KANSAS CITY, MO (PNAN) – On view through April 30, 2023, “Captured” is an exhibition at the National WW1 Museum and Memorial that explores how their relationships sustained hope, on both sides of the barbed wire, amid bleak and uncertain circumstances.
During four brutal years of the Great War, at some point nearly 9 million people were held as POWS. From the shores of Southeast Asia and the Siberian tundra, to mere miles from the Western Front, Captured delves into the stories of life behind the wire.
For the first time, prisoners and guards were encountering people of different races, religions, languages and cultures. Relationships among the prisoners and between the prisoners and their captors that was a complex, but also the unique dynamics of mundane daily life, the arduous conditions of captivity all bound together by suffering and uncertainty.
On November 2, 1917, the first US casualties of WWI happened when German forces launched a successful raid on their inexperienced American counterparts in the trenches near Nancy, France, killing three and capturing 11 soldiers from the 16th Infantry Regiment.
German propagandists sought to use the moment to their advantage, taking and distributing photographs of the prisoners in an effort to demoralize the US troops quickly amassing in Europe. It did not go as planned because among the photographs was one depicting a Sgt. Edgar Halyburton, who was gazing defiantly at the camera with a hand in his pocket and the other clenched in a fist at his side.
Within days, the Allies had broadcasted the Halyburton image internationally which caught the attention of American sculptor Cyrus Dallin. First worked in plaster and then cast in bronze, the statue is one of five originals created by Dallin.
Images of WWI prisoners, gazing at cameras across the globe, document a historical juncture in which long-term mass incarceration was becoming a key outcome of fighting. Over a century later, they still carry a modern and global impact seen today.
For more information see www.theworldwar.org