POW Camp: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:StalagSeventeen_6303.jpg|frame| You ''REALLY'' don't want to stay at this camp.]]

 

During major wars, armies will often capture numerous enemy soldiers. These enemies must be kept somewhere, preferably some place where they can not return to their fellows. This usually results in a Prisoner of War Camp. As soldiers on the battlefield, these two groups are enemies. For whatever reason, a group of soldiers has been captured by the very guys they were trying to kill just the day before. The camp guards will not like the prisoners because those same prisoners may have been responsible for the death and destruction visited upon their homeland. Typically, the guards will not be nice about the way they treat their prisoners.

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{{examples}}

* Several issues of ''[[Jonah Hex]]'' deal with Jonah's experiences in the Union prison camp of Fort Charlotte during the [[American Civil War]].

 

* ''[[The Bridge on the River Kwai]]'': Captured British soldiers are forced to build a railroad bridge by a Japanese officer.

* ''[[The Great Escape]]'' Dramatized account of a major breakout by mostly British prisoners from a German POW Camp.

* ''[[Chicken Run]]'', being a spoof of WWII prison escape movies, depicts Tweedy's chicken farm as this.

 

* ''Andersonville'' is a novel by MacKinlay Kantor concerning the Andersonville prison.

* The beta plot of [[Tom Clancy]]'s ''[[Jack Ryan|Without Remorse]]'' is about a group of American prisoners in a secret POW camp in North Vietnam during [[The Vietnam War]], and an attempt to rescue them. The prisoners are kept in isolation from each other, however they are not tortured, because the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) officer there believes that the best way to get information from them is to get the prisoners to let down their guard by treating the prisoners well and acting friendly.

* ''Red Cap'' is a [[Historical Fiction]] [[Children's Literature]] novel by G. Clifton Wisler. The main character is a drummer boy that ends up in the Andersonville prison cap.

 

* The 1996 TV Movie ''Andersonville'', directed by John Frankenheimer, tells the story of the notorious Confederate prison camp.

* British series ''[[Colditz]]'' is about the German PoW camp of the same name. It is partly based on the film ''The Colditz Story'' which itself was based on a book by that name.

* ''[[Hogan's Heroes]]'' Comic misadventures of prisoners trying to disrupt the German war effort from right under their noses.

* The ''[[Ripping Yarns]]'' episode, "Escape from Stalag Luft 112B" was set in a POW camp.

 

* ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'': In the "Puppet Master" episode, Hama tells the gang how she, and the other water benders from the Southern Water Tribe, were rounded up and taken prisoner by the Fire Nation. There, they were kept in cages, with their hands shackled, so they couldn't bend. The warden even pumped in dry air as an added measure. And while they were given food and water, it was only enough to keep them alive, but just barely.

 

* In ''[[Ace Combat 5 The Unsung War]]'', one of the missions revolves around storming an enemy POW camp to free your soldiers in the middle of a snowstorm.

* More than one game in the ''[[Call of Duty]]'' franchise have featured POW camps.

* The aptly named cult classic 6th generation game ''[[Prisoner Of War]]'' was set in a POW camp, and cast the player as an American airman with the objective of escaping.

 

== Works featuring the Concentration / Internment Camp: ==

* ''[[Empire of the Sun (film)|Empire of the Sun]]'' tells the story of Jamie "Jim" Graham, a young boy who goes from living in a wealthy British family in Shanghai, to becoming a prisoner in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, a Japanese run internment camp in occupied China, during [[World War II]].

* ''[[Escape from Sobibor]]'' is a 1987 prison escape/war/Holocaust movie set in 1943, in the Sobibor extermination camp, where inmates who have been selectively spared for their skills in manufacturing material goods plot their escape from the camp, in part utilizing the skills they possess.

* ''[[Schindler's List]]'' shows glimpses of the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

* ''[[Life Is Beautiful]]''. A man and his son are sent to a concentration camp, the father acting like it's all a game to hide the truth from his son.

* ''[[Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay]]'' They aren't inmates, though.

* ''Journey To Topaz'' follows one Japanese American family following the [[World War Two|attack on Pearl Harbor]] as they're sent to [[wikipedia:The Shops at Tanforan#Tanforan Assembly Center|Tanforan]] and then to [[wikipedia:Topaz War Relocation Center|Topaz]].

 

{{reflist}}