During World War II, 106 Australian medical officers were taken prisoner of war by the Japanese, along with 22,000 Australian troops and many thousands more British and Dutch. Over three and a half years, they accompanied work parties of Allied prisoners sent to camps all over southeast Asia and Japan, living in a variety of harsh and dangerous conditions. Despite the doctors’ efforts, one in three Australian POWs died in captivity. Of those who survived, most attributed this not to inner strength or to luck, but to the care of their medical personnel. Yet apart from the attention recently accorded to Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, who was only one of these doctors, the experiences and work of all Australian POW medical officers in World War II has been largely overlooked. / Medical officers were crucial for the survival of Australian prisoners, both physically and psychologically. Doctors attempted to keep men of all nationalities alive with little medication, tools or diagnostic equipment, and battled a variety or medical conditions, starvation and systematic physical brutality from their captors. As survival became more difficult, the increased status and responsibilities of the doctors had significant ramifications for the military chain of command and for the burdens on the doctors themselves. / This thesis explores many aspects of Australian POW doctors’ experience of captivity: the complexities of practising modern medicine without any of its tools; the development of unique strategies to combat a wide variety of environmental limitations and life-threatening medical conditions; the unique relationship between medical personnel and their captors; the relationships between Australian POW medical officers and combatant officers and a comparison with relationships in the British military in captivity; the daily dilemmas faced by doctors trying to reconcile their professional ethics with their military obligations, and how they coped with these responsibilities. Doctors’ continuing roles in the postwar lives of ex-POWs, and the influence captivity had on their own lives and careers after the war are also analysed. / While examination of the influence of medical officers on other prisoners’ lives is important, studying their experience as a group in their own right is equally valuable. In this thesis, both these areas are investigated to bring a variety of perspectives to understanding the complexity and importance of Australian POW doctors’ captivity experience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/245147 |
| Creators | Hearder, Rosalind Shirley |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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