literature bringing together emotional and sensory interpretive frameworks, particularly relating to conflict and the development of wartime emotional communities” (Alexander and Ariotti 2023, p. 3).

It was in their log books that many Canadian POWs curated a community and leaned on their fellow POWs for moral support to endure their time behind barbed wire. Members of these “emotional communities” were often drawn from bunkmates, work and labour partners, or from other parts of the camps—usually “friends of friends”. These communities were built on shared experience, trauma, and the resilience of the human spirit. POWs lived in extremely close quarters and lived through events they rarely communicated with family members at home—so as not to worry them, but also often because of the fear and belief that they would not, or could not, understand. These “emotional communities” and strong friendships among POWs, therefore, are both visually and materially represented in Canadian POW wartime log books.

3. The Canadian POW Experience—In Europe and the Far East

Moore rightly points out that while the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention “undoubtedly rectified some of the perceived faults of its predecessors, it still left a great many unanswered questions” (Moore 2022, p. 23). The mechanisms set in place to monitor the camp conditions and treatment of POWs were “only as good as the captor powers allowed them to be, and the whole edifice continued to rely on reciprocity between contracting parties, but there was no provision for conflicts where only one side had ratified the Convention” (Moore 2022, p. 23). During this conflict, therefore, there were great extremes in the treatment of prisoners of war. At one end of the spectrum, were the generally “acceptable” conditions experienced by the Allied prisoners of war in Western Europe, and on the other, the horrific and inhumane conditions experienced by those in captivity in the Far East. Facilitating and actually enforcing the humane treatment of prisoners of war and ensuring that belligerent nations adhered to the rules and regulations set out by the 1929 Geneva Convention and its predecessors was difficult because there was no single office or institution that was solely in charge of seeing these things through.

The Second World War between the Allies and European Axis powers saw millions of soldiers taken as prisoners of war. Just over ten thousand Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen fell into enemy hands while serving with the Canadian Forces, 9000 of them in the western theatre and 1600 in the eastern theatre. Hundreds more were captured while serving with other countries’ forces, primarily in the Royal Air Force (Vance 1994, pp. 99–100). According to Moore, “captivity was one of the most common experiences for all those in uniform—and even more common than front line service” (Moore 2022, p. 1). That being said, most Canadian servicemen never even considered that they might “fall into enemy hands and consequently had no idea what to expect; this made the moment of capture when new prisoners were unsure whether they would be interrogated or shot, all the more agonizing” (Vance 1994, p. 100). For the first three years or so of the Second World War, very few Canadians were taken prisoner. Before the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day in June 1944, most Canadian POWs in enemy hands were airmen and sailors, except for two large groups of soldiers who were captured after the fall of Hong Kong in December 1941 and the failed Dieppe raid in August 1942.

Becoming a prisoner of war could be understood by their contemporaries as “sitting in direct opposition to the exalted model of masculinity that total war demands of men of fighting age: that of the ‘soldier hero’” (Pattinson et al. 2014, pp. 179–80). To avoid this uncomfortable, even unthinkable, idea, the emphasis both in public memory and in academic scholarship in the immediate post-war period was on themes of comradeship and survival and often resulted in an over-emphasis and mythologisation of escape. One of the most famous films produced, of course, was The Great Escape in 1963, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson, and Richard Attenborough. Bob Moore argues that “while based on fact, their admission into cinematographic popular culture has usually involved embellishments insisted upon by Pinewood or Hollywood” (Moore 2022, p. 2). Escape, however, was not a common experience among POWs—it was the exception, not the rule.

As already discussed, during their time in captivity, men kept diaries, log books and/or autograph books—this Victorian tradition and pastime of keeping an autograph book and “signature hunting”, was transposed to the context of captivity during the Second World War among the men of the “rank and file”. According to Vance, Canadian POWs became “obsessed with what might seem to be trivialities. Mail from home was eagerly awaited, and some prisoners passed the time drafting complex charts or graphs to record the receipt of letters and parcels from friends and family. Some men became compulsive autograph hunters and pursued fellow prisoners to sign their diaries or log books” (Vance 1994, p. 145).

