British prisoners of war in Nazi Germany remain among the forgotten of World War II. Their story has been overshadowed by the experiences of their counterparts in Japanese hands. As much to the point, it has been distorted by the myths and legends surrounding Colditz, the castle converted to a special camp for officers prone to escape attempts. Their story was told—and somewhat sensationalized—in a series of postwar books by former prisoner P. R. Reid. These in turn became the focus of a number of movies and television series popular in good part because they told a generally appealing story of ordinary men pitting courage and ingenuity against power and brutality—much like the recurring retellings of the Robin Hood legend. More specifically the Colditz images appealed to British images of Britain's World War II: waged on a shoestring against heavy odds, avoiding submergence beneath the massive resources of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. by finesse, insouciance, and sheer bloody-mindedness—a tale of David versus Goliath, Robin against the sheriff.

Mackenzie, author of a half-dozen widely regarded books focusing on British wartime culture, seeks in this work to contextualize the Colditz experience as opposed to debunking it. While Colditz remains the focal point of his presentation, Mackenzie's comprehensive research establishes a POW experience differing significantly from the Colditz myth—even in Colditz itself. The overwhelming number of British prisoners were enlisted men; most by far were soldiers rather than members of the Royal Air Force; and most of those were captured early in the war, in France and North Africa. Those facts combine to make escape a minority prospect.

In the Pacific, escape, when it succeeded, was largely a matter of physical and moral toughness. In Europe it was a matter of sophistication. Relatively few British POWs, and those almost exclusively from the upper classes, had had sufficient linguistic skill not to betray themselves whenever they opened their mouths. Fewer still had the cultural sophistication to move unobtrusively through an alien environment infused with mutual suspicion. And the chances of crossing into a neutral country, or being picked up by still-embryonic resistance organizations, were somewhat along the lines of winning the lottery. Small wonder that even at Colditz, accommodation tended to become the norm. Escape attempts, intelligence collection, and minor sabotage were generally understood in terms of assisting the war effort by harassing the enemy. “Home runs” ending in a return to Britain were a bonus, to be sought but not expected.

Accommodation was facilitated by the Germans' relatively comprehensive observation of the Geneva Convention—at least when “Western” captives were involved. As in any war, successfully surrendering was the hardest problem, though that usually involved individual Germans seeking to settle personal scores, as opposed to large-scale atrocities. Front-line interrogations similarly seldom went beyond psychological pressure and minor physical discomfort. Processing into the POW system frequently involved disrupting unit and crew identities. Much of a prisoner's experience correspondingly depended on the internal organization of the camp to which he was sent.

The behavior of German camp personnel ranged between “correct” and downright unpleasant. Most, however, were well content with duty away from the front lines and willing enough to practice a policy of “live and let live.” Everyday routines were to a surprising degree left to the prisoners—in particular the Senior British Officers (SBOs) and their warrant officer/noncommissioned counterparts in enlisted camps. These men walked a fine line. In the sense that both sides benefited from an orderly, predictable environment as opposed to randomness, they de facto represented German as well as British interests. POW status, moreover, involved responsibilities as well as rights. When, as was usually the case in Germany, the captor fulfilled the requirements of the Geneva Convention, prisoners were correspondingly required to obey the rules. That last point could be difficult to convey.

On the whole, Mackenzie concludes, British camp leaders performed honorably and successfully. Their major challenges involved not violations of the Geneva Convention, but material shortages, physical inactivity, and moral ennui. Mackenzie's middle chapters, which discuss the details of POW housekeeping, are his most useful ones. Even with the regular arrival of Red Cross parcels, food was a constant, near-universal concern. Cigarettes, however, were as much a medium of exchange as an item of use. Sex, in that still-reticent age, seems to have involved more talk than performance, though rumors of “masturbation societies” periodically surfaced and resurfaced.

Volunteering for labor outside the camp had advantages—variety in particular—but the jobs could also be physically demanding and high-risk, and prisoners had no control over their assignments. Another means of combating boredom involved challenging authority. In some camps baiting the security personnel—the “goons”—became an art form, a relatively safe way of showing one's masculinity in an environment otherwise encouraging passivity. The Germans in turn had a spectrum of reprisals that ranged from random, unauthorized shootings to close confinement to, as the war neared its end, what amounted to mock executions that might have become real had not cooler heads prevailed. There were rewards for compliance as well, but the number of actual traitors, however, was small, while planted spies and informers seldom maintained their covers in the constant forced intimacy of POW life.

The system broke down at the war's end, when many camps—Colditz not among them—were emptied in the face of Allied advances, and sick, hungry, generally unfit POWs were put on the road under guards who had no real supervision. Even then air attacks posed the greatest threat, as fighter-bombers looking for targets mercilessly strafed columns of men unable to scatter without risking being shot by their guards.

Repatriation was the final hurdle, and here again one's own side often proved the primary obstacle. This time it was a bureaucracy that, however sympathetic, moved far too slowly for men desperate to go home. Mackenzie does not address problems of postwar adjustment—a subject, perhaps, for another book. Instead he ends The Colditz Myth appropriately with a private's triumphant shout on returning home: “Bloody hell, I've made it!”