Just over two hundred Australians fell into enemy hands during our involvement in the Allied fight against the Ottoman Empire. Amongst those troops taken at Gallipoli and in Palestine, there were also some pioneering Australian submariners and a group of our very first aviation personnel. These last went into the bag during the relatively obscure Mesopotamian campaign; a four year effort to dislodge the Ottomans from what is now Iraq.
One of these airmen, Thomas White, was captured in a hare-brained plan to disrupt enemy signals by blowing up telegraph poles. No smart bombs or Tomahawk missiles being available, in 1915 this meant landing your aircraft behind enemy lines and sending your observer out to place dynamite on the poles whilst you hauled the plane round manually to face back into the wind. Predictably it all went horribly wrong. White’s ensuing memoirs of his years in captivity describe the privations Allied troops endured whilst also bearing witness to the depredations of the Armenian genocide that was going on around them.
Excerpt
By Mat Hardy, Deakin University
The Conversation
Photo Caption: Australian POWs. Thomas White is seated, centre. White (1928)