Depending on in which camp a POW was imprisoned, keeping an autograph book or a diary could be a dangerous pastime. In German POW camps, “in general, the greatest problems for Allied prisoners held captive in Germany were boredom, or worrying about the fate of friends and comrades who might have died or gone missing in battle, and the anxiety of not knowing when the war might end and how many years of captivity lay ahead (Greenhouse 2016)”. To keep their hands and minds busy and to prevent them from falling into despair, Canadian POWs found creative outlets and other ways to cope with their situation. Their German captors quickly realised that Canadian “prisoners in Oflags and Stalags were likely to give less trouble if they had something to occupy their time” (Rolf 1996, p. 75). Therefore, the wartime log books provided to POWs by the Red Cross and the YMCA were not only allowed but also encouraged by the German guards.

In POW camps in the Far East, under the control of the Japanese Army, at first, the Japanese “did not impose restrictions on keeping a record—whether visual or written—but after several months, they began to enforce strict rules about drawing or keeping a diary” (Gillies 2011, p. 162). For most POWs, whether in the western or eastern theatres of war, keeping a diary, log book, or autograph book was well worth the risk.

4. Themes and Coping Strategies in Wartime Log Books in Germany 1942–1945

The case of Canadian Warrant Officer Lorne T. “Homer” Goat is especially unique as he managed to acquire and fill not one but two POW wartime log books during his incarceration.3 On the first page of his wartime log, Goat writes: “all Canadians in the camp received these Wartime Logs, some use them for drawings, paintings, line-shoots, diaries, etc. Of all the things that the people at home could send us, I’m sure this is the best” (Goat CWM 19880138-001.1 & CWM 19880138-001.2. George Metcalf Archival Collection). Pasted to the inside cover of his first wartime log book is a letter dated 15 June 1943 from the War Prisoners’ Aid of the YMCA. The letter explains the committee’s reasoning for sending the wartime logs, with the fervent hope that it will bring comfort, a “remembrance from home”, and something to keep a prisoner of war’s hands and mind busy while “waiting it out” (Goat CWM 19880138-001.1 & CWM 19880138-001.2. George Metcalf Archival Collection).

Goat’s two wartime log books are filled with drawings, pencil sketches, watercolour illustrations, cartoons and caricatures, autographs, signatures, home addresses for keeping in touch after the war, snapshots and photographs, pressed flora, three small flag pins, ticket stubs, day passes, and “camp money”. Many of the drawings and paintings in both of Goat’s log books are humorous in nature and display the “gallows humour” that POWs developed to cope with their less-than-ideal circumstances (Cook 2012, p. 213). One example in particular takes up a full page, divided horizontally in two. On the top half of the page is a woman in a hot pink bathing suit wielding a shovel and building a sandcastle, enjoying her day at the beach, and the caption reads simply, “Margate, 1904”. Above her, two seagulls are floating in the wind. The bottom half of the page leaps forward in time to “Dunkirk, 1940”. Sitting in the same position, a soldier finds himself also wielding a shovel, digging a hole for his wooden boat. The seagulls, in his reality, were instead two airplanes. The title of the watercolour painting is “History Repeats Itself” (see Figure 2). The artist, identified only by his signature as “R”, pokes fun at the idea that the beach, which was formerly a place of leisure, had become a conflict site, requiring retreat, where members of the British Expeditionary Force and their French and Belgian allies had to “hurry up and wait” to be evacuated back to Britain.

Near the middle of his log book, Goat pasted in a photograph from August 1943. It is a portrait of himself and his fellow inmates at Stalag VIIB Lamsdorf, and under the photograph itself, he has named each POW, including their rank.

During his time in captivity, Flight Lieutenant Robertson kept his wartime log book and curated the drawings and illustrations of his fellow POWs. There are 151 pages in his wartime log book, “with an assortment of pencil drawings, watercolours and crayon sketches, a diary, newspaper clippings, postcards, money and other mementos” (Robertson CWM 19930131-007. George Metcalf Archival Collection). There is also poetry and other short colloquialisms written on some of the pages. Many of the artworks are pasted into the diary, which indicates that Robertson was collecting these bits of artwork from his fellow POWs and curating them in his log book. Many of the illustrations in his log book are similar in theme and style to those that appear on the pages of Goat’s logbooks. There are several scenes of daily POW life, including the cleaning duties assigned to some of the men in the camps. Mopping the floors of the bunks, peeling vegetables on kitchen duty, chasing a chicken gone rogue in a little “fowl” play—the caption of the caricature reveals the pun and the humour of the anonymous POW artist in 1943 (Robertson CWM 19930131-007. George Metcalf Archival Collection).

