POWs into citizens: repatriation, gender and the civilian resettlement units in Great Britain

In the second half of the Second World War, the question of how best to manage the repatriation of the thousands of British prisoners of war (POWs) languishing in camps in Europe and the Far East grew in urgency for British repatriation authorities. The problem was not just one of logistics - the difficulties of corralling troop ships and planes - though the magnitude of the war and the disparate sites of fighting made that a factor, too. British officials were also concerned with the psychological condition of the men they would retrieve. Commentary from the previous war suggested that captivity took a toll on even well-treated prisoners, with the resulting 'barbed wire syndrome' making men irritable, suspicious and slow to settle back into civilian life. With over 142,000 British personnel in German and Italian hands and around 50,000 prisoners of the Japanese, the scale of wartime captivity raised the stakes considerably as the end of the war approached. How to avoid these tens of thousands of former POWs returning to Britain disaffected and adrift? Better still, how to bring these repatriated men into the full embrace of Britain's ambitious post-war settlement, with an emphasis on both the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship?