List of prisoners of war

This is a list of famous prisoners of war (POWs) whose imprisonment attracted media attention, or who became well known afterwards.

Senior officers held captive in Oflag IV-C in Colditz Castle, including Admiral Józef Unrug and General Tadeusz Piskor.
Winston Churchill in Durban after escaping from captivity in 1899. He had written the Boer Secretary of War a polite departure note, "I have the honour to inform you that as I do not consider that your Government has any right to detain me as a military prisoner, I have decided to escape from your custody..."[1]
  • Ron Arad – Israeli fighter pilot, shot down over Lebanon in 1986; not seen since 1988 and is presumed dead
  • Everett Alvarez, Jr. – Navy aviator, Vietnam War POW, held for 8 years, second longest period as a POW in American history (after Floyd James Thompson)
  • Airey Neave – British politician, made the first British home run from Colditz on 5 January 1942
  • A. A. K. Niazi – commander of Pakistan Army in East Pakistan who surrendered along with nearly 93,000 other soldiers
  • Richard O'Connor – British General who commanded the Western Desert Force 1940-41
  • Friedrich Paulus – German field marshal, surrendered Stalingrad to the Soviets in 1943
  • Pete Peterson – American diplomat and member of Congress, Air Force pilot who spent more than six years as a POW in Vietnam
  • Donald Pleasence – English film and stage actor, WWII RAF airman shot down and placed in a German POW camp; later acted in the film The Great Escape
  • John RarickU.S. Representative from Louisiana
  • Sławomir Rawicz – Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the Soviets after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. Ghost-wrote the book "The Long Walk", where he claimed he and six others escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp and trekked on foot through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas before finally reaching British India
  • Pat Reid – author of historical non-fiction
  • James Robinson Risner – USAF Brigadier General, first living recipient of the Air Force Cross
  • Yevgeny Rodionov – Russian soldier captured by rebel forces in Chechnya and beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam
  • Giles Romilly – nephew of Winston Churchill, war correspondent, Prominente (celebrity prisoner) in Germany 1940-45
  • James N. Rowe – Colonel, US Army Special Forces, held by the Viet Cong from 1963 to 1968, one of only 34 American soldiers to escape captivity in Vietnam
  • Floyd James Thompson – America's longest-held POW, he spent 9 years in POW camps in Vietnam (1964 – 1973)
  • Josip Broz Tito – president of Yugoslavia, Austrian soldier in WWI, captured by Russians in 1915
  • András Toma – last known WWII POW, a Hungarian soldier who lived in a psychiatric asylum in Russia for 55 years before being identified and returned home in 2000
  • Jakow Trachtenberg – Russian Jewish mathematician who developed the mental calculation techniques called the Trachtenberg system
  • Mikhail Tukhachevsky – Soviet military leader and theorist, captured by Germans in WWI
  • Louis Zamperini – American athlete, member of Olympic team, captured by Japanese forces in 1943[4]

References

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  1. ^ Sir Winston S. Churchill (10 December 1899), The Boer War: London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton's March, Bloomsbury, p. 70, ISBN 9781472520838
  2. ^ Gordon, Ernest (2005). Miracle on the River Kwai. Royal National Institute of the Blind. p. 173. OCLC 939628465.
  3. ^ Sparks, Jared: The Writings of George Washington, Vol VII, Harper and Brothers, New York (1847) p. 211.
  4. ^ Hillenbrand, Laura (2010). Unbroken: A WWII story of survival, resilience, and redemption. New York, NY: Random House. ISBN 978-0-81297-449-2.