War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. Your host, James Early. Hello and welcome to another episode of Key Battles of World War II in Europe, our 10,000-foot

survey of the Second World War in Europe and the areas around it.

I'm your host, James Early.

As always, and my co-host, as always, is Sean McIver.

Now, as you know, if you've been listening, we are in a mini-series of one-off topical episodes to kind of wrap up our series on World War II in Europe.

In fact, this is our second to the last episode. In this episode, we're

going to be talking about Allied prisoners of war in Germany. And I want to throw out a couple

of disclaimers here. First of all, this episode deals only with British, American, Canadian, French,

and other Western Allied prisoners of war. I am deliberately not discussing the treatment of Soviet and other Eastern European

POWs. And that is an important topic. It merits discussion, but for the sake of time, we're

focusing on the Western allies and how they were treated as POWs. So we'll tell their stories

on kind of a mega level, 10,000 foot view, and then we're going to look at some

specific things that went on in some specific camps. And also, I'm going to use the word

airmen as a catch-all term for pilots and all other allied air crewmen. Just so I don't

use the same words over and over and over. We'll talk about pilots, but we'll also talk about crewmen.

And so I'm going to use the word airman.

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