Catalog
8 Annas Bangalore; PoW Camps
| Issuer | Prisoners of War Camp, Bangalore (Group I) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1941-1945 |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | Letterpress-printed in brown on pale ochre paper, with a geometric guilloche border frame enclosing a central oval guilloche underprint. The denomination 'EIGHT ANNAS' appears in large brown letters at centre, with 'As. 8' indicators set in cartouches at left and right. A red overprint carries 'PRISONERS OF WAR' in an arc above and 'CAMP' below, with 'Group I Bangalore' applied in red across the centre. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | PRISONERS OF WAR EIGHT ANNAS As.8 Group I Bangalore CAMP |
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| Comments |
These notes were issued by the British-run prisoner of war camps at Bangalore during the Second World War to control purchasing within the camp economy — preventing prisoners from accumulating currency usable outside the wire. The Group I designation refers to the administrative grouping of camps under the Bangalore command, a classification system used across India's wartime PoW infrastructure to manage the substantial Italian and later German and Japanese prisoner populations.
Camp scrip from the Indian theater is considerably scarcer than equivalent issues from European camps, largely because surviving prisoners rarely retained it after repatriation, and British military authorities routinely destroyed remaining stocks at war's end.