The National Archives has a range of resources on the First World War, including:
Online collections, including war diaries
Talks and events, including webinars
Learning opportunities
For more information, see here.
Tag Archives: National Archives
The National Archives: Prisoner of war interview reports 1914-1918
The National Archive records, in series WO 161, are reports on over 3,000 British and Commonwealth prisoners of war captured during the First World War.
The reports were made by the Committee on the Treatment of British Prisoners of War before the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918. The Committee appointed examiners who conducted interviews with repatriated, escaped or interned prisoners of war to ask about how they had been treated. The examiners then wrote up the reports.
The reports include:
officers
medical officers
other ranks
merchant seamen and civilians (in a minority of cases)
Although the reports contain valuable information, they represent only a tiny percentage of the estimated 192,000 British and Commonwealth captives. They do not include the many prisoners of war who were liberated after the Armistice.
Digitised WW1 diaries highlight battle confusion
A web article that links to the projects being undertaken by IT Services on the Great War highlights how digitised diaries from World War One have shown how the early days of war were full of confusion about who fired its first shots. The inconsistency is just one of the insights being gained from Operation War Diary – a tie-up between The National Archives, the Imperial War Museum and online research website Zooniverse. You can find more information here, and see here for the different projects that IT Services are working on.