The themes that appear in both Goat and Robertson’s log books are as varied and unique as the young men who created them. That said, their log books also share remarkable similarities and touch upon many of the same themes, including their upset at being captured and made to live as POWs for years, humorous caricatures that mock their captors, the women (often scantily clad) they dreamed of meeting once they regained their freedom, cartoons of everyday life in the camp, including how much (and little) their lives had changed in their new capacity of POWs, small memorials including names and places, and references to the Christian resurrection and hope that their fallen pals had found peace.

5. An Autograph Book in Captivity in the Far East—Hong Kong, 1941–1945

The years Canadian POWs spent in captivity in Hong Kong were not only brutal but were punctuated with long, dreary stretches of boredom. To combat this and to avoid spiralling into a depression, many prisoners of war, Rifleman Percy Horace Wilmot included, found creative, intellectual and physical outlets in order to cope—even at the risk of punishment from their captors. Many of them found that artmaking, collecting souvenirs and signatures, or both, was an excellent way to cope and escape mentally, intellectually and emotionally. This is why, even in the most hellish of circumstances, they created, collected, and curated small works of art.

Throughout his captivity, much of which was spent in and out of POW hospitals, Wilmot kept a small black leather autograph book with “autographs” embossed on the cover in silver leaf (Wilmot Book of Autographs Belonging to Percy H. Wilmot. CWM 20070117-085. George Metcalf Archival Collection). It is unclear whether he brought the autograph book into the camp with him or whether he bartered for it once inside. On the inside page, he marked the date 15 January 1943 and wrote, “This is my book so please write your pieces so as I may look at it in time to come with memories of joy not grief” (Wilmot Book of Autographs Belonging to Percy H. Wilmot. CWM 20070117-085. George Metcalf Archival Collection). Instead of recording his own thoughts, Percy Wilmot sought the words and drawings of others. The pages of his autograph book are filled by his fellow captives who inscribed their home addresses in Canada—with the hope that they would reconnect after the war was over—they wrote poems, quoted Bible verses, drew pictures, scribbled jokes, and offered words of comfort and thanks. Wilmot kept the autograph book throughout his ordeal in Hong Kong and long after he was liberated in 1945.

The experience of captivity and the potential for escape for those Canadians held in the Far East was quite different from their fellow POWs imprisoned in Europe. They were at a “marked disadvantage because they did not have reliable contacts outside the POW camps or knowledge of local customs, foods, geography and languages which many of the others captured there [in Hong Kong] possessed” (Ion 2006, p. 302). Therefore, entertainment and other ways in which to keep their hands and minds busy was “the purest form of escape because there was usually no alternative” (Gillies 2011, p. 144). On one page dated 15 January 1943 (see Figure 3), there is a cartoon drawn in ink of a POW, possibly of Wilmot himself, looking visibly frustrated and disgruntled, shouting in a speech bubble: “I wanna go home!” Below the caricature are the words: “Keep your chin up ‘Pop’ it won’t be long now” (Wilmot Book of Autographs Belonging to Percy H. Wilmot. CWM 20070117-085. George Metcalf Archival Collection). These words of encouragement likely gave Wilmot some hope to cling to—however, as we now know, their liberation was still two years away.

One last entry in Wilmot’s autograph book, undated, from Grenadier Alex Skibinski, written after liberation, reads: “At last it’s over Pop. You’ve been through a rough time—A mark of courage to us younger fellows” (Wilmot Book of Autographs Belonging to Percy H. Wilmot. CWM 20070117-085. George Metcalf Archival Collection). Already having served in the First World War, Wilmot was quite a bit older than his fellow POWs, and they often looked to him for advice, guidance, and strength. Skibinski was one of those young men who admired Wilmot’s strength, courage, and perseverance.

Wilmot wanted his autograph book to help him remember something positive from his experience as a prisoner of war: the friends that he made. It also became a visual and material symbol, perhaps a talisman or a good luck charm, that proved he had survived and that he had fought well. The POWs in Hong Kong had formed a familial community, and their collective survival was to become as important as their own individual survival (Schwarzkopf 2019, pp. 90–91). The faith they had in one another to care for each other and bolster their spirit is evident among the pages of their wartime log books. Percy Wilmot survived his ordeal and returned to Canada after the war. However, he suffered from health issues for the rest of his life, the result of his service in two World Wars and his experience as a POW during the Second World War (Barker and Noakes 2021, p. 5).

Much of the scholarship written about Canadian POWs in Hong Kong tends to paint them as victims, as they certainly were; however, as Schwarzkopf writes, “a new work is needed that empowers them… [that] shows them to be industrious, clever, generous, proud, and committed to fulfilling their duties and returning home. They all had reasons to make it home alive” (Schwarzkopf 2019, p. 3). This article then contributes a survival narrative to the historiography, a metaphorical rather than physical “escape” narrative through creativity, intellect, and above all else, Wilmot’s strong will to live. One of the ways in which Canadian POWs coped in the hellish conditions of the POW camps in Hong Kong and later in forced labour camps in Japan was through arts and craft-making and the collection and curation of these fragments of war art. This became an almost compulsive need for some, as souvenir and signature hunting became almost like a sport.

Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum insist that “creativity of one form or another was a central form of survival; it was a necessity—a prerequisite—for enduring and surviving captivity” (Carr and Mytum 2012, p. 3). It is through both material objects and the visual arts created and held onto by Canadian prisoners of war that the lives and experiences of Hong Kong veterans on both the individual and collective levels are illuminated. These bits of war art, therefore, and the notebooks, autograph books, diaries, and log books in which they appear, became memorials for those who did not make it out alive, and material memories, tokens representing their survival, for those who did.

6. One Canadian Woman’s Experience as a POW

One exceptional case in the collection at the CWM belonged to Hélène Marcelle Chambon (née Garrigues). She drew five detailed and heart-wrenching pencil sketches of herself and the other women and girls with whom she was imprisoned at Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp exclusively for women in the German Reich (Chambon Untitled [Textual Records] Sketch 5. CWM 19890327-005. George Metcalf Archival Collection). The United States Holocaust Museum describes the sheer size and scope of the camp: “in the concentration camp system, Ravensbrück was second in size only to the women’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau… By the end of 1942, the female inmate population of Ravensbrück had grown to about 10,000. In January 1945, the camp had more than 50,000 prisoners, mostly women” (Holocaust Memorial Museum 2022). The women interned during the first years of the war were primarily classed as political and social enemies of the Nazi regime (Docking 2021, p. 425). Chambon was among them.

Arrested in France in 1943 by the Gestapo for passing letters at the demarcation line and actively participating in the Resistance, Chambon detailed her experiences as a POW in her diary, which she later typed and deposited with her donation to the Canadian War Museum (Chambon Diary. CWM 19890327-008. George Metcalf Archival Collection). In her account, she describes arriving at the gates of Ravensbrück after a long and arduous journey packed into freight cars with hundreds of other women prisoners, some of whom did not survive the trip. In the most hellish and horrifying conditions, those which she wrote in her diary, “Dante himself could never have imagined” (Chambon Diary. CWM 19890327-008. George Metcalf Archival Collection). Chambon escaped through her artwork and creativity. For her, drawing was a form of resistance and, ultimately, a method of survival.

Her writing denotes a resilient woman, one not easily broken. Her sketches illustrate the everyday, the lived experience, the silent waiting, worry and the horrors of Ravensbrück. She wrote an extensive summary of her experiences in French, from the moment she was arrested in 1943 until the moment she arrived at Ravensbrück. It is incredible that not only did she survive two years in a German concentration camp, but so too did her written and visual documentation of her experiences. Her artistic talent is clear when looking at the five sketches she completed during her imprisonment.

In each of the sketches, the women are represented in their “everyday” activities and lived experiences as POWs at Ravensbrück. One sketch is of a woman posing with her left arm on her hip in her striped grey and white POW uniform. Her short hair is curled in the latest fashion. She is depicted in open defiance of her circumstances, as evidenced by her posture, taking the time to make herself feel human. Chambon’s sketches represent art as defiance, as resilience. Art is revolt even in the most hellish of circumstances. Paper was scarce in the camp, so finding it and using it itself was an act of resistance. Her five pencil sketches deserve a place of memory in the visual record of the Second World War, especially because they can tell the often untold or hidden story of a woman’s experience in a POW camp.

