Senior officers held captive in Oflag IV-C in Colditz Castle, including Admiral Józef Unrug and General Tadeusz Piskor.
Winston Churchill in Durban after escaping from captivity in 1899. He had written the Boer Secretary of War a polite departure note, "I have the honour to inform you that as I do not consider that your Government has any right to detain me as a military prisoner, I have decided to escape from your custody..."[1]

This is a list of famous prisoners of war (POWs) whose imprisonment attracted media attention, or who became well known afterwards.

A

  • Ron Arad – Israeli fighter pilot, shot down over Lebanon in 1986; not seen since 1988 and is presumed dead
  • Everett Alvarez, Jr. – Navy aviator, Vietnam War POW, held for 8 years, second longest period as a POW in American history (after Floyd James Thompson)

B

C

D

E

G

H

J

K

L

M

N

  • Airey Neave – British politician, made the first British home run from Colditz on 5 January 1942
  • A. A. K. Niazi – commander of Pakistan Army in East Pakistan who surrendered along with nearly 93,000 other soldiers

O

  • Richard O'Connor – British General who commanded the Western Desert Force 1940-41

P

  • Friedrich Paulus – German field marshal, surrendered Stalingrad to the Soviets in 1943
  • Pete Peterson – American diplomat and member of Congress, Air Force pilot who spent more than six years as a POW in Vietnam
  • Donald Pleasence – English film and stage actor, WWII RAF airman shot down and placed in a German POW camp; later acted in the film The Great Escape

R

  • John RarickU.S. Representative from Louisiana
  • Sławomir Rawicz - Polish Army lieutenant who was imprisoned by the Soviets after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. Ghost-wrote the book "The Long Walk", where he claimed he and six others escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp and trekked on foot through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas before finally reaching British India.
  • Pat Reid – author of historical non-fiction
  • James Robinson Risner – USAF Brigadier General, first living recipient of the Air Force Cross
  • Yevgeny Rodionov – Russian soldier captured by rebel forces in Chechnya and beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam
  • Giles Romilly – nephew of Winston Churchill, war correspondent, Prominente (celebrity prisoner) in Germany 1940-45
  • James N. Rowe – Colonel, US Army Special Forces, held by the Viet Cong from 1963 to 1968, one of only 34 American soldiers to escape captivity in Vietnam

S

T

  • Floyd James Thompson – America's longest-held POW, he spent 9 years in POW camps in Vietnam (1964 – 1973)
  • Josip Broz Tito – president of Yugoslavia, Austrian soldier in WWI, captured by Russians in 1915
  • András Toma – last known WWII POW, a Hungarian soldier who lived in a psychiatric asylum in Russia for 55 years before being identified and returned home in 2000
  • Jakow Trachtenberg –Russian Jewish mathematician who developed the mental calculation techniques called the Trachtenberg system
  • Mikhail Tukhachevsky – Soviet military leader and theorist, captured by Germans in WWI

U

V

W

  • Jonathan Wainwright – Commanding General US forces in Philippines; captured at Bataan (1942–1945)
  • George Washington – first US President, captured in 1754 by the French during the French and Indian War
  • Peter Wynagrde (actor) - Imprisoned as a young British citizen in Langhua POW camp in WWii

Z

  • Louis Zamperini – American athlete, member of Olympic team, captured by Japanese forces in 1943[4]

References

  1. Sir Winston S. Churchill (10 December 1899), The Boer War: London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton's March, Bloomsbury, p. 70, ISBN 9781472520838
  2. Gordon, Ernest (2005). Miracle on the River Kwai. Royal National Institute of the Blind. p. 173. OCLC 939628465.
  3. Sparks, Jared: The Writings of George Washington, Vol VII, Harper and Brothers, New York (1847) p. 211.
  4. Hillenbrand, Laura (2010). Unbroken: A WWII story of survival, resilience, and redemption. New York, NY: Random House. ISBN 978-0-81297-449-2.
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