The Prisoner of War Diary of Stan Cornwell

In September 1943, just at the moment when their Italian guards were deserting their posts and British Prisoners of War were about to be liberated by the advancing Allied troops, they were ordered by their own officers to stay in their camps. This order, from the M19 branch of the Ministry of Defence, contradicted Churchill’s express wishes that all POWs should be allowed to walk free. Fifty thousand Allied prisoners missed their chance as German troops recaptured the camps and transported the POWs to Germany and Poland where they would spend the rest of the war.

This is the diary of one of those fifty thousand. Lance Corporal Stan Cornwell documents the daily preoccupations of a POW, played out against the backdrop of global conflict. The diary shows how comradeship enabled men to cope with hardships, frustrations, anxieties and insecurities, and how they and their families were able to hang on to their ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances of loss, deprivation and chaos.