7. Cultural History Approaches to Canadian POW Art

Despite the cultural turn that began in the 1990s, which has since prompted a re-examination of the lived experience of the Second World War and its ongoing legacy in Canadian public memory, it is only recently that scholars have begun to explore “‘the flowering of creativity’ behind barbed wire” (Pattinson et al. 2014, p. 181). It is those historians working with cultural history approaches grounded in art history, archaeology and anthropology, among other disciplines, who have an intriguing approach to understanding prisoner of war art created in the camps during the Second World War. Carr and Mytum emphasise the importance of creativity behind barbed wire and insist that it was both a mode of survival for POWs and also an important way of memory-making—documenting the experience for posterity. They argue that “creativity of some sort was practiced by nearly all POWs (to varying levels of competency) and was a therapeutic outlet, which enabled them to survive emotionally, psychologically and, in some cases, physically. Further, this creativity is a rich vein of information which allows the researcher an insight into the experiences, perceptions and emotions of life behind barbed wire” (Carr and Mytum 2012, p. 5).

Their argument is not about whether or not the visual materials and objects made by POWs in the camps were “artistic” or “utilitarian”; what is useful is finding a place within Canadian war art historiography for works of POW art that do not fit into the pre-existing and strict definition of “war art” that is influenced by discussions of high art and hangovers from late nineteenth-century formalism and connoisseurship (Prown 1982). Carr and Mytum argue that the insistence upon a marked distinction between “artistic” and “utilitarian” is a wasted opportunity: “all items made in the camps… have a value today as memory objects which can tell us about the quotidian experience of internment. This combination [of artistic and utilitarian qualities] was necessary in helping internees to survive until liberation and beyond” (Carr and Mytum 2012, p. 5). That the ‘utilitarian’ and ‘artistic’ categories overlap in the case of POW art, especially in the pages of their wartime logbooks, is, therefore, clear.

This is the point I make with these POW wartime log books—they are so much more than just utilitarian log books in which POWs could write down their thoughts and feelings or draw on the pages to pass the time. The artistic quality of the works on the pages of wartime log books is visual proof that “the artistic and the creative had a… function behind barbed wire: that of survival. The utilitarian and the artistic are thus heavily intertwined and inter-related categories, and one could not exist without the other” (Carr and Mytum 2012, p. 5). It is the creation of categories, labels, and the following of old, established and often entrenched art history traditions of distinguishing between high art and low art conventions in museums, archives, and art galleries, especially, that memory objects like this fall through the cracks. It simply comes down to this: archivists and museum professionals do not know where to put them because they do not fit seamlessly into any of the predetermined visual, material, or textual categories at the Canadian War Museum. Carr and Mytum conclude with the following: “while labels may be applied for classificatory convenience, these categories were not necessarily meaningful or so clear cut in the camps and should not be taken as an indicator of relative importance either then or in revealing information about the POW experience” (Carr and Mytum 2012, p. 8).

8. Conclusions

The collective histories of Allied prisoners during the Second World War have been “coloured by over-simplification, dramatization, redaction and, in some instances, pure myth-making” (Crossland 2009, p. 662). To combat this, therefore, I have turned to the variety of individual Canadian prisoner of war experiences that are reflected in the wartime ephemera, including the artwork that appears on the pages of their wartime logbooks and in their letters home—where available. The sentimental value of the objects and artworks that POWs kept must not be underestimated. There were many who kept sentimental items, even if they were not functional or utilitarian. And there were those who traded their sentimental possessions with other POWs to cement their wartime bond.

“Good stories often start in old boxes, with the lid more or less firmly stuck down, full of papers turning yellow with age” (Pathé and Théofilakis 2016, p. 1). This is so very true of the wartime log books that are acquired, arranged, and catalogued alongside the textual materials and documentary records of the World Wars in the Personal Ephemera category in the George Metcalf Archival Collection at the Canadian War Museum. They deserve a place in the national memory, as they are a fascinating juxtaposition with the official war art that has thus far commemorated the Canadian experience of and participation in the Second World War.