Apart from the physical destruction of the enemy, the taking of prisoners has always been a significant objective of military operations in time of war. Prisoners taken represent a resource denied to the opponent. They can provide valuable intelligence concerning his strengths, weaknesses and intentions. However, the holding of prisoners also entails the commitment of often-considerable resources on the part of the captors. In the Second World War this entailed the creation of vast bureaucracies dedicated to the administration of prisoners of war and civilian internees. As many as 35 million members of the armed forces who participated in the Second World War were at one time or another held as prisoners of war - 40% of the total number of combatants.

As prisoners of war formed such a large and distinctive group in both world wars, the Imperial War Museum's collections include much material concerning them. There are examples of the remarkable variety of practical and artistic objects made by POWs and civilian internees in the camps. There are also detailed diaries and journals written during confinement. A considerable number of sketches, paintings and other works of art depict life in the camps. Recorded interviews with former POWs and internees, and official and private photographs and film footage, enhance our knowledge of the conditions considerably.

During the First World War, the total number of reported prisoners of war from the British Empire was 191,652. For many decades afterwards, however, relatively little attention was paid to such a sizeable group of servicemen. The published literature on the subject in any language remains limited. This is partly due to the dominant perception that a prisoner of war's life was a world of boredom and frustration, divorced from the excitement and horrors of the battlefield. This simplistic view does no justice to a more complex reality. Many diaries, memoirs, recorded interviews and other personal experience accounts in the Museum's collections indicate otherwise. Officers might receive better treatment in the camps, but for many men of all ranks captivity was a severe test of endurance and physical survival. Frequently it cost them their lives. Written and oral testimonies held by the museum bear witness to ill-treatment, starvation, hard labour and death in many forms, together with evidence of bravery, humanity and hope.

For the smaller groups of civilian internees captivity was, on the whole, characterised by fewer extremes, and their condition attracted even less historical interest after the war. However, internment was often a traumatic event for both the internees and their families.

The Second World War projected a broadly similar picture onto a much larger canvas, and the Museum's collections in this area are correspondingly more extensive. Compared to the First World War, published literature on prisoners of war during the later conflict is vast. Many more contemporary accounts survive. Common perceptions of the life of a prisoner of war in Germany in this period have been heavily coloured by the postwar popularisation of events such as the `Wooden Horse' escape and `Great Escape' from Stalag Luft III, and the ingenious schemes hatched to break out of Colditz Castle. The reality of imprisonment was usually much less spectacular or glamorous.

Much of what prisoners of war wrote, sketched and otherwise produced in captivity in Europe is characterised by a strong sense of humour, an important way of dealing with the many frustrations and tragedies that confronted them every day.

Whilst conditions in German or Italian captivity were generally better than those endured by prisoners of war in the Far East, written and recorded accounts show that this is indeed a generalisation. Those who survived the notorious Italian camps in North Africa and the hazardous passage across the Mediterranean to the Italian mainland could tell many stories of unimaginable degradation.

The horrors of the forced marches from the prisoner of war camps in eastern Germany in 1944 and 1945 are also well documented. Material relating to German and Italian servicemen in Allied hands features in the Museum's collections, albeit to a much lesser extent. As with the First World War, civilian internment in Europe in the Second is a less prominent subject within the collections, but those seeking information will find an important set of first-hand accounts and other forms of documentation, mainly concerning those refugees from continental Europe who sought to escape the threat of Nazism.

In the Far East, over 190,000 British, Commonwealth, Dutch and American servicemen became prisoners of war of the Japanese, whose government had signed but never ratified the Geneva Convention. The Japanese, whose military code at that time did not regard the surrender of fighting men to the enemy as an acceptable option, decided to use the Allied prisoners of war as a labour force in support of their war effort. Most notoriously, over 60,000 prisoners were eventually employed on the construction and maintenance of the Burma-Siam railway. Large numbers were also sent to work, under similarly harrowing conditions, on such tasks as airfield construction on the Moluccas, coal-mining and ship-building in Japan, and copper-mining in Formosa. Some 20 - 25% of the total number of these prisoners perished as a direct result of the conditions they endured. Evidence of the suffering of prisoners in the Far East is preserved in the Museum's collections, perhaps most notably in the drawings of Ronald Searle and the well-known photographs of emaciated survivors taken shortly after their liberation. Contemporary diaries concealed from their captors, later published and unpublished accounts and oral history recordings provide a wealth of detail about their ill-treatment and neglect by the Japanese. They also shed light on how the majority managed to survive. Numerous artefacts in the Museum's care reveal the prisoners' ingenuity in devising means of providing some of the essentials of life in captivity.

Unlike the prisoners of war, the 130,000 Allied subjects who found themselves in civilian internment in the wake of Japan's victories in 1941 - 1942 were not compelled to work. Often they were held in very harsh circumstances in generally quite primitive camps or `civil assembly centres' where their captors demonstrated minimal concern about their welfare. The many elderly men and women among them, as well as young children, were constitutionally less suited, and organisationally less well equipped, than the servicemen to cope. The plight of internees is not as well covered by the Museum's holdings as their numbers might suggest. There are few powerful visual images of internees, and they are better represented by surviving examples of the handiwork done by women internees and by their written and oral testimony.

Captivity and internment during the other conflicts of the 20th century do not feature as largely in the collections. Nevertheless, several recorded interviews with former British members of the International Brigades who were prisoners of war in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s exist as do a number of oral testimonies made by prisoners held in the Korean War. There are images of POWs from more recent conflicts (Vietnam, the Falklands and the Persian Gulf). The Museum continues its efforts to acquire historical material that will benefit present and future students of the subject.