In July 2015, then Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump criticised Senator John McCain for his record as a POW in the Vietnam War, remarking: 'He's not a war hero… I like people who weren’t captured.' In doing so, Trump tapped into an idea of wartime captivity that was popular in the western world during the first half of the twentieth century – that surrender and enforced confinement was an unheroic and emasculating experience that rendered servicemen passive and powerless. Such impressions of POWs as essentially the antithesis of the combatant were also prevalent in Australia. We argue that this perception stemmed not from the prisoners and their understanding of their experiences, but from British imperial military policies towards POWs, particularly those regarding honours and awards. This paper explores these policies and the types of awards bestowed to explain how and why military authorities differentiated between combatants and captives. Such analysis provides important insights into the attitudes of the Australian military towards those who had been captured by the enemy, the ways in which military authorities conceived of heroism in war, and the broader aftermath of captivity in the two World Wars.